Coalition dodges questions about whether threat from One Nation is driving hardline migration policy

The Opposition Leader has dodged questions about whether the threat from One Nation is driving his hardline migration policy, as coalition strategists closely study the factors behind their loss to Pauline Hanson’s populist right-wing party in the Farrer by-election.

The Nightly has learnt that on Friday members of the National Party’s Federal Management Committee discussed their unsuccessful performance in last weekend’s contest, which saw the Coalition lose a NSW seat it had held since its creation in 1949.

In his first budget reply speech as Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor declared mass migration was “changing Australia for the worse”, and unveiled a policy to restrict welfare access for non-citizens.

Earlier Senator Hanson claimed the Opposition was copying One Nation’s policies, an accusation also made by the Albanese Government.

Speaking to the ABC following his Budget reply speech, Mr Taylor insisted his focus was on putting Australian citizens first, rather than targeting immigrants.

“I think it’s extraordinary at a time like this that the government has cut support for older Australians’ private health insurance and yet there is welfare for Anglo-Australian citizens.”

“Citizenship is a privilege and it’s something we want people to get something from.

“If you contribute to this country, we want to contribute back, and that’s what citizenship is all about, but when someone can get all the benefits without that, it becomes meaningless.”

The first major poll since Tuesday’s federal budget in which Labor announced broken promises on negative gearing and capital gains tax changes, has also recorded surging popularity for One Nation at the expense of the government and opposition.

The poll by Roy Morgan found primary support for One Nation was at 32 per cent, while Labor held just 28.5 per cent of the vote and the Coalition at 16.5 per cent.

On a two-party preferred basis, voters were almost split between Labor and the right-wing populist party, with some 49 per cent saying they would vote for One Nation, though Labor had a clear lead over the Coalition which sat at 45 per cent.

Senior Coalition strategists say the results are in line with their own polling and research which has found the Government’s unpopularity, as well as their own recent leadership chaos, is responsible for One Nation’s surging success.

Labor strategists believe that the new Opposition Leader is now firmly wedged between trying to stop coalition support going towards One Nation, and trying to win back ethnically diverse metropolitan seats held by the government.

“He thinks he is chasing Hanson voters in Farrer,” Labor aligned pollster Kos Samaras writes of the Opposition Leader’s new migration policy.

“He has not, evidently, considered that the seats he needs to actually form Government, Bennelong, Reid, Banks, Chisholm, Menzies, Aston, Tangney, Hasluck, are precisely the seats where this policy will read as a declaration of hostility against the household.”

“Taylor has just told every one of them that in his Australia, their parents are second-class. Their grandparents are second-class.”

But as the Coalition continues to study the fallout from last weekend’s Farrer by-election conversations are beginning on whether it may have to enter an informal arrangement with One Nation to eventually form government.

As one senior Opposition figure puts it: “You’d always prefer to sit on the Treasury benches, so nothing can be ruled out, but there’s still a long way to go until the next Federal Election”.

Australians are next due to go to the polls in 2028, but before then both Labor and the Coalition will be able to see how well One Nation performs in the next Victorian and New South Wales polls.