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The phrase “rise of One Nation” is standard media shorthand for its phenomenal poll gains. It’s also completely wrong-headed. One Nation did not “rise”. As Pauline Hanson said many times, she did nothing different. It was the fall of the main parties. That was the motive force.
The failures of the Coalition and Labor so frustrated and angered voters that they switched their support to One Nation. Hanson’s increased poll support is an index of despair at the main parties rather than expression of admiration and respect for her or her plans.
This is a crucial difference. It means the major parties have an opportunity to persuade their former supporters to return.
So the Hanson shock is also the Hanson opportunity. Australia’s traditional enemy is not any country. It’s our complacency. By jolting the main parties out of their complacency, Hanson could turn out to be a national ally in defeating this pernicious enemy.
We are seeing the Albanese government act accordingly. While expressing disdain for the right-wing populist party, Labor is increasingly adjusting its policies and its rhetoric to improve its appeal and reduce its vulnerabilities.
As one minister puts it: “Everyone sitting around the cabinet table is a politician and we’re all thinking about how to deal with the biggest political change in a generation.”
Exhibit A is Labor’s much-anticipated immigration announcement this week. Immigration, of course, has been Hanson’s single biggest grievance for the entirety of her 30 years in politics.
In response to its savage new salience, the government has not produced a new-model immigration policy but it has announced running repairs to the old one. It’s not a new model because the planned immigration intake is unchanged, to the evident astonishment of Liberal leader Angus Taylor. He kept repeating “there are no cuts”. That’s true, and also surprising.
The May budget said net overseas migration (or NOM) for the current fiscal year was forecast to be 245,000 and 225,000 the year following. These numbers are exactly unchanged today. So what was the point?
The crux of this is not the numbers but the words. The budget papers have always stated the net overseas migration figure as a “forecast”. Not a target. And governments have treated it accordingly.
“The numbers always overshot the forecast, and we stood there as spectators,” as one government member puts it. They didn’t care. Because there were no consequences for the federal government; the cost was always borne by the states.
This is one of the great mismatches in Australia’s federation. The federal government controls the inflow of immigrants across the border but the states have to accommodate them. Housing, schools, hospitals, public transport, roads – these are chiefly state responsibilities.
This was a feature of Australian immigration policy under Coalition and Labor governments alike. Ministers shrugged their shoulders and said it was a “demand-based system”.
There was no real accountability. Now One Nation has imposed some accountability. It has skewered the government for overshooting the forecast.
Uncomfortably for Labor, the 2022-23 blowout was a whopper. The forecast NOM was 235,000. The reality was double that. Sure, it was a surging post-COVID immigration catch-up, but that persuaded no one. It made a mockery of the forecast.
And the government has responded under pressure from One Nation. This is how Immigration Minister Tony Burke phrased it in his National Press Club appearance this week, followed by a blunt decoding by one of his ministerial colleagues.
Burke said: “For most of my political life, net overseas migration has been viewed as a budget forecast. Last couple of years, people have talked about it as a budget target. That is a very different way of looking at it. But given that we have the challenges we have with housing in Australia at the moment, I do think we need to be able to have these additional tools to make sure that what is published and forecast is reached.”
The “tools” he mentioned – such as the return to a more energetic policy of deporting visa overstayers – are to give him the power to better police the system, to enforce the forecast. A forecast that is now being treated as a target.
And decoded by one of his ministerial colleagues: “We are already in the last full year before the election in which the NOM will be delivered. There was a moment [within the government] of, ‘Oh shit, this is the last chance we have to prove that we will meet the target’.
“Our excuse was that it was a demand-driven system; now we are finding ways to control the demand.”
But why not cut the total intake while they were at it? One Nation is touting a net outflow for three years, so less than zero, before setting a maximum NOM of 130,000 a year. The Coalition is proposing to limit NOM to housing capacity, which probably puts it around 150,000 to 170,000.
Burke had been hoping to accomplish a cut. But the government’s collective verdict was that any cuts would harm the economy or some of its key constituent elements. Which is true.
So the whole exercise was designed to show not that Labor would cut the intake but that it had the intake under control, that it was a credible manager. And it now hopes that the issue fades away.
“We’ve got these numbers locked in as a target, and we will be judged on competence,” a senior government figure explains. “We need to be competent enough that it’s not in the news all the time. It’s an area we don’t want to talk about.” Because the other parties are perceived electorally as more trustworthy on managing immigration.
Another important factor moderating Labor’s responses is this: while the Coalition has lost a huge chunk of support to One Nation, Labor has lost only about 3 to 5 percentage points to Hanson’s crew.
Labor wants to win these voters back, of course. And it wants to hold the voters who are still counted in the Labor column but flirting with the possibility of switching to One Nation. Labor insiders call these folks “One Nation-curious”.
But it doesn’t want to shore up its margin by alienating its core. So its responses are moderate ones.
Exhibit B of Labor’s adjustment to the Hanson shock is Labor rhetoric on climate change. A telling analysis of federal politicians’ vocabulary shows that, since taking office four years ago, Labor MPs’ mentions of “climate change” have dropped by 60 per cent. Labor references to “net zero” have fallen by 60 per cent in just the past 12 months.
“In fact,” wrote Australian Financial Review reporter Ryan Cropp this week, “according to a tally of the number of mentions per 10,000 speeches in parliament using the privately owned artificial intelligence tool CheckHansard, in 2026 the conservatives talked about climate change more than Labor did for the first time in almost three decades.”
Strikingly, he reports that “over the past 18 months, One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has mentioned climate change more than Greens leader Larissa Waters”.
Barnaby Joyce boasts: “One Nation has made it toxic for Labor to talk about climate change. They’ve changed their narrative. It’s now about affordable power.”
Exhibit C is Labor’s handling of superannuation. One Nation this month announced a policy allowing account holders to get early access to 3 percentage points worth of employers’ contributions for up to three years simply to help pay the bills.
In response, Labor has started doing something it hasn’t done in years: advocating strongly for the super system. Labor complacency has turned into Labor campaigning. A senior government figure says this is not only defensive but also “an opportunity” for Labor to advertise one of its strengths.
Yet, the biggest and most important opportunity for Labor is going unaddressed. The world is in a new phase of permanently persistent inflation. This is the deep source of popular discontent. No surprise. Inflation destroys living standards.
The government can wait for the Reserve Bank to crush inflation with ever-higher interest rates. Or it can address the problem directly. As the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry told me last month: “The government should be taking every opportunity to put downward pressure on inflation.”
How? By cutting spending. Henry urged the government to balance the budget to “take considerable pressure off the demand contribution to inflation”. The International Monetary Fund this week reinforced his message.
Lower inflation would contribute to lower interest rates. When rates fall and capital is cheaper, companies are more likely to invest. Helping the economy to grow. This is the missing element in Labor’s plan – substantive action to cut spending, cut inflation and boost growth.
At the moment, there is no serious discussion of a growth agenda within the government. Certainly, it would be hard to do politically. It would require impassioned political campaigning of the sort that Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello demonstrated when they eliminated the federal deficit.
The Albanese-Chalmers government argues that One Nation and its discontents make it harder now. Yes, but that also makes economic rejuvenation more vital. Everything else is tinkering. Where Labor and the Coalition continue to fail, One Nation will continue to appeal.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. His international column appears on Tuesdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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