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One Nation wants to distance itself from the far-right brand to attract broader appeal and woo disenfranchised conservative voters fed up with the turmoil in the Liberal and Nationals parties.
Pauline Hanson’s polarising immigration position is well known, but One Nation says it has a range of policies – housing affordability, energy, and tax – aimed at appealing to a wider range of voters.
The party is surging in the polls and threatens to overtake the fractured Coalition as the leading conservative force in federal parliament as Hanson spruiks her plans to “hopefully form government”.
However, with just four senators and a lone House of Representatives MP – Barnaby Joyce, who was elected as a Nationals candidate before defecting in December – One Nation and its broader policy agenda remains largely unreported.
So what are the party’s policies, and do they make practical and economic sense?
Immigration
Immigration is the foundation of Hanson’s political career. She burst onto the national stage with the claim Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” in her maiden speech to parliament in 1996.
This has offended many over the years but is now adopted by a broader range of political figures, including some in the Liberal and Nationals parties, although most are at pains not to single out Asian migrants.
One Nation wants to overhaul immigration by slashing arrival numbers and deporting illegal migrants, such as those who have overstayed their visas and are working illegally – the latter a policy also shared by the Albanese government.
Reintroducing temporary protection visas would end permanent residency through supposed “back door” avenues such as education, according to One Nation’s policy platform, and also refuse entry to those coming from “nations known to foster extremist ideologies that are incompatible with Australian values”.
Housing
One Nation’s housing policy is closely linked to its stance on immigration, blaming arrivals for a population surge that has created an affordability crunch.
“There’s a direct correlation between housing and excessive immigration,” recent One Nation recruit Barnaby Joyce told this masthead.
“Excess immigration is when you bring in more people than you have the capacity to absorb.
“If you’re going to bring in the population, or in excess of the population, as we have been, not this year, but in previous years, of Canberra each year, then you better have built the houses of Canberra each year.”
This claim is widely repeated but was shot down by independent economist Saul Eslake, who said the broader One Nation platform didn’t have “anything approaching a coherent economic policy”.
He said Australian politics was fundamentally supportive of price growth, so even if the borders are shut, as they were for many months during the COVID pandemic, measures were introduced to avoid prices collapsing.
“When it looked as though [prices] might go down because of the closure of our international borders to migrants, there was a kind of mass panic and governments, federal and state, responded by doing things designed explicitly to prevent house prices from falling – doubling or trebling first-home owner grants and encouraging the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates to record lows,” Eslake said.
The economist also said One Nation’s plan to ban foreign ownership would do little to move the affordability dial, given about 10,000 overseas residents buy property in Australia each year compared to about 170,000 Australians.
Another housing affordability policy is to introduce a five-year GST moratorium on building materials for some homes to limit the price rise crunch.
Climate change, environment and cost of living
One Nation blames the renewable energy transition and pursuit of net zero targets for rising energy costs, and wants the continuation of coal and expansion of gas to power homes and industries.
“The cheapest form of power is coal-fire power, and we have to go back to coal-fire power,” Joyce said, who wants Australia to build new generators powered by the fossil fuel.
“You will not have a manufacturing sector in Australia, your cost-of-living crisis will be exacerbated and never dealt with because your fundamental building block – of manufacturing, of cost of food, of everything – is energy prices.”
One Nation wants to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, repeal a number of climate-related laws, abolish the renewable energy target, abolishing the government department of climate change, and ban clean energy installations.
The party claims policies that cut emissions are “economic suicide” and questions the well-established science that climate change is caused by human influences such as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The Australian Energy Market Regulator’s latest road map on power supply to 2050 finds again that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, warns that the rollout of infrastructure to connect Australians to the renewable grid is one of the biggest causes of short-term cost blowouts, and observes that maintaining coal-fired generators beyond their current closure dates would risk even higher power prices due to ageing equipment breaking down with no notice.
‘Slash government waste’
The climate change department isn’t the only government agency One Nation wants to scrap, in policy settings that closely resemble those of US President Donald Trump.
The party wants to abolish the National Indigenous Australians Agency, review both the housing and education departments, abolish the Therapeutic Goods Administration and review the medications approved for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme during the pandemic.
A One Nation-led government would withdraw from the United Nations, Paris Agreement, and the World Health Organisation, as well as reduce foreign aid spending. The tens of billions proposed to be saved from these measures would help reduce federal debt levels, the party says.
Education
One Nation is critical of state education and blames a reduction in basic proficiency benchmarks on “Western, white, gender, guilt shaming” in classrooms.
“You should be focusing on the fundamentals of what teachers are supposed to do – writing, reading and arithmetic,” Joyce told this masthead.
The MP cited a conversation he’d had with a 10-year-old, who Joyce said was told to remove an Australian flag from their laptop.
“There’s something almost malevolent about asking children to engage in social policy and political views,” he said.
While states set the curriculum for schools, in October last year, education ministers agreed to a review aimed at improving mathematics teaching in years one to three as part of the latest curriculum review.
Health
One Nation’s idea to fix strained access to healthcare in regional communities would be to boost the number of rural doctors and other medical staff by introducing three-year contracts for newly qualified professionals, who would have their student loans paid off in return.
Currently, doctors can have at least half of their student debt wiped if they spend time working in remote and rural areas. Entire student debts can be wiped in certain circumstances.
Tax
One Nation wants to simplify income tax settings and lower the corporate tax rate to attract businesses and investment in Australia, also specifically mentioning that targeting multinationals to pay tax is a priority. However, the party has not mentioned exact settings for these tax rates.
Eslake questioned how the company tax rate cut would be paid for, and claimed the reduction would result in a change to franking credits, which would ultimately hit the pockets of investors.
“If you cut the company tax rate, say from 30 per cent to 20 per cent, Australian shareholders, including superannuation funds, will end up paying higher taxes on their dividends,” the economist said.
“The only beneficiaries of a cut in the company tax rate are foreign shareholders in Australian companies, or the owners of wholly owned foreign companies operating in Australia, plus those companies that don’t pay dividends.”
Trade
Hanson has previously advocated for tariffs to be used to protect Australian jobs by supporting industries such as steel and automobile manufacturing, another policy that mirrors Trump.
But Joyce told this masthead he had reservations about imposing duties on imported goods.
“Very rarely can I ever see it [tariffs] helping Australia,” he said.
“You start putting tariffs on somebody, they’ll start putting tariffs on you, and you’ll find most economies Australia deal with are vastly bigger than us and they can hurt us a lot more than we can hurt them.
James Hall is the News Director at the Brisbane Times. He is the former Queensland correspondent at The Australian Financial Review and has reported for a range of mastheads across the country, specialising on political and finance reporting.Connect via Twitter or email.From our partners
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