Comment

John Hewson
Andrew Hastie’s play for the leadership

There should be little doubt that Andrew Hastie is already running for the Liberal leadership.

While not yet directly challenging Sussan Ley, he has made several tightly crafted statements on key policy issues designed to differentiate himself from her and other leadership aspirants. He is attempting to outline what could loosely be described as his vision for the country. However, he is being very divisive, not only within the Coalition, but also across the Australian community, which ought to raise doubts about his leadership credentials.

Hastie is attempting to ride the anti-immigration wave that has become so evident in marches, protests and movements in Australia and internationally. In so doing he has fallen into the Peter Dutton policy hole, by tapping fear and emotion rather than offering hard numbers or specific plans to achieve his nirvana of sustainability. He has even lapsed into the same rhetoric used by the likes of Britain’s Nigel Farage, leader of the hard-right Reform UK party, claiming, “We’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home.” The language he used in a lengthy Instagram post last week has echoes of Donald Trump’s recent warning to leaders at the United Nations, that because of migration policy their countries “are going to hell”.

“The Liberal Party will be in exile for a long time until we act in the interests of the Australian people. That means getting immigration to a sustainable level. If we don’t act, we can expect anger and frustration. We might even die as a political movement. So be it.”

Heady stuff.

Sussan Ley has dismissed suggestions that Hastie is angling for the leadership, as well as his argument on immigration. “You see for yourself how the lack of infrastructure is contributing to the struggles that people are facing every day,” she told reporters this week. “This has nothing to do with any migrant or migrant community, but this is a reprehensible failure of government to put the infrastructure and services in place that Australians deserve.”

Hastie is taking aim at the immigration policies of the Albanese government, however, and specifically the rapid increase in immigration since the Covid shutdown, which was in part a result of the Coalition’s loosening of visa conditions. The post-pandemic spike in intake makes up for the collapse in migration while our borders were completely closed and answers the growing skills shortages in so many areas.

There can be no doubt about the intensity of the emotion against immigration in Europe and the United States, but we can’t ignore the damage that anti-immigration policies have already done. For example, Trump’s deportation of so-called “illegal immigrants” in the US, without evidence of any wrongdoing, has led to enormous disruption across many key sectors of the economy – most conspicuously in agriculture, where there is now an extreme shortage of farm workers. So much so, that Trump has announced he will spend some of the tariff revenue on assistance to the farming sector.

Trump’s tariffs have also affected growth, inflation and unemployment, compounding the effects of deportation. Similar effects have been seen in the United Kingdom, where the Farage-driven Brexit decision to leave the European Union, based on an extreme fear campaign on immigration, must surely rank as the most insane imposition on the domestic economy under already difficult global economic circumstances.

It is absolutely not in our national interest to embrace the same fear campaign in Australia. That would be to ignore the considerable contributions that successive generations of immigrants have made to the growth and development of our society and to our cultural diversity. It is important to recognise the significance of what I believe to have been one of the greatest postwar successes of our nation, namely the building of a tolerant, multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious society, which in many respects is the envy of countries across the globe.

It is also important to recognise this is a constant work in progress that needs to be nurtured as it develops. It is certainly put at risk by opportunistic, short-term pointscoring in our daily political contest.

This divisive language tactic was employed by opponents of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament to great effect and we have recently heard it from a leader of that “No” campaign, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to ignite what many think of as “latent racism” in our country – indeed, politicians have at times sought short-term political advantage by playing the “race card”.

To be clear, it has proved to be pretty dumb politics, as evidenced in the votes of the Chinese diaspora in two consecutive elections. Price’s recent remarks on immigration generally, as well as her comments targeting Indian immigrants specifically, and Hastie’s attack on immigration policy can be expected to have similar electoral consequences. I am told that right-wing commentary on mass immigration is already killing the Liberal Party in Western Sydney. What a tragic and utterly predictable outcome.

The anti-immigration mutterings from the far right of the party are yet another sad chapter in a history that includes an increasingly hardline stance on refugees and asylum seekers. For many years, and especially under the leadership of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, Australia could be proud of the humanitarian component of its immigration strategies with an admirable record of resettlements from many global conflicts. Indeed, Fraser was proud that he responded positively to the surge of Vietnamese refugees, as a captain’s call. He told me he doubted that the cabinet would have approved. On leaving office, Fraser maintained a very strong public stance in defence of refugees and at odds with the party’s unfolding scaremongering about “border security”.

By comparison, as prime minister two decades later, John Howard made several stands against Asian immigration and defended the opinions of the newly elected independent senator Pauline Hanson. Rather than calling out her racism, including her assertion that Australia risked being “swamped by Asians”, Howard said he respected the fact that many Australians shared similar views. He headed to the 2001 election declaring, “[W]e will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Nevertheless, there was a stark contrast between Howard’s public expressions and his expansive immigration policy. Richard Allsop, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote in 2008 that it was under Howard’s leadership that the population born overseas topped 24 per cent for the first time since Federation, and the non-European component exceeded 50 per cent for the first time ever.

There was, however, the inhumanity of the Tampa affair and the shameful allegations from Howard government ministers ahead of the 2001 election that asylum seekers on boats had thrown their children into the ocean. From this followed the “Pacific Solution” for offshore detention and, later, then opposition leader Tony Abbott’s “Stop the Boats” election pitch.

These attitudes and policies have been emulated in the UK and Europe, and the bottom line of what Australia has done is that many genuinely desperate people, often fleeing persecution, have been left with no future and little prospect of finding a home – they can’t be sent back to their countries of origin or effectively resettled. Are we supposed to feel “good” that we have protected our borders? The issues we have handled so poorly surely pale in comparison with the problems we are yet to face as climate change brings refugees from the Pacific.

Of course, Hastie, in his leadership rush, ignores the granularity of the issue, leaving the tougher aspects to whenever the party regains power. We are never offered the detail, the numbers, by immigration category, for a sustainable immigration strategy. Nevertheless, Liberals are quick to rail against foreign students as scapegoats for the lack of affordable housing and other social dislocation – never offering a firm solution or addressing the trade-off with education as a successful Australian export, or the need to properly fund universities.

Beyond immigration, Hastie has embraced other populist positions. Alongside his attacks on the net zero emissions target, he declares his love of gas-guzzling cars, decrying the fate of Australia’s domestic car industry and vaguely implying that Liberals could rebuild it. They were, of course, responsible for driving the last nail into the industry’s coffin in 2013 – it was the then treasurer Joe Hockey, haggling over subsidies, who dared Holden to leave the country: “Either you’re here or you’re not.”

Again, Andrew Hastie is taking such positions just to stir emotions and unease, ignoring hard facts in each case, which defines him as opportunistic at best and delusional at the other end of the scale. I fear, given his religious and military backgrounds, that he seems to be flirting dangerously with the hard-right strongman image that the Americans have embraced. And no good can come of it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Hastie climbers have sudden falls".

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