This recalled the infamous anti-immigration speech of British Conservative Party firebrand MP Enoch Powell in 1968. In his \u201cRivers Of Blood\u201d speech, Powell described a future in which Britons \u201cfound themselves made strangers in their own country\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hastie doesn\u2019t want to shut down the immigration program. But he\u2019s not Robinson Crusoe in wanting to cut it. That\u2019s the stated intention of both the Albanese government and Ley\u2019s Coalition.<\/p>\n
![\"Opposition](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/59fbd42f9fd377a2875828c1303d261caca086f9.jpeg\")
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Opposition Leader Sussan Ley in Sydney\u2019s \u201cLittle India\u201d on September 7, after senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said the government was bringing in \u201clarge numbers\u201d of Indian migrants because they voted for Labor.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong<\/p>\n
After two COVID years with zero immigrants, the intake staged a two-year catch-up that added almost a million people to the population. There is an unspoken Canberra consensus that this was predictable yet poorly managed, a serious mistake. The intake is now falling.<\/p>\n
Hastie, however, wants to cut harder and faster than the Liberal leadership is prepared to. He wants to return the level of net overseas migration to its scale of about a decade ago. Meaning a halving from its 2023-24 level, which was 446,000. Temporary foreign students accounted for 207,000 of these. Hastie thinks universities are abusing the international student system to make easy cash. He sees it as ripe for a major pruning.<\/p>\n
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He does not want to hack into the permanent intake of new settlers. Indeed, his own electorate of Canning in Western Australia is rich with immigrants from Britain, India, the Philippines and elsewhere. One of the immigrants is his wife, Ruth, now an Australian, whom he met in her native US.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what\u2019s the point of migrating to Australia if you can\u2019t buy a home?\u201d he says to colleagues. \u201cI want to make the Australian dream sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we don\u2019t act, we can expect anger and frustration,\u201d he wrote in his Instagram effort. \u201cWe might even die as a political movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The final slide in this stack cites late Formula 1 champion Ayrton Senna as a source of inspiration for political strategy: \u201cIf you no longer go for a gap that exists, you\u2019re no longer a racing driver.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s going for the gap. Otherwise, Pauline Hanson\u2019s One Nation seems the likely beneficiary of rising frustration with immigration levels. So far, Australian politics has remained remarkably and gratefully immune to the xenophobia and sensationalism of Farage and Donald Trump and Alternative for Germany and Marine Le Pen and the rest.<\/p>\n
One Nation\u2019s share of the primary vote at the May election was 6.4 per cent, a gain of a bit over one percentage point on the 2022 election. In Hastie\u2019s seat, it was 11.4 per cent this year, a doubling of its share.<\/p>\n
Hastie intends that he, not Hanson, will be riding the train of nativist immigration policy. In contrast to Hanson, Hastie is no racist. He uses his experience in his father\u2019s church as a model for successful multiculturalism.<\/p>\n
He grew up in multicultural Ashfield in Sydney\u2019s inner west, where his dad was a Presbyterian pastor. The church ran a roster of services in English, in Mandarin, in Korean, in Samoan. It was a harmonious congregation of many nationalities, bound by common values.<\/p>\n
But wait. As opposition leader, Peter Dutton did go to the polls promising a major cut to the immigration intake. It certainly didn\u2019t protect him from a thrashing of historic proportions. So what makes Hastie think it could work electorally in the future if it proved so ineffectual in the recent past?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t talk about it,\u201d Hastie told the ABC\u2019s Patricia Karvelas recently. The problem wasn\u2019t the policy but the marketing of it, he says. He sees the oncoming train of a nativist, populist movement heading for Australia\u2019s shores regardless of the evidence of election day, 2025.<\/p>\n
If so, he should beware the rejoinder to the Dominic Cummings line in the Brexit movie. \u201cBe careful what you wish for. You won\u2019t be able to control it either.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter Hartcher is political editor.<\/p>\n