27 May 2026
Glenn
Welcome to Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a current climate and environment activist.
I’d like to acknowledge that Glenn and I are recording this on the unceded land of First Nations people in Australia and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have.
Glenn
Thank you very much, Janaline.
I would note that we are recording this program on Thursday 21st May 2026.
In the last two months, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has transitioned from being a noisy, and influential party on the right wing fringes of the political landscape, to winning seven seats across the two houses of the South Australian Parliament, coming second in the Victorian by-election for Nepean, and winning the Farrer by-election in New South Wales. Clearly things are changing.
Peter Drucker, a 20th century expert in organisational and societal change said ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.’ Janaline - what’s changed in the last few months? And is the Albanese Government in danger of acting with yesterday’s logic in its response to this turbulence?
Janaline
So before I come to the Government, I think a lot of the rise in One Nation I think actually is a reflection of the chaos in the Liberal and National Parties. I know I said at the outset that I wanted to talk about policy and not politics, but let’s just spend a couple of minutes on the politics.
I think, after the election, obviously, Peter Dutton lost his seat, the former Leader of the Opposition, Sussan Ley was elected as Opposition Leader - almost immediately there was an enormous amount of undermining from her own ranks, the National Party left the Coalition, it came back. We saw another bust-up of the Coalition and another coming together, and then we saw the dumping of both the Liberal and National leaders.
So I think in all of this there was no actual policy message coming out from the Opposition. So I actually think what happened, and I did a podcast episode on this a little while ago, I think what actually happened is, for people on that side of politics, they didn’t have anywhere to go.
So I think the other thing that we’ve seen on the centre left and the left side, the progressive side of politics is that the Labor vote has pretty much held up, there’s been a small slippage of a couple of percentage points, that’s quite normal after an election. The Greens vote, which is sort of the other significant progressive party, has pretty much flatlined. It hasn’t really changed. And I think what that reflects is that, on the progressive side of politics, if you’re happy with government intervention, if you’re happy with worker power and union power in the economy, then the Labor government is actually delivering quite a lot of stuff. Same job same pay, increased bulk billing for Medicare, a Future Made in Australia which is about transitioning our economy from a fossil fuel export dependence to a clean energy export dependence - but all of this is done in a very very Labor way. So if you are a person who doesn’t like union power and who doesn’t like government intervention, where do you go? The Liberals and Nationals are not offering you alternative policies that get outcomes but through, for example, a more business friendly or less interventionist way. They are offering you chaos. So where do you go? You go to the people who articulate your grievance, and that is One Nation.
The other issue is Bondi. So, terrible, terrible event in Bondi just before Christmas. Two gunmen allegedly opened fire on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration. Fifteen people killed. It was the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil. And unfortunately, the narrative from people like One Nation and the Liberal and National Parties, immediately went to the migration status of the alleged gunmen. Now, one of them - Australian citizen, born in Australia, has always been Australian. One of them was a migrant. And I think what that did was, apart from the fact that it is irrelevant and one of them was Australian anyway, it really gave permission for a whole narrative around migration as a security threat. Migrants, the others, those people over there, being a threat to national security. And I think again, that is the kind of narrative that really feeds into the fear and in security of people, and parties like One Nation are very happy to exploit that.
Glenn
So, you’ve covered a lot of really interesting points there. I might just go back to the Liberal Party quickly, before we move on to talk a bit more about One Nation.
I would note that there seems to be a fundamental change going on with the Liberal Party. It was a party that was formed in 1944 and first won government in 1949. Since then, they have been in government for 51 of the 82 years up until 2026. In contrast, Labor’s only been there in government for 31 years. So they’ve been there in government for the majority of the time since the 1940s.
Since 1972, when we had the Whitlam Labor government come in, the Liberals have been in power for 28 years, Labor for 26, but by the time we get to the 2028 election, it will be 50-50. But what we’re seeing now is that there is a party of government that has been in power for so many more years than Labor that seems to be no longer seen by most of their previous supporters as a credible alternative to the Labor government. And what we are seeing now, is a growing number of voters on the right, shifting their support to One Nation.
Now I’ve had a bit of a look at their policies on their website, and to be fair, there’s a couple there that probably aren’t too bad.
One is their notion that incomes of households or couples should be split, so that if one person’s earning a higher salary, and one’s earning a lower salary, they can split it and pay lower tax overall. At one level, that’s a fair enough proposition at a high level, but given the diversity in what constitutes couples and households these days, I suspect it could be quite difficult to sort that out.
And of course they also support spending on health and mental health and so on, as any decent person would. But after that, they seem to move a little bit to the fringe.
