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By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Australia's inwardly focused immigration debate is a tawdry exercise heaving with more politics than policy.
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 blames migrants for just about any problem you can name, the Albanese government will reduce migrants coming here to study and to fill the jobs Australians won't.
Immigration Minister Tony Burke announced changes on Thursday that will strengthen visa compliance, close off access for the family members of international students, clamp down on education-related visa-hopping, and sharply reduce backpacker numbers.
In the space of months, Hanson's anti-ethnic nostalgia for an "Aussie" monoculture - privately considered bogus and "boganoid" - has vectored from the disreputable fringe to the disaffected middle.
Or rather, the centre of Australian competition for votes has shifted to her. This has produced some interesting behaviour.
First, One Nation has hardened further with a policy of net-negative migration - more people leaving than coming. This would be economically ruinous.
The party now risks losing its burgeoning non-capital city base because migrants are so crucial to the rural-regional economy. This, in order to build support in the cities.
It is a long way from the policy articulated last month by the party's sole elected (rather than defected) lower house MP, David Farley, who told the ABC's Insiders that the intake under One Nation's formula would be about the same as Labor's at 235,000 net overseas migration.
"The raw number is not too different, but the reality is ... we don't need them in the great urban 'metroplex'. We need them out to be productive, working out in agriculture, engineering, mining ... the big difference is we are focusing on what are the skills we need as a nation," Farley had told the flagship program on August 23.
Hanson and Joyce quickly shut him down, explaining that his remarks had been a rookie error - code for honest, reasoned, even balanced. Skills? This is about culture.
Another perverse response is that of Angus Taylor's Liberals. They are preparing to release a policy to abruptly cut aggregate migration by pegging the intake to housing completions rather than broader industrial demand. This puts the opposition on a collision course with its core constituency, employers.
Peak business bodies have warned against harsh cuts with many noting that the capacity to lift housing completions relies (ironically) on access to skilled trades which are not available onshore.
So, having surrendered their inner-city heartland, Liberals are now shaping to lose business as well.
Then to Labor. After years of what can best be described as defensive rhetorical meekness, Labor has reluctantly repositioned and now hopes to be seen as more keenly attuned to community concerns over "mass" migration.
Its changes will further weaken universities (Australia's third largest export sector) and starve fragile regional-rural economies of the temporary labour on which they depend.
In other words, there are risks in all of these presentations.
Here, Treasury's IGR is disarmingly frank.
"...intergenerational equity is being strained by the long-term decline in home ownership and the pressures that an ageing population and structural trends in the tax base are placing on working-age Australians ... discontent is driving political upheaval at faster rates than in recent decades. This underscores the urgency of governments responding to the real pressures and concerns in the community through ambitious reform and long-term planning".
Labor says it is doing just that. But as Farley can attest, in a race between politics and policy, the former starts well ahead.
A steeling word, then, from John Howard: "It's important to have a migration program that caters for reasonable expectations of a number of things, including shortages of skilled migrants."
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.