Taylor’s migration plan doesn’t make much sense. That’s not the point

More than a day after Angus Taylor unveiled the first plank of the Coalition’s long-awaited migration policy and many media interviews later, there’s still little clarity about what it would change in practice.

The policy’s top line is a plan to take the pre-existing Australian Values Statement and enshrine it in the Migration Act as a basis for deportation. The rest of the announcements, like a new taskforce to monitor visa applications and more social media screening of prospective migrants, represent a slight ratcheting up of the status quo.

But perhaps that was never the point of the speech, which was heavy in rhetoric.

Migrants, Taylor told the Menzies Research Centre on Tuesday, fell into two reductive groups: “noble and patriotic” or “subversive and transactional”. Some are a “net drain” on our country.

The immigration system should “discriminate based on values”, he argues, not nationality, race or religion. But migrants from “liberal democracies” are more likely to adopt Australian values, he says, compared to “those migrating from places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists, and dictators”.

Borrowing a line from John Howard circa 2001, he argues Australia should “decide who deserves protection and the circumstances in which that protection is granted”.

Taken together, it’s the strongest signpost yet of how the Coalition thinks it can win back voters charmed by One Nation and its anti-immigration stance.

A confused message

Taylor’s pitch was initially presented as a neat, three-prong strategy: put Australian values at the core of immigration policy, shut the door on unauthorised migrants, and stop extremists from entering the country.

A preview of the announcement proclaimed that screening of visa applicants’ social media would ramp up from an “as-needed risk basis”, as it is now, and instead become a “standard feature”. Then Taylor quickly clarified that actually not all applicants would be screened, and it would “obviously” be “risk-weighted”.

Under the plan, a new taskforce made up of the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force and ASIO would be stood up to oversee the crackdown. A Coalition spokesperson later made clear it would not involve “new agencies, new powers or new laws”. When asked multiple times, Taylor didn’t rule out an ICE-style force as seen on American streets, but he also didn’t confirm one.

The values statement would be added to the Migration Act, but to breach it, Coalition home affairs spokesperson Jonno Duniam made clear a visa-holder or prospective migrant would have to commit an existing crime that undermines those values. As it stands, non-citizens who are sentenced to a year or longer in prison have their visas automatically cancelled on character grounds.

“In order to make it enforceable and something that would stand up to the scrutiny of the courts, it would need to have an offence in law,” Duniam told the ABC on Wednesday.

“This is not about stopping people from expressing an opinion.

“But when you start inciting hatred, inciting political or communal violence, inciting harm, those sorts of things, which are the thresholds in many cases across the Criminal Code, for example, at a Commonwealth level, they’re the kinds of things that would trigger what we’re talking about here.”

This explanation was different to the one presented by Taylor, who on multiple occasions suggested the values test would be enforceable on its own.

“The statement will be going into the legislation in the Migration Act and it will be enforceable and it will be a basis for cancellation of a visa for someone who comes to this country and is not a citizen and refusal of a visa,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

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Meanwhile, the opposition leader has been asked numerous times who he thinks should be deported or barred from entering Australia that currently can’t be. So far, he hasn’t provided an answer.

Instead, he’s repeatedly made an example of the 1,300 or so Gazans who sought safe haven in Australia in the early days of the war. There are “clear risks in people coming from places like that”, he says, despite a lack of public evidence that the small cohort has been up to anything “subversive” in the years since they arrived.

As a second example, Taylor invokes the Bondi terror attack. It’s a potent if confusing example. One of the shooters was born in Australia, the other has lived here since 1998. The opposition leader left out those details when he told the ABC that “someone who was on a visa was responsible for the murder of many Australians”.

The vibe is the point

For the significant slice of the country who believe migration is out of control and needs to come down, the details probably won’t matter.

A general vibe that the opposition is keen for a tough crackdown on migrants who don’t subscribe to ill-defined Australian values might be enough to tempt some of them back from One Nation, which is currently riding a previously unseen wave of national popularity.

“That was not a policy, that was an ideological proposition designed to win votes from a certain cohort of Australia,” Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

“Yesterday was not a policy, yesterday was, at best, a not-so-subtle dog whistle.”

A One Nation-lite approach won’t win over many Labor or Liberal-turned-teal voters in the centre, which the Coalition needs if it ever wants to return to government.

The benefit of being a minor party is that the One Nation migration policy can be summed up in one line: Slash the number of visas granted to 130,000 a year. The how doesn’t really matter, because they’re unlikely to ever find themselves in government.

And that’s the other problem with choosing the populist route: Pauline Hanson has been doing it longer, can probably do it better, and doesn’t have to spend any time muddying the message with explanations of convoluted policy.

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