One of Australia's leading pollsters and repositories of knowledge about what and how Australians are thinking gave us some very encouraging insights recently.

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Kos Samaras, a director at RedBridge, whose poll results are published in major media outlets, told us that immigration is not on the minds of voters. Responses from more than 400 focus groups, including many in regional and rural Australia, showed that immigration was just not on the radar.

"They talked about the mortgage that seems not to get any smaller by the year, the rent that eats into 50-plus per cent of their weekly wage, the cost of food, the rising power bill, the wait to see a doctor, and the strong sense that nobody in charge wants to listen," he wrote. "They talked about their kids not being able to leave home.

"Immigration did not come up. Not as a grievance, not as an aside, not at all."

In short, without prompting, "immigration" per se is not an issue. But economic conditions are.

This is encouraging because, politically, raising "immigration" in Australia recently has been dog whistling. It has been an appeal to racism and religious bigotry, to a white Christian Australia. And, according to Samaras, the evidence shows that Australians are not falling for it.

What is the consequence? Surely, it means, that if people's economic position improves, they will not be beguiled by the appeal of One Nation's harking for the white Australia of bygone days. And why would they? A tad more than half of Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was born overseas.

Even after the highly publicised "rallies for Australia" in the past month or so, immigration "still does not come up" in focus groups Samaras says. "Prompt it and people will offer a view, usually a measured one about numbers and housing, and then they go straight back to what is actually happening to them."

This is very telling about the recent surge in One Nation support. It is, Samaras says, a protest vote against the major parties on economic grounds.

It means that if the concerns are addressed, the protest will cease.

But here's the rub, rapid population growth has caused most of the things that protest voters say concern them. And we have rapid........

© Canberra Times