The legacy media: no matter how much you hate them, it’s not enough.
In a recent interview with Tim Pool, media bias consultant Julie Mastrine laid it out: yes, the legacy media are biased to the left. Mastrine outlined 16 types of media bias her website allsides.com had identified, such as spin, slant, bias by omission and sensationalism. One key one, though, is what she calls “subjective qualifying adjectives’, which is when the legacy media are purporting to ‘report’ objectively, but deliberately slip in opinion-based qualifying adjectives. Think of every time the media use ‘far-right’, for example. Or ‘baseless’, whenever Donald Trump referred to election fraud.
Today’s example comes from the supposedly ‘conservative’ Australian. Covering the One Nation’s latest broadside at the government over mass-migration, the headline was “Hanson’s wild claim”. See what they did? Pauline Hanson made a claim, certainly: but the Australian calling it “wild” is a subjective qualifying adjective designed to imply that the claim is ridiculous or extreme.
But is it? The numbers say otherwise.
Let’s look at what she actually said:
Pauline Hanson has slammed the Labor government, claiming they want to bring in a million new migrants into Australia over the next four years.
In a post on X, the One Nation Leader said Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is “doubling down” and planning to allow more foreign nationals into Australia.
“Here’s the worst part. You can’t even trust them to stop at a million. This weak government has never once hit a migration target it set, not once in four years,” the X post said.
There’s only one problem here: Hanson never said “foreign nationals”. The legacy media just can’t help themselves lying, can they?
And is Hanson right about the numbers? Absolutely:
“October 2022: Labor promised 235,000. 538,000 flooded in.
“May 2023: Labor promised 315,000. 429,000 flooded in.
“May 2024: Labor promised 260,000. 306,000 flooded in.
“December 2025: Labor promised 260,000. By May they’d moved their own goal posts to 295,000 before the year was even finished.”
The only people who lie harder than the legacy media are Labor politicians. Assistant Minister for Immigration Matt Thistlethwaite said Hanson’s numbers were “incorrect”, claiming that, “Those numbers that Pauline Hanson refers to are net overseas migration numbers, which include Australian citizens who are living overseas and returning home,” he said.
In fact, the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that, if anything, Hanson was being cautious. For 2022–23, temporary and permanent visa holders totalled over 600,000 and Australian citizens just 60,000. Taking out “Australian citizens who are living overseas and returning home” puts the foreigner count at almost precisely Hanson’s quoted numbers. Like the legacy media, Labor are pissing on our legs and telling us it’s raining.
“The better figure is permanent migration that we’ve set at 185,000 for the last couple of years and we’ve met that figure.”
This is a complete and utter barefaced lie. Not once in the “last couple of years” have Labor even come close to meeting their promised figures. The minimum number was almost twice Thistlethwaite’s claim. At worst, in 2022–23, it was nearly three times Labor’s ‘cap’.
So, Hanson is also right that the consistent pattern is that Labor promise one number and invariably overshoot it dramatically. So, when Labor last week promised 185,000 permanent migrants, we can, on their own history, expect at least a quarter of a million, every year, which (I know maths isn’t Labor’s strong point: just look at Katy Gallagher’s clueless performance in Senate Estimates) over four years means at least a million more migrants.
Pauline Hanson is right. Labor and their legacy media bootlickers are lying through their teeth.
Is anyone surprised?
