Progressive Australian academic Jill Sheppard tells room full of progressives that elites should completely ignore voter sentiment and keep pushing migration and open borders with the help of corporate money: ''Money from big business is actually good on issues like immigration. It can sort of mitigate against these populist tendencies. The median voter is anti migration. Whatever's happening in their brain to get them to that position, I can't really say, but something is happening. But business wants migration. Business wants free trade, business wants open borders. Business wants a lot of positions that we share as basically good socially and economically liberal outcomes. If you are a political party and you have to get money, the option is there to get money from big business. Yes, that leads to some pretty perverse outcomes. But if the alternative is just listening to the median voter, who on migration is probably far beyond where we are right now, it's a good thing.'' Certainly sounds anti-democratic to me.