One Nation has Found the Australian Immigration Nerve
Something rather extraordinary has happened in Australian politics. Immigration reduction, until recently treated across much of the political establishment as somewhere between economically illiterate and morally suspect, has suddenly become respectable. What caused this intellectual revelation was not a newly discovered economic paper, Treasury admitting that endlessly increasing population might impose costs as well as benefits, or the universities deciding that an economic model increasingly dependent upon importing enormous numbers of fee-paying students deserved reconsideration. It was fear.
One Nation has discovered an issue on which a very large number of Australians believe the political establishment has simply stopped listening to them, and the reaction of Labor and the Coalition tells us more about the importance of that discovery than any opinion column could. Macrobusiness argues that One Nation now has the best immigration policy on offer, and whatever qualifications one might make about the party's recent confusion over precisely how its numbers are calculated, the central political fact is difficult to miss. Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce are now insisting upon a net overseas migration target of 130,000, while Treasury's forecast for 2027–28 is 225,000. One Nation also wants substantial reductions in international students and temporary graduate visas and a more targeted skilled migration program.
There has certainly been some fumbling. One Nation MP David Farley recently muddied the waters by discussing Pacific workers and other categories in a way that appeared to push the effective figure much higher, and Hanson and Joyce subsequently corrected him. That deserves criticism because a party aspiring to reshape national immigration policy ought to know exactly what its numbers mean. But concentrate upon the larger political movement.
A recent RedBridge poll reported by MacroBusiness produced an extraordinary result. Asked which party was best able to handle immigration, 40 per cent nominated One Nation, compared with 17 per cent for Labor and 16 per cent for the Liberals. On this issue One Nation equalled the support of all the other parties combined, and that is the political earthquake.
Immigration is particularly dangerous for the established parties because dissatisfaction with the present system does not fit neatly into the racial categories through which the debate was traditionally filtered. Australians worried about housing availability, rents, infrastructure, congestion, wages and access to services do not all belong to one ethnicity, class or political tribe. The renter competing with another twenty people at an inspection does not need a theory of race to understand supply and demand. The commuter sitting in traffic does not require a seminar in nationalism to notice congestion. The family unable to find affordable housing does not become xenophobic merely by asking why population is being increased faster than housing and infrastructure can comfortably accommodate it. Nor does the recent migrant who has finally established a life in Australia necessarily benefit from bringing another million people into competition for the same scarce housing, roads, schools and medical services.
That is why the old political vocabulary is losing its power. Calling every critic of high immigration "racist" becomes considerably less effective when the critic may himself have arrived from India, China, Vietnam or Lebanon ten years ago and is now wondering why his children cannot afford a house. This is a community concern capable of transcending race precisely because the material constraints transcend race. There are only so many houses, only so many hospital beds, and only so many roads, classrooms, water systems and transport networks. Calling somebody a bigot does not construct another suburb.
This is where One Nation has hit the political establishment directly in its most vulnerable spot. For years, Australia's implicit bipartisan assumption was that a larger population was almost automatically desirable. Business obtained workers and customers, universities obtained students, property interests obtained demand, and governments obtained additional headline GDP and taxpayers. The costs were dispersed among everybody else. Population growth could make aggregate GDP larger while leaving GDP per capita considerably less impressive. It could increase aggregate demand while worsening housing scarcity. It could produce impressive national economic totals while the individual Australian wondered why getting ahead seemed harder every year. The political establishment nevertheless remained remarkably enthusiastic.
The answer to high immigration was skilled immigration. The answer to labour shortages was immigration. The answer to an ageing population was immigration. The answer to university finances was international students. The answer to regional shortages was more migrants. The answer to the problems created by population growth was frequently another population program. One began to suspect that if Australia somehow contained 100 million people and experienced housing shortages, congestion and infrastructure stress, somebody in Canberra would solemnly announce that the solution was 200 million.
Labor supplied the progressive vocabulary and the Coalition supplied the economic vocabulary, but both roads tended toward Big Australia. One side spoke about diversity, inclusion and Australia's multicultural identity. The other spoke about skills shortages, economic growth and the needs of business. Different hymn books; remarkably similar destination. Now suddenly everybody has discovered limits.
The Albanese government is preparing tighter rules around international students, visitor visas and onshore applications. Proposed measures reportedly include restrictions upon onshore student-visa lodgements, limits affecting dependants and measures against visa hopping between educational sectors. The Coalition has likewise entered the migration-cutting competition. Angus Taylor is talking about relating migration levels to housing construction, although the Coalition has yet to spell out exactly which visa categories would bear the reductions. What an astonishing coincidence. Just as One Nation becomes a serious electoral threat, the political class discovers that perhaps immigration should be lower after all.
This is how democratic politics is supposed to work. One Nation does not need to form government to influence government. A challenger merely has to threaten enough seats and enough votes for the established parties to rediscover opinions they previously considered beyond discussion. That is why dismissing One Nation voters as ignorant, angry or prejudiced misses the significance of what is happening. Some undoubtedly are angry. The more interesting question is why.
Perhaps voters noticed that governments were running an immigration program whose aggregate benefits flowed strongly toward identifiable institutional interests while many of the associated costs appeared in housing, infrastructure and public services. Perhaps they became tired of being told that every shortage required increasing the number of people competing for the thing in short supply. Perhaps they concluded that population policy should serve the existing population rather than requiring the existing population endlessly to adjust itself to population policy.
The serious question has never been immigration versus no immigration. It is how many, which migrants, for what purpose, and at what rate can Australian society successfully absorb them? That is the question One Nation has forced back into mainstream politics.
The 130,000 target itself should therefore be open to scrutiny. One Nation needs to remove the ambiguities in its policy documents, state clearly whether every headline figure refers to visas, permanent migration or NOM, and publish enough arithmetic for outsiders to reproduce its calculations. Immigration policy is too important to be conducted with numbers that change meaning between interviews. But One Nation's opponents should not confuse imperfections in the proposed solution with absence of the underlying problem.
The evidence of One Nation's political success is sitting before us. Labor is moving. The Liberals are moving. The immigration debate itself has moved. The Overton window did not spontaneously slide across the room. Voters pushed it.
For years the implicit Big Australia argument seemed to have no obvious stopping point. If 200,000 migrants were economically beneficial, why not 300,000? If 300,000 enriched us, why not 500,000? If half a million increased aggregate GDP, perhaps a million would be better still. There is no end to this.
Until then, Australians might prefer the considerably less sophisticated proposition being put by One Nation: a nation is entitled to decide how rapidly its population grows, and immigration should be calibrated to the country's capacity and the interests of the people already living here. Judging from the sudden nervousness of Labor and the Coalition, rather a lot of Australians appear to agree. And that is why, whatever its present need to tidy up the numbers, One Nation has the best immigration policy in town: it was prepared to say there should be a limit before the rest of the political class discovered that limits existed.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/08/why-one-nations-immigration-policy-is-the-best-on-offer/