So let’s start with what they say about migration and see why that seems to be resonating with more voters.
Janaline
Yeah, before we get onto migration, I just want to take issue with the idea that having taxes based on pooling the household income and then dividing it by two if you’ve got a couple and applying tax to those rates sounds great. It has, in the past, those sorts of ideas have tended to suppress female wages because it provides a very significant disincentive for both partners to have roughly equal salaries. It actually provides quite a significant incentive for one partner to have a very very high salary and the other partner to have a much lower salary. Historically, and probably currently also, maybe to a lesser extent, that lower salary partner tends to be the woman. So I am sceptical of that.
But let’s go to migration.
Glenn
Yes, let’s talk about migration. It’s a very valid point that you make, but let’s move on to migration.
Janaline
Look Pauline Hanson’s been talking about migrants since 1996. In her maiden speech, she said we were going to be swamped by Asians. Just to be clear to our listeners, that’s me. Support for migration generally, in communities, tends to wax and wane according to how people are feeling in their own lives. So if the local population is feeling a lot of economic insecurity, or physical insecurity, as we saw after Bondi, their support for migration tends to fall. This is just a sort of statistical phenomenon.
And I think there is a kind of underlying, baked in xenophobia in humans. If you’re in a hunter-gatherer society, or in a very early settled agricultural society, the chances are, if a stranger rocks up, they’re going to be bringing violence or disease, or trying to get your resources. So I think there is a kind of evolutionary reflex to be suspicious of strangers.
Having said that, in the 20th and 21st centuries, I would like to think that we had moved on as societies from that. I would like to think that we appreciate the shared humanity that we have with everybody on the planet. And I feel like people do know that at an intellectual level, I really do. I think the levels of overt racism based on the other is inferior or bad is definitely not what it was in the early 20th century or before then.
But, having said that, that’s not the same as what is in your gut when you’re feeling insecure and somebody is telling you ‘it’s not your fault, it’s not because you didn’t work hard enough, or you’re not smart enough or you failed to take opportunities. It’s because of those other people who are coming in and taking your jobs and taking your opportunities, and sucking up the resources of your community. And it’s a very attractive scapegoat and I think it is deeply unfortunate that political parties and politicians find it attractive to exploit those insecurities in that particular way, by demonising other people.
Glenn
Yes it is that scapegoating that seems to underpin a lot of One Nation’s arguments around a range of things but particularly immigration, and that is that the migration is causing problems with the housing market, amongst other things, saying there is too much demand for houses, but it completely ignores the supply side of the argument, and that is that a lot of the people coming in, are actually tradies or others who contribute to building more homes.
So their stated migration target on their website is about 130,000 people a year, but the reality is that this number is unlikely to meet the labour needs of our economy. Now, anybody who’s been anywhere near a hospital, or an aged care facility, or the transport industry, or a lot of hospitality, for example, will clearly see the people who are doing those jobs, are more often than not, migrants.
So if you stop migrants coming, who’s going to do those jobs? Now they might talk about Australian jobs for Australians but the reality is the current demographic mix in Australia means we do not have enough people for those roles without migration, and our birth rate is not sufficient to replace those who are aging.
So it’s a classic case of wilfully ignoring reality, and reducing the argument to a couple of simple propositions that unfairly demonises one part of our community.
Janaline
Look I don’t think it’s very controversial, honestly, in economic circles and policy circles to say that reducing migration to those levels would be an economic catastrophe for Australia, for all the reasons that you articulate.
The other thing that I would say though, is that focusing on net overseas migration is kind of ridiculous, because net overseas migration just means the number of people who leave Australia minus the number of people who enter Australia in any given year. A lot of those people are Australians coming home. A lot of them are temporary travellers, a lot of them are permanent residents, a lot of them are New Zealanders, who have work rights in Australia and an automatic right to residency.
Now I think I saw one economic study recently suggesting that, if you were to reduce net overseas migration to 170,000 a year, which I think is the Liberal Party’s stated target now, let alone 130,000, which is One Nation’s target, you would actually have to make some Australians not come home. You would probably have to restrict the entry of New Zealanders. So it’s a ridiculous number. It doesn’t actually reflect the number of non-Australians coming to Australia and on the issue of that, there is no ‘mass migration’. There is migration into Australia as there always has been. There is movement of people, as there always has been.
