Australia's inwardly focused immigration debate is a tawdry exercise heaving with more politics than policy.

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It comes against a backdrop of "accelerating global change" as it is described in the Treasury's seventh Intergenerational Report to be released on Monday.

According to glimpses I've seen, the 2026 IGR builds on key themes discussed in the 2023 report like geopolitical fragmentation, energy transition, and a shift towards services.

This one, however, will warn that these pressures "will only intensify" under the rapid acceleration of technological and digital transformation that has followed breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI).

Yet Australian politics continues to favour introspection. This feels like not so much a race to the bottom as a splash n' dash to the shallow end of the gene pool.

You can tell how far from measured it's drifted when John Howard calls for a bit of courage and principle against the populist onslaught.

The former PM told the Nine newspapers this weekend that immigration is one of Australia's great success stories.

Yet the distorting influence of Pauline Hanson's abrasive anti-migrant rhetoric is now observable across the board with both the Coalition and Labor scrambling to muscle-up on the arrival of "too many" outsiders.

Both hope to outrun a populist tsunami threatening to inundate the centre-ground of postwar Australian governance.

First-preference vote shares below 30 per cent for Labor and barely above 20 per cent for the combined Coalition, are the reason Hanson is threatening to eclipse the vote of both.

As recently as a few months ago, Labor had revelled in Angus Taylor's pain, lecturing him that he would never "out-One Nation, One Nation".

Now Labor too, is nodding One Nation's way, if somewhat more sheepishly. Yielding to a coarsening politics of complaint that........

© Canberra Times