Pauline Hanson has spent thirty years on the edge of Australian politics, calling through the window while others sat at the table. That window has become a door. A Resolve Monitor poll this month put her ahead of Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister, 33 per cent to 29, with Liberal leader Angus Taylor trailing on 16. One Nation’s primary vote, at 29 per cent, has edged past Labor and left the Coalition a distant third on 20. For a party long treated as a protest vote, these are the numbers of a contender.
What they really show is the hollowing out of the Liberal Party as the home of the Australian Right. Taylor’s Coalition has become a spectator in its own contest, and the conservative voters it once held have walked across to Hanson without much fuss. One Nation is now, in practice, the real opposition on the Right, even if the seat count does not yet say so. That shift deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed off.
And the honest thing to say is this: let it play out. If One Nation can win government, or hold the balance of it, by 2028, then it should be given the chance to try. Hanson has built a career on the claim that the answers are simple and the people in charge are too squeamish to act. Government is the one place that claim can be tested. There is no better cure for a slogan than the job of turning it into law.
Take the centrepiece. One Nation wants to “Cut immigration by over 570,000 people from current Labor levels by capping visas at 130,000 per year to ease pressure on housing, wages, and infrastructure.” It is a clean, sellable line. The trouble starts the moment you try to build it.
Look at how the numbers actually work. Last financial year about 568,000 people arrived and roughly 263,000 left, for net migration of 306,000. That net figure has been falling fast, down from a peak of 538,000 in 2022-23, and Treasury expects it nearer 260,000 this year. Now apply the cap. It limits arrivals, not departures, so with about 263,000 people leaving each year and only 130,000 allowed in, you do not slow migration, you reverse it. Net migration drops below zero, towards the minus 100,000 Hanson herself has named. That setting has a price. International education, worth close to 50 billion dollars and one of the country’s largest export earners, cannot survive it. Student visas alone run at several times the entire proposed cap. Universities in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide would shed staff and close courses, and the regional campuses that lean on foreign fees would be the first to go.
Then housing, where her pitch carries some weight. Fewer arrivals would ease rents, loosen vacancy and give first-home buyers a little room to breathe. But the same cap that empties the rental queue also empties the building sites, because migrants pour the concrete and hang the doors. You cannot strip out the workforce and the demand at the same time and call the result a housing plan. Cheaper rent in a smaller, older country is a trade, not a miracle.
The property measures wander into stranger territory. “Those foreign citizens who currently own homes will be given two years to sell up,” Hanson has said, adding, “I don’t believe that foreigners should own any housing in Australia or up our farming land.” Read literally, that net catches permanent residents who have lived here for years, paid their tax, raised their children and simply not taken citizenship. Many Indian-Australian families sit in exactly that position, holding Indian passports because India does not allow dual citizenship. A forced-sale order aimed at that group would tie the courts in knots for a decade. On negative gearing she offers, “One Nation supports negative gearing being allowed on two homes for everyone,” a line that would comfort most landlords and change very little.
This is where the arithmetic meets the law. Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, has made the plain mechanical point: there is no power in the Migration Act to cap net migration at all. A government can cap the visas it grants. It cannot cap the people who choose to stay or leave. The 130,000 figure is a target dressed up as a lever, and the first time it met a real department it would buckle.
There is a fringe cheering all of this along, giddy at the thought that a Hanson government would chain undocumented arrivals and load them onto military planes. It will not happen, and not for want of noise. Australia is held in check by its courts, by the refugee convention it has not yet torn up
The country One Nation wants to wall off is, in large part, already born somewhere else. As of last June, 32 per cent of Australians were born overseas, some 8.8 million people out of 27.6 million. India is now the single largest country of birth, ahead of England for the first time in the nation’s history. These are not tourists passing through. They are nurses, tradies, engineers, shopkeepers, and the parents and grandparents on the family stream, where the parent visa queue alone runs past 140,000 people. A policy that treats them as a number to be pushed downward is, in effect, arguing with the actual population of Australia.
There is a fringe cheering all of this along, giddy at the thought that a Hanson government would chain undocumented arrivals and load them onto military planes. It will not happen, and not for want of noise. Australia is held in check by its courts, by the refugee convention it has not yet torn up, by High Court rulings on indefinite detention, and by the simple fact that most people without valid visas arrived lawfully and overstayed. There is no fleet, no legal pathway and no public stomach for the scenes once the cameras roll. The euphoria rests on a film that cannot be shot here.
So can the country afford the experiment? In dollars, the modelling says a hard cap would weaken the federal budget rather than strengthen it, because the people being turned away are mostly young taxpayers. In services, it would age the population faster and thin out the very regions that vote for her. In the courts, it would spark years of litigation over forced sales and detention. None of that is a reason to wave away the anxieties that have lifted Hanson to 33 per cent. The housing squeeze is real, wage growth has been weak, and infrastructure has fallen behind a fast-growing population. Voters are not wrong to be angry. They may simply be wrong about the remedy.
That is the case for handing her the keys. A promise lives forever in opposition. It either dies or it delivers in government. If One Nation takes power in 2028 and finds that capping net migration is unlawful, that closing the universities costs more than it saves, and that deporting your way to affordability runs aground on the first injunction, the country will have learned something that a thousand media appearances could never teach it. Hanson has always been more at ease naming the enemy than doing the work. Give her the work. The volume from the sidelines tends to fall once someone is asked to lift the load, and the rest of us can return to the questions that actually decide elections: the price of a home, the figure on a payslip, the wait in a hospital corridor.
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