Opinion
It’s easy to forget that not very long ago, when Sussan Ley was presiding over a Liberal Party civil war on immigration policy, everyone actually agreed on what the thrust of it would be. Immigration would be cut, by consensus. The fight was over on what grounds. Moderates wanted this to be about housing; about services keeping up with population. The conservative wing wanted it to be about values: to object not just to the numbers coming, but to the people themselves. It wanted to point the finger at certain cohorts and say bluntly: we don’t want you here.
Truth be told, the moderates lost that argument even under Ley. At one point, Ley spoke of immigration policy as an “infrastructure piece”, all roofs and roads. By the time Angus Taylor deposed her, her office had already dreamt up a policy that sought to ban entries from 13 countries in the Trumpian style; a policy that, upon being leaked, proved too unvarnished even for the newly minted conservative leader, who rebuffed it. But this week, when Taylor finally launched the Coalition’s long-awaited immigration policy, it became official. The moderates are vanquished. It’s migrants, as people, in the dock.
Specifically, migrants of “subversive intent”. Migrants who are a “net drain”. They’re the ones bursting through the “floodgates”, and “taking us for a ride”. It was therefore time to “take back control”; to halt the “Balkanisation of communities”. This is not the language of an alternative prime minister any time since the White Australia policy. But it is the language of Nigel Farage. At moments, when Taylor is talking about scouring prospective migrants’ social media accounts, it’s the language of Donald Trump. And plainly, it chimes with the language of Pauline Hanson, who laughed off the whole thing as a copycat exercise, on which the Coalition will never deliver in the way One Nation would.
Hanson’s probably right. The Coalition’s policy is to “discriminate based on values” rather than “nationality, race, gender or faith”. In this way, it insists it preserves the “non-discriminatory” immigration program Robert Menzies introduced. It’s a technical, slightly tortured argument given that the Coalition is inviting us to infer values from people’s origins. Migrants “from liberal democracies have a greater likelihood of subscribing to Australian values compared to those migrating from places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists, and dictators” said Taylor, before declaring every refugee from Gaza suspect: “a high risk to our nation” who “must be reassessed with far greater scrutiny”.
Would One Nation bother with such fine distinctions? Or would it just give you the full-strength version: say we’re being swamped by Muslims, and return to something bluntly discriminatory? Taylor is proud to declare his policy is not “politically correct”. But if that’s a virtue, One Nation is much better at signalling it.
Which probably matters, because once you strip away Taylor’s thundering, there’s less than meets the ear. Security agencies already search social media posts. Prospective citizens already sign values statements. The Coalition wishes to make this legally enforceable by setting up a whole new bureaucracy to police migrants’ values, apparently in the name of reclaiming power from the bureaucrats. How this could work in practice is, at this point, anyone’s guess. For now, the values in question have been reduced to broad platitudes that would be legally meaningless. Things like “equal rights for men and women” or belief in “freedom of speech” which mean quite different things to different people.
There’s no explanation of how a government would define precisely what counts as a forbidden opinion for migrants to hold, or even if such a law would be constitutional. It’s not clear how policing migrants’ views in this way squares with our apparently inviolable value of “freedom of speech”. Even the Coalition’s huffing about refugees from Gaza would probably be of no practical effect. ASIO has already vetted every one of them – and rejected some – in what ASIO boss Mike Burgess called “a comprehensive and in-depth approach”.
None of which seems to be the point. Look more closely, and this policy seems not to be terribly much about migration at all. Consider the examples Taylor provides as evidence of our broken immigration system. “The Bondi Beach terrorist attack”, allegedly committed by an Australian-born man, and his father who arrived under John Howard. “Radical Islamic preachers”, the most infamous of which is currently Sydney’s Wissam Haddad, born in Australia. “Genocidal marches in major cities”, which presumably refers to the marches against the slaughter in Gaza, attended by huge numbers of white Australians. “Antisemitism across Australian communities”, as though the only communities in question are migrant ones, even as we’re in an age of neo-Nazi revival.
That’s the stuff of a law and order policy. To force migration policy to do that work would require us to identify not just migrants with un-Australian attitudes, but migrants who might one day have children who might grow up to have un-Australian attitudes. And since Taylor seems to be worried mostly about attitudes that gather around Muslims, Israel, and antisemitism – given these are the only specific examples he cites – there’s really only one logical extension to this approach: you’d have to ban Muslim, Arab, and specifically Palestinian immigration.
Turns out, that’s basically what One Nation policy has been for a decade. Hanson just says this stuff outright. Taylor can’t, at least if he wants to insist his policy is non-discriminatory. That’s not to say he’s being disingenuous, or that he harbours some secret desire to impose such a ban. I’m sure he doesn’t. But he’s framed his policy in a way that gives plausible deniability to those who quietly do, and makes something like that the next logical step. And, having led his followers that far, we can’t be surprised if a significant number of them decide to take it.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
