source : the age
The fire of Jacqui Lambie’s anger at Pauline Hanson has honed a pointed formulation of One Nation’s essence: “Pauline Hanson doesn’t have solutions, she only wants to show you who to blame,” says the independent senator for Tasmania.
Hanson has spent 30 years urging us to blame “the other”. Whatever our gripe, she wants us to get angry at the same people. Asians. Aboriginal people. Muslims. Immigrants.
For the past 12 months, and for the first time, her demonisation of immigrants has found mainstream support. The great bulk of that support has come at the expense of the Liberal Party.
This week, the Liberals entered the contest for her supporters. Angus Taylor delivered an immigration policy. It’s a more responsible rejection of Labor’s immigration policy. It cuts numbers hard but without endorsing Hansonite racism or her vindictive enthusiasm.
Taylor didn’t mention Muslims. So he retains the traditional bipartisan policy of nondiscrimination. He landed on a number for net overseas migration of 100,000 a year for the first couple of years, rising to 160,000. That puts him in between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s promise of 230,000 net overseas migrants a year, a reduction from the current level of about 290,000, and Hanson’s policy of less than zero.
Taylor uttered the all-important phrase that he would bring the immigration program “back under control”. But has this worked politically for the Liberals?
“You can’t underestimate the number of our people jumping at Pauline-shaped shadows,” says a seasoned Liberal campaigner. Hanson has framed the debate; everything else is seen as a response to her.
“The risk,” says Tony Barry, former deputy state director of the Liberal party in Victoria and now with consultancy Redbridge, “is that it’s just a Xerox copy of One Nation – ‘no mate, I’ll have the original, thanks’.”
Worse, the major business organisations have criticised the Liberals’ policy for its restrictiveness. The Business Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, among others, said that it would impose shortages of labour and impede growth.
So the Liberals pursued One Nation’s advantage in being seen as the party most trusted to deal with immigration. But, in the process, they’ve sullied their own advantage over One Nation – being seen to be a responsible party of government and trusted economic manager.
Realistically, an immigration policy alone, even a brilliant one, was never going to resuscitate the Liberals as they gasp for political air. But it was necessary. They needed a clear plan, a set of numbers and a couple of lines. A Liberal immigration policy is necessary but not sufficient to fix the party’s deep problem. Because, while immigration is a real problem, it’s not the fundamental reason for the Liberals’ dire predicament as the third-ranked party.
And it’s the same fundamental reason Labor is in serious difficulty too. Anthony Albanese’s approval rating is now equal to Peter Dutton’s just before he was smashed at last year’s election, according to Redbridge polling.
“There was a time,” says Barry, “when Labor led the other parties on most of the issues, but now they only lead on one – healthcare.”
Immigrants, even the immigration program itself, are, as Jacqui Lambie says, the scapegoats, not the root cause of Australia’s discontent. The root cause is the fact that, for the first time in a generation, most of us are feeling hopeless about the future. And both major parties are failing to address it.
Most of us – between 60 and 65 per cent, according to a variety of polls – believe that Australia is “heading in the wrong direction”. Among One Nation voters, the corresponding figure is 91 per cent, according to an August survey by longtime Labor pollster John Utting.
Not to suggest that immigration is perfect. The number of temporary immigrants to Australia did surge beyond all recent experience and reasonable capacity. It was a bounceback from the zero immigration of the COVID years, but that doesn’t excuse the slowness of the Albanese government to step in and manage it. By the end of 2023, during the peak of the surge, six in 10 Australians said that there were too many immigrants, according to the pollster for this masthead, Resolve Strategic.
Still, it took nearly another two years before One Nation’s poll takeoff began. Why?
It wasn’t because of Hanson. She’s said repeatedly that she did nothing different from what she’d been doing for the previous 29 years.
What changed was threefold.
First, most of the country began feeling a creeping anxiety that we were going backwards financially. And we weren’t imagining it. The $100 you earned in 2022 had lost $10 in purchasing power by last year. Wages did not keep up. Inflation was consuming Australia’s living standard. Together with the unstoppable rise in home prices, this induced an economic dread that most Australians hadn’t experienced in a generation outside the pandemic’s dark days.
It was the cold, quiet realisation that we couldn’t improve our situation, no matter how hard we worked. The problem continues to this day, now aggravated by rising interest rates.
Second, the electorate decided that the government was responsible for the problem and that the Coalition wasn’t capable of fixing it. In particular, the party that always told us it was best at managing the economy and managing immigration, the Coalition, was consumed with self-destruction.
After last year’s election humiliation, the Coalition fractured pointlessly. David Littleproud never managed to explain convincingly just why it was so important to break the 40-year partnership. And Sussan Ley had little to say about the future, and was given little time to say it. Liberal voters, despairing, started to desert the party in September last year.
It started as a drift. Three months later, Islamic terrorists killed civilians en masse in the middle of Sydney. The senior of the two gunmen was an immigrant.
Australia was primed. Hanson’s moment had arrived. The federal government was shaky and unimpressive in response to the Bondi massacre.
The Coalition responded by fracturing. Again. And dumping its leader, making a change without an improvement. The drift of voters away from the Liberals turned into a stampede.
Beyond the bigotry in Hanson’s appeal – there are “no good Muslims”, for instance – she also succeeded in framing immigration as a matter of resource competition. The immigrants are aggravating hospital queues, road congestion, home prices. So immigration inflows had to be addressed.
And now, thanks largely to Hanson, they are being addressed, by Labor and Liberal alike. But the big underlying cause of anxiety and despair is living standards. If we were confident that we could get ahead through hard work, that our kids could have better lives than our own, Australians would not need to seek out scapegoats.
Tony Barry reminds us that “in the 2004 election, One Nation had its worst performance. Not to be partisan, but we had record wages growth under John Howard, low inflation and low interest rates.
“Hanson’s great skill is identifying grievance; it’s hard to identify grievance when the economy was ticking along nicely. One of the most important preconditions for One Nation’s vote is economic anxiety. That’s One Nation’s sunlight, that’s how it grows.”
The solution? A growth agenda. At the moment, the economy is caught in a growth trap – as soon as it starts growing faster than about 1.5 per cent, it starts generating inflation.
The first part of the solution, as discussed in this column last week, is for the government to help the Reserve Bank tame inflation. It needs to do that by cutting spending in a serious way, by around 1 per cent of GDP, to balance the budget.
And then it needs a growth agenda. Easily said, much harder to achieve. The Albanese government so far has operated on the assumption that the main economic task is a rebalancing, taking priority off economic efficiency and increasing equity.
But without healthy growth, we have neither. We are “rats in a cage fighting over shares of the pie,” in Chris Richardson’s delicate phraseology. The government needs to develop a growth agenda. It’s also the Coalition’s best hope of moving from defence to offence against One Nation and against Labor too.
The business sector has given up on trying to persuade political leaders of the need for pro-growth policies. Unable to motivate the country from the top down, a broad coalition of about 30 industry groups is developing a public campaign to motivate change from the bottom up.
The Alliance of Industry Associations, from farmers to pharmacists, as they call themselves. Bran Black of the Business Council, part of the alliance, says that the campaign aims to “talk directly to Australians about what is really driving the cost of living and weaker living standards, and how we turn it around.
“Too much of the national debate is focused on the symptoms of our economic problems rather than what is causing them. Business cannot ask government to be ambitious for Australia if we’re not prepared to help build that support ourselves.”
More solutions, less blame. Dare we dream?
Peter Hartcher is political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. 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.
