Good policy makes good politics, Paul Keating used to say. The converse is not necessarily true. When the making of policy is subordinated to mere political advantage, good policy suffers, and often so does good politics.

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Bad policy begets bad outcomes, that usually trump any temporary political advantage. There could hardly be a better example of poor government than the raft of changes to Labor's immigration policies announced by Tony Burke.

Burke acted as if he had to solve the problem of One Nation. He couldn't and he didn't. The One Nation crowd now seeks net zero immigration. Burke seemed to think that he could cater to every interested party or at least perform some sort of balancing act by which each interest would feel that they had a bit of a win and a bit of a loss and thus go away grumbling but satisfied. It doesn't work like this.

First, for many of the players, immigration is an emotional, not a physical factual issue. They have opinions about whether we should have it.

People have feelings about whether existing levels are too high, or too low; they are not based on objective criteria but predispositions. There is no formula capable of describing the ideal number of migrants, or the type of them which should be allowed.

There never has been. One can give some appearance of objectivity by referring to the state of the labour market, or the birth rate, or demands for labour in various industries or regions, but even then it is primarily a matter of opinion.

Australia, for example, does not have a population policy - a formal view on how big the population should be. If we had one, we have not adjusted it for a dramatically declining birth rate, nor for the movement of the Baby Boomer cohort through and now, increasingly out of, the labour force. Many opinions are tinged with views about foreigners - some racist, but some also punctuated by traditional White Australia Policy fears that the introduction of Asian labour might break down hard-won industrial conditions.

Pauline Hanson has long been campaigning against migration, particularly migration of the wrong type, by which she has clearly meant people of Asian or African extraction, and people of Muslim faith.

It's quite clear that feelings about the "browning" of the population are at the core of her anxieties. There are others, some of whom have tried to infiltrate her movement who are frankly racist, and who believe that there is some sort of conspiracy afoot by which White Christian civilisation is being discriminated against and supplanted by sinister world government conspiracies.

A good deal of this is borrowed from bigoted American sources, which have these days become respectable given the enabling of the opinion by people such as Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and the media employees of Rupert Murdoch. But it has long had a respectable lineage in white Australian circles, in old sectarian warfare, and, early, in resistance to migration from the Mediterranean (sometimes a code word for bigotry against Catholics, Jews and Muslims.)

The politicisation of the boat people and refugee "invasions" gave a colour of national security and terrorism threat, which "permissioned" a frankly prejudiced and hostile part of the community, particularly in regional areas where multiculturalism had less sway. Hanson's appeal to a monoculture and a nostalgia for a (White Australia Policy) time when most Australians........

© Canberra Times