The figures that the Liberal Party likes to throw around of, you know, a million people coming in in the two years after COVID - a lot of those people, as I’ve just mentioned, were Australians coming home, who were not able to come home when we closed the borders during the pandemic. A lot of them were students or people on work visas or family reunions who had visas to come to Australia but temporarily were prevented from coming for two years during the pandemic because of the border closures. When the borders opened, to nobody’s surprise, they all wanted to come.
So those numbers are coming down. They are coming to levels that are more reflective of what the situation was before the pandemic. So the idea that there is ‘mass migration’ is actually entirely untrue.
I am particularly disappointed with the National Party in this. The National Party for years, even while the Liberal Party under John Howard became quite sceptical of migration, the National Party has in some ways been even more favourable towards migration than the Labor Party. And why is that? Because migrants are the lifeblood of regional Australia. There are whole towns in regional Australia that have a school and have shops and have a train station and have a medical clinic because of migration and the National Party has understood that, and for years and years and years, they championed migration, including refugee settlement because they saw the benefits that they brought to regional Australia.
Glenn
Now Janaline, one of their other key positions, is climate change scepticism, and what they see as being wasteful efforts to mitigate climate change. According to their website, One Nation acknowledges that climate change may be happening, but there’s no proof that it’s caused by people. Why is it that some voters are apparently still accepting this proposition?
Janaline
Yeah, it’s so disappointing that, you know, in 2026, we’re still debating the science around climate change. You know, what is ridiculous about this, is that people in the regions are feeling the effects of climate change more than anybody else in the country. They are the biggest sufferers of drought, of rising temperatures, of increasing natural disasters. So I find it kind of tragic that it has become such a culture war issue.
I will say that I think the Labor government needs to take some responsibility for that. I think in 2022, there was a real sense within Labor that climate action was so obvious, that people would just embrace the renewables roll-out. That was supported by a lot of polling, like over the, the past 15, 20 years, that had shown that Australians generally support renewable energy. What they didn’t take into account was that for particular, specific local communities, it would be really important to ensure that the distribution of the benefits of the roll-out were spread fairly and generously throughout those communities that are actually hosting the renewable energy infrastructure.
One of the problems was a lot of the companies that were responsible for this were going out and doing these consultations in a pretty uncoordinated and random way. There was no oversight over what they were offering people. I think the Government has learnt from that. I think they have learned that they need to do this better. They’ve put a lot more guard rails around those processes, and they’ve taken a lot more oversight over how they’re rolled out.
Because what’s happened is that the legitimate concerns of people who needed to have the benefits of this particular project in their area explained to them, have been exploited by the Barnaby Joyce Whale Appreciation Society. I think it’s really unfortunate. I think the Government’s trying to deal with it, but unfortunately, I think in some regions there is a deep well of scepticism now and it’s going to be very hard to overcome.
I really wish that environmental and climate NGOs in Australia would pay more attention and put more resources into this as well, because the renewables roll-out is absolutely essential to everything the Government wants to do on climate change.
Glenn
Yes, and that’s not going to be made any easier by feeling around the whole poles and wires issue, as well as the wind turbines, where you’ve got people in rural areas complaining that good agricultural land is being taken up with new poles and new wires or wind turbines in their area, and as well as losing the agricultural land, it’s also having an impact on their vistas and therefore their quality of life.
Now, obviously, some properties out in those areas are making some good passive income out of hosting wind turbines, but their neighbours are unhappy with the changed rural views. That makes it difficult to rebuild relationships with and in those communities and get the social licence that you mentioned.
Now another issue around which social licence and equity has been gas policy. Where does One Nation stand on this issue?
Janaline
Yeah, so interestingly, at the victory celebration after the Farrer by-election, Pauline Hanson stood up and announced that she would like to see the Government take an equity stake in export gas projects, so that the Australian people would get direct revenue benefit. I found this quite extraordinary. Firstly because that’s a pretty socialist kind of policy, and secondly because actually I think it’s not a bad idea. So one of the proposals on gas that I think you and I discussed on an earlier podcast is a proposal by the Superpower Institute to have a 40% two-way cash flow tax on gas. What this effectively does is that it makes the Government contribute to net expenses during the investment phase of a gas project, but also entitles the Government then to 40% of the all revenues on a cash flow basis once the production phase starts. It’s not exactly an equity stake but it acts in pretty much the same way. So I find this pretty interesting that there is a policy on which I actually agree with Pauline Hanson.
Glenn
OK, well that’s interesting and certainly that gas equity conversation is a long way from over. We’re going to hear a lot more about that.
Now, at the risk of finding somewhere where you don’t actually agree, let’s talk about what their position is on this whole question of national sovereignty.
Now One Nation argues we shouldn’t be involving ourselves in things like the Paris Agreement, and foreign aid, and we should keep that money for ourselves.
