Labor’s new migration restrictions respond to public concerns about immigration, but tighter visa rules alone cannot resolve deeper anxieties about housing, economic security and social change.
Good policy makes good politics, Paul Keating used to say. The converses are not necessarily true. When the making of policy is subordinated to mere political advantage, good policy suffers, and often so does good politics. Bad policy begets bad outcomes that usually trump any temporary political advantage. There could hardly be a better example of poor government than the raft of changes to Labor’s immigration policies announced by Tony Burke.
Burke acted as if he had to solve the problem of One Nation. He couldn’t and he didn’t. The One Nation crowd now seek net zero immigration. Burke seemed to think that he could cater to every interested party, or at least perform some sort of balancing act by which each interest would feel that they had a bit of a win and a bit of a loss and thus go away grumbling but satisfied. It doesn’t work like this.
First, for many of the players, immigration is an emotional, not a physical factual issue. They have opinions about whether we should have it. People have feelings about whether existing levels are too high, or too low; they are not based on objective criteria but predispositions.
There is no formula capable of describing the ideal number of migrants, or the type of them which should be allowed. There never has been. One can give some appearance of objectivity by referring to the state of the labour market, or the birth rate, or demands for labour in various industries or regions, but even then it is primarily a matter of opinion.
Australia, for example, does not have a population policy – a formal view on how big the population should be. If we had one, we have not adjusted it for a dramatically declining birth rate, nor for the movement of the baby boomer cohort through and now, increasingly out of, the labour force. Many opinions are tinged with views about foreigners – some racist, but some also punctuated by traditional White Australia policy fears that the introduction of Asian labour might break down hard-won industrial conditions.
Pauline Hanson has long been campaigning against migration, particularly migration of the wrong type, by which she has clearly meant people of Asian or African extraction, and people of Muslim faith. It’s quite clear that feelings about the ‘browning’ of the population are at the core of her anxieties.
There are others, some of whom have tried to infiltrate her movement, who are frankly racist, and who believe that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot by which white Christian civilisation is being discriminated against and supplanted by sinister world government conspiracies. A good deal of this is borrowed from bigoted American sources, which have these days become respectable given the enabling of the opinion by people such as Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and the media employees of Rupert Murdoch. But it has long had a respectable lineage in white Australian circles, in old sectarian warfare, and, early, in resistance to migration from the Mediterranean (sometimes a code word for bigotry against Catholics, Jews and Muslims). The politicisation of the boat people and refugee ‘invasions’ gave a colour of national security and terrorism threat, which ‘permissioned’ a frankly prejudiced and hostile part of the community, particularly in regional areas where multiculturalism had less sway.
Hanson’s appeal to a monoculture and a nostalgia for a (White Australia policy) time when most Australians were white and of British or northern European background is deliberate and sharpened by focus groups, however sincerely her personal grievances are held.
Labor should be an advocate for more migration, not trying to reduce its effect
Labor did not have to agree with Hanson that there was too much immigration. Put bluntly, it fudged the debate, seeing that Hanson was getting traction on the issue. It seemed to think that being agreeable would silence Hanson, or that her supporters would walk away from her message. Labor did not enlist business, which makes no bones about its continuing demand for labour. Or the union movement, now particularly organised by the very people most benefiting from migration. It did not enlist the multicultural community. There was, effectively, a silence. Or efforts by people such as Tony Burke to anticipate criticisms of immigration by pre-emptive kowtowing. Including the refugee intake, at least until Albanese read the mood. It was an internal Labor debate which had seemed to slip Albanese’s radar.
Labor felt the anti-immigration vibe and responded by trying to cut numbers. Perhaps it thought that it, or Hansonism generally, could be deflated if government responded to One Nation criticisms. The argument that foreign students have crowded out the housing market is a nonsense, but the government, even now, is responding to the ‘foreign student problem’ as though it were a big problem, not a highly successful export industry, and was now requiring a rationing of scarce resources. Burke’s punishment of, and re-regulation of, foreign students (which adds to punishment and coercion since the Covid period) is performative and cruel. It serves no useful public purpose.
Nor does the punishment of younger people on holiday visas. There is no call to reduce their numbers, and they are not in any real competition with other Australians for jobs. They pay taxes. They spend a lot of money. The bargain about working in seasonal agriculture, particularly with fruit picking, serves important sectoral needs. The only possible reason for picking them out is to create an impression that everyone is sharing the burden of a perhaps unfortunate tightening of the numbers, and that it is especially important, in any event, that some maximum number be achieved.
