Home affairs and immigration minister Tony Burke’s speech to the National Press Club (NPC) on September 17 was a boost to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and its Trumpite politics of hate, racism and division.
Burke’s speech, delayed for a month, was always framed as Labor’s “new” plan to get tougher on immigration.
It was a blatant concession to One Nation’s billionaire-funded campaign to scapegoat recent and non-European migrants for the housing and cost-of-living crisis, despite them being a result of the establishment parties’ neoliberal policies since the 1980s.
This bipartisan approach is responsible for making housing totally unaffordable for a new generation of workers. It has reduced real wages and eroded basic social rights, including the right to public health, education, transport and welfare.
Migrant workers are not the cause of these problems. However, with the backing of Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest billionaire, Hanson has whipped up a panic about “mass migration”; it is her way way of shifting the blame from the billionaire class to the most vulnerable sections of the working class.
Burke said that One Nation’s claims about “mass migration” were “absurd” and “not something we're dealing with in Australia”. But he went on to outline measures to cut net overseas migration from 290,000 to 225,000, in 2027-28, and make life harder for migrant workers and international students.
The federal Labor government wants to continue to exploit migrant labour and extract as much money as it can from international students. It also plans to make life harder by restricting their right to have their family come over with them and to stop so-called “visa hopping”.
Labor’s focus on “visa hopping” is a deliberate tactic. Just as it accused those on the National Disability Insurance Scheme of “rorting”, to justify its $38 billion cut, Labor is exaggerating to demonise entire groups of people in a bid to justify cruel policy decisions.
Labor has promised to more actively hunt down and lock up visa over-stayers. This is both cruel and expensive, and it was a calculated play to the hate campaign weaponised by US President Donald Trump in his deadly ICE war.
While Burke denies that Labor’s proposal will be anything like Trump’s ICE terror, Labor has legitimised One Nation and many Coalition MPs’ support for Australia to copy Trump.
Labor governments helped to embed illegal and cruel anti-refugee and asylum seeker policies decades ago — well ahead of Trump’s or the European Union’s reactionary refugee policies.
Burke’s speech has rightly been criticised for being “performative” and poorly researched in terms of policy consequences. University administrations are warning that getting tougher on already over-exploited international students could back fire, especially as Labor, the Coalition and One Nation are not supporting greater funding for universities.
The huge fees that are extracted from international students pay $24.3 billion of the $54.7 billion a year spent on the university sector. In addition, international students are 22.8% of all cleaning and laundry workers, 22.7% of food trade workers, 17.1% of food preparation workers, 14% of hospitality workers, 8% of factory workers, 6.7% of health and welfare workers.
Farmers are worried that restricting working holiday visas could make it harder for harvesting. If crops can’t be harvested in time, there will be food shortages. This could further inflate the costs of food just as Trump’s war in the Middle East again sends oil prices skyrocketing.
Apart from feeding the racist campaign to scapegoat immigrants for problems caused by a sick capitalist system, Labor’s immigration measures attack some of the most exploited sections of the working class.
Labor is effectively buttressing One Nation’s billionaire-funded campaign of divide and rule, and this will only shift politics further right.
As Labor moves further right, the Coalition will move further right and, perhaps, end up in a permanent coalition with One Nation. Hanson has made explicit her desire to work with the Liberals and Nationals to defeat Labor.
Hanson has only ruled out an official coalition with parties “where I will be told what I can say, what I can do”. But a coalition with the Coalition, where she calls the shots, is another matter.
Labor’s attempt to avoid being wedged on immigration will also drive more of the working class vote to One Nation.
The far right will never be defeated by making more concessions to its campaign of hate and division which blame the wrong class for the problems we face today.
[Sue Bolton is a member of the Socialist Alliance National Executive. She is also a long-term Merri-Bek councillor and is standing for SA in Broadmeadows in the Victorian elections.]