Pauline Hanson has spent thirty years warning that foreign workers threaten Australian jobs.

She now leads a party polling at historic highs, with One Nation reaching 25 per cent in the latest Essential poll. So, where is her policy on the largest foreign workforce ever to enter the Australian economy – AI immigrants?

Four days before Christmas, Katherine, a 24-year-old medical receptionist at a clinic in Sydney’s Inner West, was called into a meeting with three colleagues.

Management told them phones would now be routed to a “natural computer AI”. Emails would be filed automatically. Patients would receive a generic computer-generated reply.

With their six-month probation almost up, the four young women were let go and, adding insult to displacement, asked to help configure the systems replacing them.

Katherine called her father afterwards. He works in tech, heads IT for an insurance fund and was livid. Her younger colleagues had never been let go from a job before. They sat in the room together, stunned, not quite believing this was how working life could go.

Katherine’s story, first reported by News Corp in May 2025, is not an outlier. It is the shape of things to come and it exposes a gaping hole in the political debate about protecting Australian workers.

The immigration debate in Australia, as in most wealthy democracies, rests on a labour market argument wearing cultural clothes.

Too many people competing for too few jobs. Downward pressure on wages. Disruption to established communities. Whatever you think of the framing, the underlying logic is economic – new entrants to the workforce reshape bargaining power, career ladders, and wage floors.

One Nation has built its entire platform on this logic. According to RedBridge polling, 78 per cent of One Nation voters believe the next generation will have a worse life than their parents. They are voting on economic anxiety as much........

© The New Daily