There is room for argument about the balance of real immigrants and skilled workers on temporary visas. But it is bad policy to want to reduce the presence of such skills in the labour market – indeed, we desperately need more. Without foreign nurses, health workers, childcare workers and others in the caring industries, and without skilled builders and miners, Australia would be going down the drain. If they were made to leave in some performative act of self-harm, living standards would plummet and so would the much-vaunted demand for greater productivity. And there would be many fewer houses available for younger Australians.
As the economy is presently configured, the existing Australian building workforce, including migrant labour, cannot even build housing at the rate it did a decade or more ago.
Labor must address the mood as much as the ‘facts’
One Nation voters have talked themselves into thinking that the country is ‘swamped’ with migrants. They have talked themselves into thinking that the difficulties of younger Australians getting access to housing, or cheaper housing, are a result of the available houses being taken up by migrants, including foreign students and those on working visas. Their misapprehensions will not disappear simply because of tinkering. The benefits of immigration and multiculturalism need to be sold anew.
Merely selling Burke’s speech, or tough talk about addressing rorts, won’t change the conversation. Whatever the message being sent, it ought to be clear that it will have little impact either on the One Nation machine, or on those who support it. I believe that the Hanson bubble will ultimately burst, and well before the next federal election, but that will not happen simply because politicians, or governments, rush to implement her agenda, so far as they can divine it.
The Hanson indictment of modern Australian politics is not an agenda or a list of demands to be bargained over. It is not a crusade to change Australian minds. Pauline Hanson has a powerful message, but she does not have much in the way of an advertising budget. It is not a list of economic or spiritual difficulties which can be addressed patiently by practical government action. Indeed, it is not even clear that Hanson wants anything much at all, other than the satisfaction of having her complaints recognised. Appeasement does not make her sit down, satisfied.
Hanson is about problems and grievances, not solutions. To a degree she can even invent new ones, but the ones she started with continue to serve her well, even in times far different from when she first articulated them. Those who are very angry at mainstream politicians and mainstream parties want them blown up, not reformed. The sense that something drastic must be done has gathered as many Australians have faced cost-of-living pressures, and incapacity (for younger Australians) to get into the housing market. That has accentuated the feeling that politicians and ministers have no idea of how tough it is to survive in the modern economy. Standards of living are falling, job security is at risk, and politicians continually talk of the necessity to reduce the level and availability of services.
If Labor treats Hansonism as a set of spotfires to be patiently put out around the country, it will serve only to emphasise the potency of the One Nation message, and the increasing impotence of politicians in trying to adjust to a new economy, a new culture, a new society. The new society is not really about the backgrounds, identities or beliefs of Australians in the community so much as the impact of the pressures placed on our economy, our culture and our sense of community by what is happening around the world, new calls on reskilling and meeting the health and welfare demands on our society, and the capacity of our leaders to mobilise Australian ideas and ideals in the new environment.
All the evidence suggests that there is no real problem in getting people who have made their home here to identify with their new home, environment and culture. Unity does not happen by accident but from common purpose and common struggle. That involves social and cultural leadership as much as political and economic leadership: it is always hard to galvanise a population around nebulous and contradictory ideas about ‘things’. Things such as AI and data centres, for example. Were there ever more mixed messages about employment from the data centres which are, according to the moment, about to kill us, or which are about to be harnessed to serve Albanese’s perceptions of our economic needs? Or, in conjunction with artificial intelligence, will either take out our high-skilled jobs, or take out the low-skilled ones?
The action needed is not the sort of appeasement or tinkering on offer from Tony Burke. It is debate. It is communication. It is explanation. It involves going out to and talking to ordinary Australians, including those who have proven susceptible to One Nation messages. It involves, as Neville Wran once put it, applying the blowtorch to the One Nation belly. It involves bringing the argument to the dinner table. It involves missing no opportunity to explain just what Hanson is saying, her general hatred of most Australians, and the fact that her clutch of ideas is not Australian but slogans from abroad. And it involves some full-blooded defence of programs that help Australia to grow and look after each other.
For the ALP, and Albanese, stubbornness about talking to and with ordinary Australians is the greatest single threat to Labor’s future. And possibly Australia’s. If the government and Albanese could communicate, the nation could also deal with some of its other problems, including AUKUS, energy and our place in the neighbourhood. Can anyone imagine that Australians would persist with AUKUS if they really understood it? If they could, or they would, perhaps we would deserve Richard Marles.
Republished from The Canberra Times
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.