Quote:Pauline Hanson flew to Mar-a-Lago to sell her vision of Australia and lord, where do we start?
Pauline Hanson’s vision for Australia is one of high inflation, high debt and fewer migrants. It’s also one that directly serves China’s interests.
Bernard Keane
It takes a special kind of politician to go overseas and make a speech vilifying their own country, but Pauline Hanson has never been one for observing basic standards of decorum.
Her party, One Nation, feels very much at home overseas, and especially in the US — after all, One Nation offered to try to water down Australia’s gun laws in exchange for funding from the National Rifle Association.
Is it worth fact-checking Hanson’s address to the far-right faithful at Trump’s Xanadu? It would take too long to list the lies about both the US and Australia, such as our alleged migration intake of 740,000 (try less than half that, Pauline), her claim Australia has more homeless people than the US, or the “no-go areas” in Australia created by migration of “hateful, radical migrants” (which presumably means, erm, the British, New Zealanders, Indians and Chinese who make up the great bulk of our migration).
More useful, given Hanson’s party has reached 15% in some polling, is to look at Hanson’s overall vision for Australia. And migration is central to that agenda. Hanson’s base of older, regional male voters hate migration, even though many of them probably see an actual migrant in the wild once a year. But, from Florida, Hanson told us “high migration numbers have had a brutal effect on our hospitals, health system, our roads, education standards, nursing homes, aged care facilities, and general infrastructure.”
In fact our health and caring system would collapse without migrants: one-third of health workers were trained overseas. A half of all new doctor registrations are of overseas-born doctors — who have to work for 10 years in regional areas. And a half of all aged care workers, providing the services that many of Hanson’s voters are going to need over the next decade, were born overseas.
“Mass immigration is one of the key reasons inflation remains higher than normal in Australia,” she also told the Trump faithful — ignoring that the major driver of inflation during the post-pandemic price spike was large corporations gouging customers, and that the current surge in inflation is created by government policy failures. Without immigration, key industries that rely on skilled migrant labour would be forced to lift prices to cover higher wage costs created by chasing workers at a time of near full employment.
So Hanson’s vision is for an Australia where you won’t be able to get decent health services or a spot in an aged care facility due to a lack of workers, especially in regional communities. Where the lack of skilled migration forces prices up and means you’ll have to wait much longer for a tradie, or pay more.
“The man-made climate change falsehood is this century’s greatest hoax,” Hanson also insisted, which means we neither need to reduce emissions nor invest in more resilient infrastructure (although there won’t be anyone to help build that more resilient infrastructure without skilled migrants anyway). Regional Australia will again bear the brunt of the impact. The more extreme weather events, the higher inflation will be as supply chains deal with a greater number of severe weather interventions.
Hanson’s vision is also of a radically more indebted Australia. “Our national debt has crashed through the trillion-dollar mark, which means higher interest and higher taxes,” she declared in horror. But she also wants defence spending at 5% of GDP. In 2024-25 figures, that means an annual defence budget of $130 billion, compared to $49 billion in reality. That extra $80 billion a year will be funded by more debt, or less spending, or higher taxes. Eighty billion would be more than two-thirds of the entire health budget, far more than the entire education budget, or 30% of the entire social security budget. Which spending does Hanson want to cut? Or which taxes does she want to raise? Or will she just stick an extra $80 billion on the national credit card every year?
Hanson’s claim that we need 5% of GDP to defend ourselves doesn’t stack up — we actually need far less to defend Australia and our sea routes, given the large air-sea gap around us, the presence of well-disposed countries like Indonesia to our north, and military technology that makes force projection over distance far more prone to disruption. The real reason Hanson supports AUKUS and wants to spend 5% of GDP on defence — she doesn’t actually say on what — is not to defend ourselves but so we can help the US attack China, the country that “has plundered Australia’s industry and manufacturing sectors following our involvement in the 1970s’ LIMA Declaration”.
This is a novel take even for a far-right populist. Even MAGA Republicans argue that it was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 that destroyed US manufacturing jobs (which it did — along with the financial crisis; it was the Biden administration that at least got manufacturing employment back up to its pre-financial crisis levels). Here, it was the removal of tariffs by Hawke and Keating and the early 1990s recession that hammered manufacturing. Hanson wants to emulate Trump on tariffs, in the quest to generate more manufacturing jobs at a time of near [Continued]
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