And that obviously resonates with a lot of people, much more since COVID, where it is apparent that interconnectedness with the world carries certain risks for us.
Janaline
Now when I was a young graduate trainee in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the 1990s, as in, last century, this was a really live argument. We were in the throes of the ‘recession that we had to have’, I don’t know if you remember that, Glenn.
Glenn
Yes I remember that.
Janaline
And of course foreign aid is a very popular target for annoyance when people are suffering economic harm. The very understandable argument goes ‘people are hurting in Australia, why is the Government spending money on helping people overseas. That money should be spent helping Australians’.
Now, yes, I think the Government should be helping Australians, but I would say that cutting foreign aid is a very short sighted way to do it. Foreign aid benefits Australia. It benefits Australia by helping to stabilise countries in the region. It is not at all in our interests to have mass poverty and hardship in developing countries in our region. That is a massive push factor for irregular migration, it is a massive push factor for instability, for local, often even violence in those countries. None of that is good for Australia’s economic or national security.
So I think foreign aid is not just a means of helping other countries. It is actually a means of increasing welfare and prosperity across the world and therefore underpinning stability, peace and security.
On climate, and the Paris Agreement and international agreements in general, international cooperation is in Australia’s interest. We are not a very big country. There’s a lot of discussion about Australia as a middle power. Climate change is a global issue. There is no point in one country taking action if other countries do not also take action. So climate change is probably the biggest candidate for the benefits of international cooperation of any issue in the world. And it is absolutely in Australia’s interest to be taking climate action. Because it is actually economically beneficial. As the globe warms, we need to increase our resilience, and also we need to reduce our dependence on foreign imported fossil fuels. The current crisis in the Middle East has put up in absolute highlights the importance of energy independence, and the best form of energy independence for Australia, with our very abundant renewable energy resources, is to lean heavily into renewable energy and electrification because nobody can blockade the sun or the wind into Australia.
So I think the other point I would make is that, during COVID, global pandemic, the role of the WHO (World Health Organisation) was actually critical in ensuring that countries could share knowledge about the virus, could share vaccines, could share personal protective equipment, generally share experiences, how to deal with things, as knowledge evolved about this new virus. That sharing saved lives, including Australian lives. International cooperation is not some academic, diplomatic, champagne trail luxury. It actually saves lives.
Glenn
So let’s move on to another area of focus for them, Janaline, and that’s the notion of cutting what One Nation sees as wasteful government spending. We’ve already mentioned government spending on climate change initiatives to try and mitigate the risk; what they refer to, quite disparagingly, as the Aboriginal industry, and one of Pauline Hanson’s other favourites is ‘woke education’, where our children are being indoctrinated.
That sort of language, and other gratuitous Canberra-bashing, seems to resonate with people who are angry they’re not getting what they believe is their fair share in life, because the Government is wasting money on the undeserving. Are they right, Janaline?
Janaline
Oh, you know, this kind of debate reminds me of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan ran this campaign against ‘welfare queens’, which was very racially coded and basically intended to turn white America against social welfare because black people were getting benefit from it. It had another echo under John Howard in Australia when we had the whole kind of nasty narrative around ‘dole bludgers’. I don’t know if you remember Glenn, but there were a couple of sort of high profile, supposed exposés of people supposedly living a high life on the dole - all of which was exposed later to be completely misleading and untrue, but which laid the foundation of this sort of very poisonous and divisive rhetoric around ‘the undeserving poor’. And we saw that in fact, even in COVID, when you know the then Liberal government stood up and said ‘we want to help these people because it’s not their fault they’ve lost their jobs’, you know people who had lost their jobs because of the pandemic. It was just this idea that the people who were on welfare before then - it was their fault. But these new people, it’s not their fault, so we can be more generous to these people, because they’re not so undeserving.
I think it’s really corrosive and it’s really unfair and it’s also socially detrimental, because if you keep populations in abject poverty, they cannot be productive in your society. They are not well enough. They don’t have enough money to go to job interviews, they’re not housed, it really creates a massive pool of social instability, insecurity, crime, it’s just really unhelpful.
And Pauline Hanson and First Nations people. She has a long history of demonising First Nations people. I should have mentioned that in 1996 when she thought that people like me should be deported and repatriated to who knows where, because some of us have been here for quite a long time, some generations in some cases. But she also had a go at First Nations people and again had a go at what she calls the Aboriginal welfare industry.
