Albo’s mum and “primitive” first Australians: has Pauline finally gone too far?
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What is the new Labor migration plan and why does it matter?
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am. Migration is shaping up to be the next big battleground in federal politics, as Labor desperately tries to wrestle back control of the narrative from One Nation. But does this week's long-awaited plan leave the government stronger or weaker politically? And could going harder on Pauline Hanson hold the key to tackling One Nation? This week, the major parties gave it a try, as some of Hansen's nasty comments came back to bite her. Today, contributing editor at the New Daily, Eamon Remekis, on immigration politics and whether some things are off limits, even for Pauline Hansen. It's Saturday, September 19th. Amy, Labor finally delivered its migration plan on Thursday, six weeks after it was originally scheduled.
And in the same week, One Nation delivered its migration policy. Do you think it'll be enough to take some of the political pressure off around this topic for the government?
It's really difficult to answer because we're really in existential areas now. We're still kind of looking for the actual issue that we're trying to solve here. And it really is a political narrative. I mean, yes, of course there is pressure on housing, but that is complicated because interest rates are also one of the big reasons that we're seeing pressure on rents and interest rates are being driven by a supply issue inflation problem that Australia is currently dealing with. So there's nothing that you can say cutting migration right now is going to solve this massive issue in Australia. It really is a vibe issue. That's the predominant thing the government is trying to address. It's trying to catch at smoke and it has been building all year.
I think it'll now become a race to the bottom where you have the coalition saying, well, we'll cut even more. And then you'll have One Nation saying, well, why aren't you cutting as much as us? But none of that matters. The facts do not matter in this debate. It is all about how people feel. And I think anybody who has put any sort of toe into into the social media waters on this knows that because no matter how many facts you reply to people with, they're just like, no, no, no, we have a mass migration problem in Australia and we don't.
Do you think Labor needed to respond in this way or does its response just give more power to One Nation, which appear to be the ones setting the agenda right now?
From a purely political point of view, it's both because the political climate became so volatile around this, a lot of that due to media coverage where, like, every single masthead, every single commercial broadcaster was dedicated to this in the mainstream. And that started from the beginning when we saw the march for Australia where we saw people saying, oh, we're protesting against this high migration, and then people just started going, oh, well, look, yeah, sure, we know Nazis were involved in that march, but maybe they have a point about migration, which is, you know, like crazy. It's absolutely crazy what we allowed to kind of take hold.
Reported straight up and down by commercial nightly news networks that a rally against immigration, which had Nazis speaking at it, In my view, if you have a rally that Nazis speak at, that's a Nazi rally.
Yeah, whether or not you meant for the Nazis to come, if you're at an event and Nazis turn up and speak at your event, you're at a Nazi event. But we allowed that in the political and media classes to dominate this debate where we stopped talking about Nazis and started talking about what they wanted us to talk about, which was migration. Right. which was importing the same culture wars that we saw in the United States and more recently in the UK and Europe. Just that level of intense focus on migration. But nobody could say what problem it was that we were actually solving.
Let's talk about the coalition. They've been talking about migration numbers being too high and they're directly tying migration to housing shortages and the cost of housing. But we still don't have a policy from them.
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