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When you’re copping the most flak, you know you’re over the target.
And so it begins: the normiecon establishment and the left-elite are in a full-blown panic over the rise of One Nation. The latest shock to their system is a poll last week that showed One Nation leading not just the hapless Liberal opposition, but the Labor government that has ruled the state for 22 of the past 25 years. Even worse for Labor, One Nation is leading them in their heartland state of NSW.
Cue the attack jobs.
Even the supposed ‘right-wing’ evil Murdoch press are in full-blown panic mode, with no less than three unhinged attack articles in Tuesday’s edition alone. Leading with the second-lowest form of pearl-clutching after ‘but think of the children!’: breaking out the political ouija board.
The widow of Tim Fischer, Judy Brewer, says the former Nationals leader and long-serving member for Farrer always believed “dumb and divisive” One Nation was not the answer for rural Australia, as Pauline Hanson aims to claim his old seat.
Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? In 1998, the first incarnation of One Nation was a direct threat to Fischer’s Nationals, as rural voters revolted against the Howard government’s gun laws. This time around, One Nation are a more experienced and savvy party and voters are even more disillusioned with the establishment ‘right’. The threat to the Nationals is every bit as existential as to their Liberal coalition partners. Current polling suggests the Nationals would be all but wiped off the electoral map.
So of course they’re going on the attack, just as they did in ’98. The question is whether crying wolf will work for them this time.
Senator Hanson’s comments last week questioning whether there were any “good Muslims” sparked backlash across the political spectrum, divided her own party, and represented the kind of rhetoric against which Fischer warned.
What? Plain truth-telling? And it’s not as if Fischer didn’t have his own form: don’t forget him attacking Aborigines for ‘not even inventing the wheel’, which is also true, but exactly the sort of truth that has Fischer’s widow clutching her pearls when someone else says it.
The establishment are so off the rails over One Nation that they’re attacking them for what they admit are ideas worth considering.
One Nation recruit [Barnaby Joyce’s] ridiculous overreach in suggesting Medicare provider numbers should be restricted to all doctors who have not performed a stint in the bush or the regions ensures the kernels of reasonable policy contained in the thought-bomb will be dismissed before a serious discussion can even be had.
So, it’s reasonable policy but ‘ridiculous’ overreach? Why, just because it comes from One Nation?
It’s not even a Barnaby Joyce ‘thought-bomb’: it’s a long-advocated policy from an expert.
Health economist Stephen Duckett has proposed restriction on the issue of Medicare provider numbers to specialists as a tool to combat workforce maldistribution. Perhaps if Joyce was more engaged with the nuances of health policy, he might have engaged with actual proposals such as this and formulated a policy grounded in reality rather than political sensationalism.
Because Joyce is correct that doctor shortages are more a matter of maldistribution than overall numbers. But he appears to have given the idea of geographic restriction to Medicare less than five minutes’ thought.
More likely, the establishment bootlickers in the media didn’t think for five seconds before going on an unhinged attack, instead of examining whether the policy has merit. Or where it could be refined.
The biggest problem is that it will be used in conjunction with mass migration, to flood rural areas with badly trained foreign doctors with often poor English skills. This is, in fact, what is already happening under current migration policy. Go to any rural clinic and at least half of its GPs will have unpronounceable names and thick foreign accents, which older patients, especially, struggle to communicate with.
This raises the question: if Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal patients are able to demand ‘cultural safety’ in medical settings, why not elderly whites?
But I digress.
The policy could certainly be tweaked to encourage Australian-born and trained doctors to ‘go bush’.
Any rudimentary examination of the Australian-trained aspiring GP workforce reveals that those entering the profession are predominantly women. Many of them are working mothers with young children for whom upping sticks to perform a stint in the bush is not possible.
Tell them it’s a ‘tree-change’, and they’ll lap it up.
But nothing has got the elites, left and right, in such a panic as the fact that, finally, a major political party is listening to the people over mass immigration.
One Nation’s plan for “net zero” migration could blow out Australia’s debt by almost $420bn over the next 10 years, while barely making a dent in the nation’s welfare bill over the same period, bringing into question the core of Pauline Hanson’s economic policy.
According to whom? You guessed it: the usual elites suspects, for whom mass immigration is not just a golden honey pot, but an article of almost religious faith.
Economists and immigration experts have rejected One Nation’s key policy platform to cap visas at 130,000 a year and achieve “a responsible net-zero immigration policy”, claiming the cap would do untold damage to the budget and the economy.
Analysis conducted by the Australian using the Parliamentary Budget Office’s budget tool showed the commonwealth’s fiscal position could deteriorate by almost $90bn in a decade, potentially blowing out government debt by $419bn if net overseas migration is reduced to zero.
Note the sleight-of-hand, there? Slashing immigration will – even on this panic-merchant exaggeration – cost just $9 billion a year, or, a modest government programme. The rest of the crying-wolf figure is just a continuation of the Labor government’s out-of-control spending.
There’s no acknowledgement, either, of the other side of the ledger: what would slashing migration save? The Big Lie of the mass immigration addicts is ‘skilled migration’. In fact, ‘skilled’ migrants (who include such ‘skills’ as “amusement centre managers” and “boarding kennel or cattery operators”) make up a vanishingly small percentage of the migrant intake. Just 12 per cent of migrants are ‘skilled’. The vast bulk of migrants are the low-skilled, unemployable, or ‘family reunion’ migration: that is, importing not just Pajeet the Uber driver, but his wife, children, elderly parents... heck bring the whole village here to live off working Australians’ taxes.
Even if an immigrant works and pays taxes for 10 years, that doesn’t come to even half of what their pension benefits will cost, not to mention the Australian pensions paid to migrants who’ve never worked a day here. Not citizenship, nor even permanent residency, is a requirement for elderly immigrants to to collect an Australian pension. Nor is there any waiting period. Daadee can arrive from the village in Poopinstreetistan next week and immediately scarf up the Australian aged pension for the rest of her life.
Australian taxpayers are being royally ripped off and they’re sick to death of it.
And they’re not buying the hysterical propaganda from the elites who’ve grown fat on the mass immigration Ponzi scheme any more.