I think, apart from, even if you don’t accept the true historical fact of First Nations dispossession, of genocide in earlier generations, just having that level of disadvantage in the community is not healthy for the community. Even if you take a purely transactional view of this, it is not good for the rest of society to have some people in this country living in conditions that are equivalent to very poor developing countries.
So I think social welfare is partly, and importantly, about helping individuals, but it is also, importantly, about securing the economic stability and the social stability of the whole community.
Glenn
OK, now we’re coming towards the end of our program for today, but one final matter that we’ll touch on is the so-called common sense approach for ordinary Australians. What do you think this means? What do you think common sense is, and who are the ordinary Australians that they’re applying this common sense to and for?
Janaline
Yeah, so when I hear this from people like Pauline Hanson, it sends a bit of a chill into me, because I know that she doesn’t think of me as an ordinary Australian. That her conception of ordinary Australians is actually not very reflective of what ordinary Australians actually look like and where they actually come from and how they actually live in our current modern society. And what I mean by that is that Australia is a deeply multicultural country. We have always been a deeply multicultural country. Pauline Hanson is harking back to a past that never really existed.
So I think this is all again very coded, frankly, racist dog-whistling about who should be Australian and who shouldn’t. I utterly reject the implication that in order to be a good Australian, I have to somehow pretend that I am a white person whose ancestors came from the UK. I don’t see why I cannot be a good Australian by simply living my life, being a productive member of the community, participating in the community like every other person in the country without erasing my parents’ language, their culture, where they came from. I think it is absurd to think that Australia was ever this sort of monoculture that lived in harmony because it was monocultural.
So you mentioned earlier ‘woke education’. ‘Woke’ is an interesting concept. My understanding of it is, it means inclusion. It means not discriminating against people. It means being aware that some people do suffer from racism, from discrimination on the grounds of their sexuality, or their gender identity, or their disability or a whole raft of other things that they cannot control. To that extent, I would have to out myself as a ‘woke person’. I believe in inclusion. I believe that people should be judged by what they say and what they do and not by who they are.
Getting rid of ‘woke education’ raises the question for me of what is the alternative? Are we saying that we want to be educating our kids to discriminate against people? Are we saying that we want our kids to hate other people for reasons that those other people cannot control? I don’t really understand why anybody would think that was a good idea.
Glenn
Hmm, very salient points that you make.
Now we’re going to stop talking directly about One Nation at the moment and go back to the point I made right at the very beginning about Peter Drucker’s comment about acting with yesterday’s logic. So Janaline, what do you think are the implications for the Labor Party and the Albanese government of this current status of One Nation, and is the Labor Party and the Government at risk of acting with yesterday’s logic?
Janaline
So I think what the Government is doing, and I honestly think they are taking the right approach to this. They are really trying to implement policies that will actually help people. They are focusing on improving services, they are focusing on making the economy fairer. We’ll talk about the budget another day, but one of the things that they have tried to do in the budget is shift the burden of taxation from income to wealth, in order to make the country less unequal. I think these are really important measures. You know delivering better Medicare services, fixing the NDIS, trying to make aged care more equitable and efficient, universal child care. These are all things that, if they are implemented successfully, should make people’s lives better. And on top of that, increasing the housing supply, the absolute laser focus on all aspects of housing, from taxation to increasing supply, to planning, to infrastructure, I think are really really important. Because at the end of the day, they will demonstrate whether the Government can deliver for the people and it is essential that the Government delivers for the people in order for the people to stop feeling so insecure and to stop being so attracted to these divisive and nasty sentiments that prey on that economic insecurity.
Glenn
Hmm. That brings us to, almost to the end of our time today. And Janaline, I think what all this shows is that government is very hard to do well, no matter which party’s in government. And it also shows how a growing number of people in Australia, just like elsewhere in the world, are increasingly receptive to messages that amplify their grievances in the hope that the purveyors of those messages can fix things in their favour. Now that may be what happens if you’re already in a privileged position, but it’s not what happens for the majority of people. Any final comments from you?
Janaline
I would just say, like we are unquestionably in a time of crisis, right? The war in the Middle East, and the blockage in the Straits of Hormuz, the lack of fuel around the world, not particularly in Australia, but this whole sort of environment of uncertainty is real. I think Jim Chalmers said, the Treasurer said the Government cannot control these external crises, but it can control how it responds to them, and I think it is so so important that it responds in a way that will deliver benefits to the Australian people and that will help to alleviate - I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet, because as you say government is hard - but hopefully it will alleviate the attractiveness of grievance.
Glenn
That was this week’s episode of Why Can’t They Just? The theme music that we use for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc. I’m Glenn Davidson.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?