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“Shut up about immigration,” George Christensen warned David Farley this week, apparently not for the first time. For those catching up, Farley is One Nation’s recently elected member for Farrer. Christensen is the former LNP parliamentarian who is now part of the One Nation machinery and helped Farley get elected.
Christensen keeps telling Farley to shut up because Farley keeps saying very un-Hanson-like things. We can surmise it was not a mistake this week when Farley declared on Insiders that One Nation’s migration intake would be “not too different” in size to what the Albanese government’s proposing.
Meanwhile, this masthead published the results of a survey of 1000 One Nation supporters, showing about half of them are still available to be won back by the establishment parties, and that slashing immigration is overwhelmingly the way to do it. Here, some caution is advised. This survey was conducted online. Other research shows surprisingly little emphasis on immigration in this cohort, and even that some are decamping to One Nation despite its immigration policies. But it’s also true that polls have emphatically shown One Nation to be the most trusted party on the issue. I expect that to continue, even as One Nation’s actual policy unravels under scrutiny.
Farley is dissenting from Hanson because the businesses in his electorate rely so much on migrant labour. These are the people picking fruit and cotton, working in the abattoirs, nursing people in aged care homes. Farley’s being partly a freelancer, but mostly a dedicated local member. His stated aim is to make sure Farrer “gets its proper slice” of the migration pie. He argues immigrants should be “working out in agriculture, engineering, mining etc” not “in the great urban metroplex”. This shows how slashing immigration is easy to pledge, but incredibly difficult to do if you want to avoid all manner of unintended consequences.
But the political reverberations of all this will almost certainly show something else: that as a matter of politics and public mood, the details don’t matter. When people tell pollsters they trust One Nation vastly more on the issue than anyone else, they are not saying they have examined One Nation’s policies and consider them to be the most robust, the best conceived, the most compellingly designed. They can’t be because those policies keep changing and are almost impossible to discern. And yet, the trust remains.
Not so long ago, One Nation’s policy was zero net migration. Early last year, that changed to “capping visas at 130,000 per year”. We have no idea how this number came about, and we don’t really know what it means. It can’t be literal because, for context, we issue more than 8 million visas a year just to tourists. Does it refer instead to permanent migration visas, which allow people to stay indefinitely? Hanson recently said as much in a television interview. But in the same interview, she said it referred to “net migration”, which is a totally different thing. Different in two ways. First, it depends on how many people leave. And second, it also counts people who aren’t staying permanently, but spend 12 months here within a 16-month window.
If the policy is about that, what does “capping visas” mean? Does it mean we’ll only issue 130,000 visas, irrespective of how many leave? In that case, more people will leave than arrive, which becomes negative net migration. Or if 130,000 is meant to be a net figure, we’re not really talking about a visa cap at all – unless One Nation plans to monitor in real time exactly how many people are entering and leaving Australia for 12 months (within a 16-month period) and then closing the border. Except to tourists. And to people who stay for 11 months (or fewer). And to people who stay for 12 months, but spread that out in a 17-month window (or more).
I apologise. Those last two paragraphs were really boring. But that’s actually the point. Almost no punter whom a pollster prods for an immigration figure they’d like to see, or who judges a figure put forward by a political party, is thinking about these fine distinctions. When they hear immigration numbers thrown around, God knows what people think it means. I don’t even know what I think it means. Are we imagining backpackers, or are we assuming it refers to people moving here for life? Do we imagine international students? Do we think it’s mostly refugees? Do we think about the fact that people leave Australia, too?
We aren’t looking at a regular policy debate here. That’s why no one seems to care terribly much that One Nation’s policy is so hard to pin down. When voters say they trust One Nation, they aren’t trusting detail. They’re saying they like the cut of One Nation’s jib on the issue. They get its attitude, know broadly what it wants, and know broadly they want something like that. They’re approving a posture, not a plan.
That’s the environment in which the traditional major parties are planning their own immigration policy. The problem is worst for the government, which has no choice but to deal with the complexity One Nation doesn’t, and live with the real-world consequences of whatever it decides. This week we learned the government’s policy is being delayed as it grapples with all this. But this week’s survey also showed that of the One Nation supporters who are open to returning to the establishment, hardly any would return to Labor. That means the Coalition will definitely go hard on immigration, and might even profit from that. But Labor will hardly profit at all.
What, then, is Labor trying to achieve with its policy? At most, it will be defensive: an attempt to prevent further bleeding to One Nation. But it’s not entirely clear who will be listening and to what. That means it’s trying to hit a mirage of a target. It’s not quite that the devil is in the detail. It’s that the devil has convinced us the details don’t matter.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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