Pauline Hanson is already distorting policy and politics on immigration. It’s threatening to take us down a dark road |
A little more than two years out from the next federal election, there is something of a realignment going on across the colour-coded hallways of Parliament House.
After a torrid nine months of post-election hell for the Liberals and the Nationals, Angus Taylor has taken over the reins of the Coalition. A new opposition energy, especially on the economy, is already evident.
Anthony Albanese, still riding high from his 2025 re-election victory, this week overtook John Curtin and Scott Morrison on time in office, and became the longest-serving Australian prime minister since John Howard.
But One Nation, with a primary vote as high as 26% in some recent national opinion polls, is the main disrupting force in national politics today. Pauline Hanson, due to notch up 30 years on the political scene next month, is demanding her party be taken seriously as a mainstream concern.
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Even if this latest surge in support turns out to be fleeting, Hanson’s policies and lowest-common-denominator politics are distorting the debate.
The results aren’t pretty.
In a Donald Trump-like way, the worst thing Hanson says can crowd out the political debate for days. Like Trump, she’s shameless and interprets even mildly critical questioning as a personal attack.
This week Hanson made a fresh round of racist comments about Australia’s Islamic community. Appearing on Sky News, she said, “You say ‘oh well there’s good Muslims out there’, well I’m sorry how can you tell me there are good Muslims?”
Doing her usual shtick over the next couple of days, she refused to apologise, offering only a mealy mouthed concession to anyone she had offended, provided they did not believe in importing sharia law to Australia or allowing the wives of IS fighters to come home, and were not in favour of an Islamic caliphate.
After her warnings of Australia being swamped by Asian migrants in the 1990s, years denigrating Indigenous Australians and welfare recipients and even wearing a burqa in federal parliament – twice – Hanson’s latest comments should have been easy to call out for mainstream political leaders.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, initially stopped short of calling them racist. By Thursday, he had drawn a direct link between Hanson’s comments and a growing series of threats against Sydney’s Lakemba mosque as Ramadan celebrations began.
The optics were even more awkward for Taylor, as he announced his new frontbench lineup in Sydney on Tuesday. Rejecting Hanson’s claims, Taylor started naming good Muslims he knew in his electorate who met the One Nation litmus test. Jason Clare, whose electorate of Blaxland is in Sydney’s diverse south-west, warned the Liberals against following Hanson down a “racist rabbit hole” and likened such a spectacle to a video of a snake eating a crocodile.
But the debate has played directly into questions about the federal government’s refusal to assist Australian women and children linked to IS fighters currently stuck in Syria. The group of 11 women and 23 children left the Al-Roj camp en route to Damascus this week, but were turned back by local authorities.
Likely there is little sympathy for their awful plight among Australian voters, but the domestic political dynamics allowed Albanese to dismiss questions about giving legally required assistance with some sharp wisdom from his mother. “If you make your bed, you lie in it,” he said, despite some of the children being born in the camps. On Friday, he told Guardian Australia the group would face the full force of the law if they make it back to Australia on their own.
Hanson has proven adept at distorting policy in Canberra as well.
One Nation’s rise in recent polls is partly a result of the tough economic times faced by working Australians. But it has also coincided with increasingly anti-immigration rhetoric from the party.
In January, Hanson’s close adviser James Ashby called for Australia to consider following the White House and block visa approvals for a list of as many as 75 countries. He also suggested the country pursue a “net zero migration” target. Ashby told The Saturday Paper an intake of about 130,000 people would effectively keep the population stable and only replace people leaving the country.
One Nation’s immigration policy has been published online. Across 10 dot points, it calls for 75,000 illegal migrants to be deported and for international arrivals to be cut by more than 570,000.
As well as stopping rorting of skilled visas and ending student visa “loopholes”, the policy plan also says appeals in the Administrative Review Tribunal should be curtailed to stop “endless, weaponised appeals that clog the system”.
Immigration policy expert and former senior public servant Abul Rizvi watches the debate with a forensic level of detail. He told this column the first piece of information needed to adequately understand immigration policies, from Hanson and the major parties, will be the release of this year’s permanent migration program level. The figure was delayed last year and released with as little fanfare as possible after anti-immigration marches in September. The government simply kept the level at 185,000 arrivals, the same as the year before.
Rizvi says a growing list of problems has been made worse, including major backlogs in partner visas and employer-sponsored categories. He says tough policy questions need to be answered, and more processing power added.
Deporting tens of thousands of visa overstayers would be complex and costly, he adds, and plans to cut overseas arrivals by 570,000 is “nonsense”. He challenges One Nation to clearly state which categories the party is talking about.
On One Nation’s promise to reintroduce temporary protection visas, described by Hanson as “a proven, effective policy that prevents permanent residency through the back door and deters illegal arrivals”, Rizvi is scathing, calling the claim “complete crap”.
Overall, the whole policy, he says, represents a bunch of thought bubbles “developed by a group of racists”.
Labor is already cutting immigration, including international students, and Taylor has started dividing up arrivals into “good” and “bad” migration. On Friday he said the government should “shut the door” to the families in Syria who wanted to return. Leaked policy documents supposedly prepared under Sussan Ley would have taken the Coalition well down Hanson’s preferred pathway.
If the realignment around One Nation’s rise is set to last up to the next election, the major parties and the Canberra press gallery will need to adjust how they treat Hanson and her followers, including Barnaby Joyce.
Allowing Hanson to call the policy or political shots on immigration is a sure road to failure.
Tom McIlroy is Guardian Australia’s political editor