Angus Taylor is a phony anti-immigration thumper, and history shows it won’t work

“The biggest cut to immigration in the history of this country.”

In the past, you would have associated that promise with One Nation, a party defined by its anti-immigrant obsessions. But in 2026 that pledge comes from Angus Taylor, committing the Liberals to what his Nationals colleague Matt Canavan calls “an Australia first migration plan”. Labor’s rhetoric might not be quite as shrill, but Tony Burke also says he will reduce net overseas immigration — allowing One Nation to boast, not unreasonably, that it is setting the agenda. 

The pattern will be familiar to those who follow European politics. In the UK, the Tories and Labour have responded over the years to UKIP, then the Brexit Party and now Reform with their own “Stop the Boats” rhetoric. In Denmark, the Social Democrats embraced asylum quotas and offshore processing in response to the populist Danish People’s Party. In the Netherlands, Mark Rutte of the mainstream People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy responded to Geert Wilders’ anti-Muslim scaremongering with an open letter advising immigrants to “behave normally, or go away”. The French centre right increasingly echoes Marine Le Pen on refugees, immigrants and national security; the German Christian Democrats sound more and more like the Alternative for Germany on deportations, asylum seekers and border policing. 

So does adoption by the mainstream keep the far right at bay?

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The short answer is “no” — fairly obviously, anti-immigrant populism continues to swell. The long answer — derived from considerable academic research — could be summarised as “mostly no”. 

Back in 2008, political scientist Bonnie M. Meguid argued that under certain circumstances, imitation by the mainstream does block the growth of the fringe. “An established party’s ability to undermine a niche party ultimately rests,” she said, “on its implementation of accommodative tactics prior to the reputational entrenchment of the niche party as the only credible issue promoter.” 

Other researchers suggest that, under certain conditions — such as the block party system employed in Denmark — so-called “positional accommodation” can freeze out the far right, at least temporarily.

More recently, Vít Novotný of the centre-right Wilfried Martens Centre has insisted that, in some European nations:

“Traditional parties have successfully mainstreamed immigration issues without framing them in a xenophobic manner, won elections while addressing these issues, prevented the far right from obtaining a place in government, adopted stricter laws against illegal migration and, often, opened new channels for legal migration.”

But, as Novotný acknowledges, most researchers disagree. 

In 2022, Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi engaged in a complex statistical analysis of 70 different elections in 13 Western European polities, stretching back into the 1970s. As they explained to The Guardian:

“We found no support for the idea that vote shares of the radical right decline if mainstream parties on either the left or the right promote tougher policy stances on immigration and integration … our findings suggest that fighting far-right parties by adopting their migration policies is at best fruitless and at worst counterproductive.”

When other scholars looked at longitudinal comparative data from 26 countries relating to some 135,000 people over 26 years, they found considerable support for the exclusionary conception of national identity favoured by the popular right. That support was mostly passive, but it became active enough to determine votes when mainstream elites embraced exclusionary rhetoric. 

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You can see how this works in Australia. Asked for the issues most important to them prior to the last election, 57% of voters responding to a Roy Morgan poll nominated “keeping day-to-day living costs down”, 31% opted for “improving health services and hospitals”, and 23% suggested “reducing crime”. Only 14% chose “managing immigration and population” as a priority. But if the entire political class frames immigration as problematic, border control can provide a lens through which voters see every other issue: a “common sense” explanation for high prices, crowded hospitals and so on. 

When the rhetoric of the far right enters the mainstream, the populist originals tend to do better than their imitators. Social democratic parties that veer right demoralise their supporters and activists, who see opposition to discrimination as central. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, risk alienating their traditional backers from the big end of town since, in general, business dislikes populist interference with the market. Significantly, Andrew McKellar from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry immediately condemned Taylor’s proposed immigration cuts on the grounds they would damage the economy.

Those internal pressures meant that major parties that play the populist rarely seem authentic. Pauline Hanson’s jibe at Taylor as a “smarmy management consultant” landed precisely because of the Liberal leader’s palpable phoniness as an anti-immigrant tub-thumper. 

We might wonder why, if adoption rarely works, it remains the go-to strategy for mainstream parties facing a populist challenge. 

Again, the 2025 survey data suggests an answer. More than anything, voters want relief from material pressures making their lives worse. A party with a plausible response to, say, house prices or food costs would not be discomforted in the slightest by the One Nation clown show. But, within the pro-market consensus by the majors, there’s no simple solution to the cost of living, other than to hope for an improvement in the global economy.

Obviously, Hanson doesn’t have any answers. But, unlike Taylor and Albanese, she sounds as if she does. 

“We are moving both the Labor Party, we’re moving the Coalition,” crows Barnaby Joyce. The sad fact is that he’s right.