Pauline Hanson and One Nation have relentlessly scapegoated and demonised migrants for low wages, the housing crisis, stretched services, deteriorating infrastructure and crime. But migrants aren’t to blame for any of these problems. The blame lies squarely with the greed of the rich, the right-wing Labor and Coalition governments and anti-worker policies Hanson herself has backed.
Immigration is not ‘out of control’
In her National Press Club speech Hanson was beating the anti-migrant drum as loudly as ever, claiming, “Labor has been bringing more than 1375 people per day for the past three years”.
Hanson’s “mass migration crisis” is a racist fiction. Stupidly, the “1375” figure included population growth from births as well as migration.
Over the past ten years Australia’s population has actually grown at the same speed as most of the past century, about 1.5 per cent per year.
In fact, the level of population growth since 2019 is below that projected based on the population growth rate in the 2010s, due to lower immigration during the pandemic.
The crisis in housing, infrastructure and wages has been created by successive governments’ warped infrastructure and spending priorities, housing policies rigged for investors and industrial relations laws designed to protect profits at workers’ expense.
Housing crisis—blame the government and developers
One Nation says that housing pain has been caused by an “immigration catastrophe”.
But immigration is not to blame. In the decade to 2025, the population increased by 16 per cent, but the number of dwellings increased by 19 per cent. During COVID, when borders were closed and there was almost no immigration, house prices actually jumped 20 per cent in 18 months.
One Nation wants to direct anger away from the real culprits: greedy property investors and governments that have wrecked public housing instead of building it.
Since tax incentives for housing investors were introduced in 1999 combining negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, house prices have increased 500 per cent while wages only doubled. In Sydney, the cost of the average house was 8.3 times annual average wages in March 2002 but 14.4 times wages by June 2024.
Public and social housing has fallen from 7 per cent of all housing in 1991 to 4 per cent today, equating to the loss of 350,000 homes.
What about cost of living?
Hanson and One Nation fraudulently blame migrants for low wages and cost-of-living pain.
But it is Hanson who is the threat to wages and workers’ rights, not migrants. This year she publicly opposed an above-inflation pay increase for the lowest paid workers on the minimum wage. She slandered workers as “lazy” in her Press Club speech and opposed Same Job, Same Pay laws among many other anti-worker crimes.
Trump’s war on Iran has led to spikes and volatility in petrol prices. Hanson cheered the war and said Australia should “pick up the phone” and become more directly involved.
Lies about Indigenous spending
Hanson has never missed an opportunity to launch vile attacks against Indigenous people. Despite being more than ten times more likely to be incarcerated, homeless or have their children forcibly taken away, Hanson wants people to believe that the Indigenous population is treated better than other Australians.
She has promised to abolish the National Indigenous Australian Agency and claims spending on Indigenous Affairs is “$30 billion plus a year”. But this figure is just a rough division of all government spending on mainstream public services, like health and education, by the percentage of Indigenous people in Australia.
Estimated total government expenditure on Indigenous specific programs was $5.3 billion on 2023-24, only 0.77 per cent of the federal government’s $684 billion budget. Attacks on Aboriginal self-determination, which Hanson has led for 30 years, has seen much of this funding shift from Aboriginal-controlled organisations to ineffective non-Indigenous NGOs.
The real crime is the level of government spending on destroying Aboriginal lives—like the more than $1 million per child per year that it costs to lock up Aboriginal children at the highest rate in the world.
Anti-Muslim hate
Hanson and One Nation have made Muslims their number one target. Hanson has said there are no “good” Muslims, claiming, “Their religion concerns me because what it says in the Koran … they hate Westerners.”
She has ridiculously claimed Lakemba, a suburb in Western Sydney, is unsafe to enter.
The idea that Muslim migrants, and migrants generally, are dangerous is another bigoted lie. The Australian-born population is responsible for the overwhelming majority of crimes.
In a parliamentary submission in 2017 during the height of “Sudanese gangs” hysteria, Victoria police admitted, “The crime rate for the overseas born groups was lower than the crime rate for Australian born.”
By Adam Adelpour
