The Liberal Party’s “Australian values migration plan”, announced last week, is a far-right wish list of racist anti-migrant politics. Greens Senator David Shoebridge is right to compare it to the White Australia Policy. But it’s not just some throwback to the past. It’s a sign of the future: far-right politics is entering the mainstream in Australia.
The plan, unveiled by party leader Angus Taylor, proposes a new task force to deport 65,000 “overstayers” living in the country on expired visas. Whatever the details, the inspiration was crystal clear. Taylor wants an Australian-style ICE agency to oversee mass deportations.
While that’s happening, people entering the country will have their social media accounts screened by the government, as under President Donald Trump’s border regime in the United States.
Taylor’s speech hit just about every possible far-right talking point on immigration. Migrants in Europe have, he said, brought about the “erosion of national culture” and the “Balkanisation of communities”. The only thing missing was a vision of the Murray-Darling foaming with blood.
He spoke about migrants coming to Australia “with subversive intent” and blamed their malign influence for the explosion of Palestine solidarity protests (“genocidal marches”) across the country. Sickeningly, he singled out 1,700 refugees from Gaza as a “high risk to our nation”; the Liberals are calling for all of them to have their visas re-evaluated “with far greater scrutiny”.
It is typical of the far right to portray any challenge to the powerful in society as the work of sinister foreign forces—usually in cahoots with the left—out to weaken the nation. For years, Muslims have been the favoured scapegoats. A century ago, the Nazis in Germany railed against Judeo-Bolshevism. Today, the far right decries “Islamo-leftism“.
The Liberals want to restrict migration from countries “ruled by fundamentalists, extremists and dictators” in favour of countries more aligned with “Australian values”. And in the Liberal Party’s universe, the Australian value of paramount importance is the ability to speak English, which the party wants to make mandatory for any permanent visa holder.
For the record, five years ago, more than 800,000 people in the country didn’t speak English well or at all, according to the 2021 Census. Plus, more than one in five speak a language other than English at home. You wonder how Angus Taylor gets any sleep at night with such an enormous potential fifth column in the country who don’t talk proper Australian!
In spite of all this, Taylor maintains that his migration policy doesn’t “discriminate based on nationality, race, gender, or faith” but rather on “values”. It’s a simple trick the far right worked out decades ago: swap out the pseudoscientific racial hierarchy mumbo-jumbo of old for a more palatable racism based on differences between incompatible cultures or values. It’s racism with a facelift.
The context of Taylor’s announcement is important to keep in mind. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging ahead in opinion polls. The party won 23 percent of the vote in the South Australian state election, and a majority of those votes came from the Coalition. The Liberals’ new migration policy is squarely aimed at winning those voters back.
But politics is about more than just elections. Some want to downplay the threat Hanson poses, insisting she can’t win enough seats to take power. That misses the point. Even in countries where they aren’t in power, far-right parties are setting the tone in politics. Mainstream political parties, desperate to prop up their rule and with nothing else to offer, feed into the racist reaction. One Nation may not be in government, but the Liberals are taking One Nation policies to the next election.
Of course, the line between “traditional” conservatism and far-right politics has always been blurry at best. Hanson herself was a Liberal Party member and candidate. In the 1990s, then-Liberal PM John Howard—who was sitting in the audience at Angus Taylor’s speech last week—responded to Hanson’s rise by adopting her policies. It might have set One Nation back electorally for a while, but it only legitimised the politics. Today, Hanson knows full well that the Liberals’ far-right tack can only help her, saying:
“I’m pleased to hear that Angus Taylor has listened to my policies. But do I trust them to deliver like One Nation does? No, because the Liberal Party is full of moderates ... It’s the same rhetoric, but they won’t carry it through.”
As the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen famously said, people prefer the original to the copy.
The Labor Party has played its part in creating a climate in which more extreme anti-migrant racism festers. Former Labor PM Paul Keating introduced indefinite mandatory detention of asylum seekers in the 1990s. In 2012, PM Julia Gillard reopened refugee prisons on Manus Island and Nauru, and a year later, her successor, Kevin Rudd, declared that refugees arriving by boat would never settle in Australia.
The current Labor government has backed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and turned away Palestinians trying to flee. Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent the last four years sucking up to the one man who embodies the far-right resurgence more than any other—Donald Trump.
The Liberals’ migration plan is a sign of how embedded far-right politics are becoming in capitalism today, including in Australia. To respond, we need socialist politics that can take the racist reaction head-on and fight the system that spawns it.
