The author calls anti-migrant politics a “disease of affluence”: Australia runs on long-stay and short-stay labour (medicine, fruit, hospitality), yet One Nation wants net-negative migration over three years—about 750,000 fewer people—visa caps at 130,000, 75,000 deportations, family limits, a smash of subclass-500 students, and exit from the Refugee Convention.

Barnaby Joyce, at an ABC forum that drew 535,000 viewers, waved off economists and the Parliamentary Budget Office as unelected; George Megalogenis said pulling ~766,000 people out of the economy for three years would be 1890s/1930s-scale. The author grants universities used foreign students as a milch cow, but cutting temporary graduates from 270,000 to 40,000 would still be economically perilous.

Labor is accused of Hanson-lite: Tony Burke’s “who arrives, stays, leaves” line, no family for most students and graduates, 100 more compliance officers, 250 detention beds, and working-holiday ballots (45,000 then 5,000). Critics say Indians and South Asians take the heaviest cut; net overseas migration is already 292,000, down 47% from the post-Covid peak.

It’s become the disease of affluence: How do wealthy countries limit, restrict or totally bar migrants (whether they arrive through regular channels or otherwise) who are seen as ills to be shunned rather than solutions to be treasured?  A country like Australia would be a shadow of itself without its migrants, either of the long stay variety or those of shorter duration who come in and do the indispensable, from offering medical services to fruit picking and filling the “hospo” (hospitality) sector.  But the malady of affluence has afflicted the Canberra establishment, much of it due to the jittery demagoguery of One Nation, a party with ideas so few you could place them on the back of a napkin.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, much like its British facsimile Reform UK, is particularly obsessed by the alleged failings of immigration.  It promises to cut it to “net negative” levels over the course of three years and throttle existing visa rules.  (The numbers promise to be a staggering 750,000 or thereabouts.)  Migrants will be restricted in bringing family members to Australia, and international education (those on visa subclass 500) is in for a hammering.  Some 75,000 “illegal migrants”, according to the party’s website, will be deported and numbers of overall........

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