Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address last week reminded us she doesn’t like multiculturalism, she sees immigration as responsible for most of the country’s problems, and she regards the values of some immigrants as inimical to a predominantly “Judeo-Christian society”. She called for “monoculturalism” to replace “multiculturalism”.
These kinds of views are not new for Hanson, nor for Australia. Billy Snedden, who served as Liberal immigration minister (and later Leader), called for a “monoculture” in 1969. The political right’s critique of multiculturalism took off in the 1980s and never really went away. Even left-wing critics saw it as a conservative ideology that celebrated food and dancing – “spaghetti and polka”, it was said – while leaving more fundamental inequalities in place.
Opponents of the diversity of Australia’s immigration intake have focused more attention on Muslims and Africans in this century than the last. But the habit of identifying a particular migrant group as a menace – usually recently arrived – is longstanding.
Australia’s long history of the ‘outsider’
In the 19th century, Irish Catholics were often viewed as a threat to the Protestant ascendancy. Southern Europeans such as Italians were “dagoes” when my (Australian-born) parents were young in the 1920s and ‘30s. The Dago threat was a favourite theme of future Labor prime minister Ben Chifley’s election campaign in 1928.
Later, Italians were called “wogs” but Hanson’s 1990s political adviser, John Pasquarelli, hilariously explains in his memoir that she used the offensive slang “Eyetie” for Italians, including to journalists.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Vietnamese immigrants attracted epithets in school playgrounds and on graffitied walls. Asian immigration also drew the attention of conservatives who said it was too high and, following British politician Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, predicted it would end in civil violence.
It was against this background that Hanson delivered her maiden speech about the danger of being “swamped by Asians”. Here was an old white Australian nightmare, stretching back to the gold rushes, which had first seen Australian governments introduce laws to exclude Chinese. Pasquarelli’s memoir emphasises how indebted his own advice to Hanson – he played a critical role in her famous maiden speech – was to the Asian immigration debates of the 1980s.
For all that, the alarming predictions did not yield disasters on the scale those the naysayers warned about. New migrant communities in some cases did have their troubles and challenges, such as illicit drugs and organised crime.
There were the Cronulla riots of 2005. But even while anti-immigration feeling fuelled right-wing populism around the world, the centre held in Australia.
The late historian Stuart Macintyre remarked in 2017:
Movements exploiting these grievances have had an undeniable effect on democratic polities. […] Here we have had periodic insurgencies such as […] Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. […] All […] have been ephemeral; none has looked like disturbing the established political alignment. And the same holds for Canada and New Zealand.
What do these countries have in common? All have enjoyed economic success and escaped the erosion of living standards experienced elsewhere. All began as settler societies, long troubled by their appropriation of the land of their Indigenous peoples and practising racial exclusion to a greater or lesser degree before they embraced new settlers from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. All are lands of opportunity, by no means free of prejudice and animosity, but able to accommodate difference.
Australia looks a little different almost a decade on. The “established political alignment” does seem more disturbed. But what role has immigration played?
An immigrant nation
The Australian Election Study provides useful data. Following the elections of 2013 and 2016, just over four in ten Australians wanted immigration reduced. For comparison, in 1996 the figure had been 63%, in 2019 almost half, and in 2025 it was 53%.
The AES figures are broadly consistent with the Scanlon Foundation’s 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion survey. It had 51% of respondents saying immigration was too high. In the period Macintyre was celebrating Australia’s resistance to populist politics, the mid-2010s, the same figure was in the mid-30s.
Opinions do move about on this matter, no doubt powerfully influenced by the state of the economy, but not only that. During the China boom, 2004, with immigration increasing rapidly, only 35% told the AES they wanted immigration reduced. In the wake of the 2010 Global Financial Crisis, more than half favoured a reduction.
In 2022, 65% thought immigration good for the economy; after three years of declining living standards, it was 55%. Scanlon has found 48% think immigrants take jobs away.
The turn against immigration helps explain something of the impact of Hanson’s grievance politics. Kos Samaras of the Redbridge Group has laid greater stress on economic grievance, and attributes Hanson’s polling success to her capacity to meet a broader need: her offering “something the major parties stopped offering a long time ago: the acknowledgement that something has gone badly wrong, and that somebody is responsible for it”.
For Guy Rundle, there is no mystery that One Nation supporters often cite the cost of living as their main concern, for this matter is “so wholly tied to immigration that to talk of one is to speak of the other”.
The AES has found 42% of voters considered immigration extremely important in their voting decision in 2025, compared with just 29% in 2022. But the Scanlon report has found more than four in five Australians agree “multiculturalism has been good for Australia”; in 2025 it was 83%, although on a downward trajectory since 2023 (89%).
The idea of Australia as an immigrant nation is deeply embedded in the country’s politics, culture and identity. The postwar immigration program forms one of the country’s most enduring and resonant narratives, associated with images of nation-building and prosperity.
That more than half the country’s population is foreign-born or has at least one parent born overseas is more commonly understood as a strength than the frailty identified by Hanson at the Press Club.
Australians might be disinclined to call for high levels of immigration, but the benefits it has brought, and continues to bring, are more embedded in the national psyche than the current coterie of political entrepreneurs appears to assume.
