One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has pushed for a "monoculture" as immigration climbs the ladder of Australia’s election debate, while the federal government still hasn’t finalised its policy and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke postponed a speech at the National Press Club where he was expected to unveil sweeping cuts to migration.
That’s the machinery at work. The people at the top argue over who gets to enter, who gets to stay, and who gets blamed, while ordinary people are left to absorb the fallout when the rhetoric spills into the street.
Who Sets the Rules
The 2026 Lowy Institute Poll recorded the largest ever decline in support for cultural diversity in Australia. Twenty per cent of respondents said cultural diversity was "mostly negative" for the country, and 6 per cent said it was "entirely negative." Those numbers didn’t appear out of nowhere. They sit beside a political climate where immigration has become a weapon, not a question of human need or community life.
Recent polling by Redbridge Group showed more Australians preferred Pauline Hanson’s stance on immigration than that of both major parties. One Nation, led by Senator Pauline Hanson, overtook Labor in a national opinion poll for the first time in June and won its first elected seat in the federal House of Representatives. The party’s gains have fed concern among multicultural advocates and residents who say anti-immigration rhetoric is emboldening hostility.
The major parties, for their part, keep the whole thing inside the same narrow frame. One side delays a speech on migration cuts. The other watches the numbers shift. Neither escapes the structure that turns migrants into a political bargaining chip.
Who Pays for the Rhetoric
Adut Atem, a mother and NDIS business owner who moved to Australia’s capital in 2002 as a 17-year-old Sudanese refugee, said she was stopped at a red light in Canberra’s inner north a few weeks ago when an aggressive driver tipped a cup of coffee on her windscreen and yelled racist abuse. "I just kept quiet, I didn't say anything — he kept swearing," Ms Atem said. She did not report the incident.
"How do you feel safe if somebody out of nowhere is attacking you aggressively, racially, and you don't even know who they are?" she said.
Ms Atem said she had experienced many racist interactions over the years but that Canberra was, in general, a welcoming place. She said rising anti-immigration sentiment was emboldening hostile attitudes towards multicultural communities. "With the pressure for living, it puts people in a position whereby people think that the migrants are the ones who are making us suffer, and that is not really correct," she said.
That’s the hierarchy cost in plain sight. The political class debates migration as an abstraction. People like Atem live with the consequences in traffic, on streets, and in the daily threat of being singled out.
What the Community Is Saying
Arif Haque, the chair of the Canberra Multicultural Community Forum, which represents more than 100 ethnic community organisations in the ACT, said the rhetoric was causing alarm. "When a politician says something, it doesn't stay within the press gallery," he said. "The following morning, somebody on the bus is abused, you know, 'why don't you go to where you came from?'"
Mr Haque said he recently experienced a racist encounter at a Canberra shopping centre "for the first time in 30 years." He said the effect on the community was going to be "devastating" and that by being quiet, political leaders were giving permission for abuse.
Sam Wong, who arrived in Australia from Hong Kong as a student in the 1970s on the tail end of the White Australia policy, said the monoculture debate was damaging. He helped set up the National Multicultural Festival and is the patron of the ACT Chinese Australian Association. "I feel even embarrassed to talk about it because it is a White Australia policy coming back in disguise," he said.
He cited a racially motivated attack near Lake Ginninderra in Belconnen in April, which left a Chinese woman in hospital. Mr Wong said, "We don't have a very strong voice in parliament," and added, "It's about time we should stand up to be counted."
The Limits of the Official Fix
Canberra migration agent and human rights advocate Marion Le said the government was at a crossroads. "I think that we are doing so much fearmongering that we are keeping out of this country people we really so badly need, qualified people to come here and assist with the growth of this country," she said.
That’s the reform trap in miniature. The debate stays trapped inside government-managed fear, with migration treated as a lever for growth, control, and political advantage rather than a matter of human dignity or community self-determination.
Ms Le said Canberra had embraced multiculturalism and was "a beacon to the rest of Australia." But the federal government still hasn’t settled its policy, Tony Burke delayed the speech that was expected to spell out cuts, and Pauline Hanson’s line keeps gaining ground. The apparatus keeps moving. The people at the bottom keep carrying the weight.