Politics
Andrew Hastie’s little corner of the world
Andrew Hastie’s stance on climate change, his affection for the UK, and his dog- whistles on immigration, all make political sense in his electorate – a microcosm of 1960s Australia.
It’s not quite clear what Andrew Hastie meant when he said on social media “we’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home”. At face value he seemed to be referring to “unsustainable” rates of immigration, but he would know that migration numbers are falling.
The ABC Jake Evans explains the numbers in a post about the politics of Hastie’s comments, and they are shown in a graph below, plotted from ABS population estimates. In the 12 months to March this year our net overseas migration was 316 000, which suggests the numbers will be in line with the 2024 Treasury population statement which estimated that net overseas migration will come in at 335 000 in 2024-25, before falling to around 230 000 in subsequent years – that is, around their level over most of this century so far.
Hastie is not the first Coalition politician to have jumped onto the high numbers in the post-Covid period, but as the graph shows, the average net migration since mid-2000, when Covid restrictions were applied, has been about 260 000 – about the same as in the pre-Covid years.
That brings us back to the “strangers in our own home” statement. If it’s not about the number of immigrants, does it say something about Hastie’s perception of the changing mix of immigration?
Hastie may be right, because what he sees when he travels around Australia, away from his Canning electorate, may seem to be strange, perhaps in a way that a North Korean who escapes to South Korea finds it strange to be surrounded by what most would regard as a more “normal” society than Kim Jong Un’s worker’s paradise.
His Canning electorate is one the Australian Electoral Commission classifies as “outer metropolitan”. It takes in Perth’s southwestern suburban fringe, a coastal strip including Mandurah, several smaller towns south of Perth, settled coastal regions and regions of small rural holdings, along the Kwinana Freeway and Forest Highway, ending well short of Bunbury. That geography is similar in many ways to the sprawling regions outside Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.
But when we dig into Census data about the electorate, it looks less like the Australia most of us live in.[1] It has a much more Anglo ethnic mix, and a much lower level of educational attainment than the rest of Australia. These comparisons are shown in the table below. Some may point out that that the Australia-wide figures are heavily influenced by the concentration of educated voters and Asian migrants in inner-metropolitan electorates, but to dispel that explanation the table includes a comparison of Canning with Australia’s other 44 electorates classified as “outer metropolitan”. It is quite different from these other outer metropolitan electorates.
In these dimensions, Canning looks more like Australia out of the 1960s, while White Australia was still in place, while the UK was still the main source of immigrants, and before the 1970s expansion of tertiary education. Just as North Korea is frozen in time, so too is Hastie’s electorate. The disproportionate percentage of British migrants, however, is also seen in three other Western Australian outer-metropolitan electorates (Brand, Moore and Pearce). Out of all metropolitan electorates, inner and outer, only one (Spence in South Australia), has a lower level of education attainment.
In view of these figures Hastie’s policy stances make sense – as a local member representing a nationally unrepresentative electorate.
His stance on climate change makes political sense, because it is well-established that there is a strong correlation between people’s education level and their understanding of climate change. His enthusiasm for the colonial-era flag probably goes down well with many British immigrants.
The Liberal Party would do well electorally to ensure that Hastie doesn’t stray out of his electorate, or at least that he doesn’t venture further east than Eucla, where he would find a different Australia – an Australia that shook off its colonial-era shackles many years ago, an Australia that embraces and celebrates diversity, an Australia where ethnic groups mix, an Australia that is meeting the challenges of climate change.
1. The data relates to the 2021 Census and the pre-2024 redistribution of electorates, which saw Canning shift a little to the south. ↩
Robodebt – the failure that goes on failing
Robodebt is so horrible that even an experienced hard-nosed journalist finds it confronting – and it’s still not resolved.
People started receiving their first Robodebt notices in September 2016. Nine years later, following an Ombudsman investigation, two Senate inquiries, a “Royal” Commission, an investigation by the Public Service Commission, a reference to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (which exposed systemic faults in that body), Robodebt is still not resolved.
No doubt Robodebt’s illegality and its contempt for Centrelink recipients was one of the factors contributing to the Federal Coalition’s political demise, but to date neither the public servants nor the minister involved have been brought to account and have not faced consequences for their illegal behaviour.
Robodebt is a gigantic public policy failure on many fronts. It is one of the few cases that can probably be described by that over-used word “incredible”, because it is so hard to believe that it actually happened. Have you ever had the experience of observing something that’s so weird, so hard to make sense of, that you think you’re in a bad dream, or that you are going crazy?
That’s how journalist and writer Rick Morton describes his experience of reporting on Robodebt. But unlike the experience of witnessing a bad road accident, for example, for Morton that experience went on for years as the illegality, immorality and idiocy of Robodebt became clearer. To quote from a short Radio National interview about his attempts to make sense of it all:
Every time you think it’s over something worse happens in terms of decision-making in this long saga of bad decisions and it just keeps going. It’s almost like it’s cursed.
Morton has two stories to tell. One is about his own incredulity, his sense of disillusionment in observing people behave in ways that were callous, blatantly illegal, and patronisingly contemptuous of those who, through democratic processes, had provided them with authority and trust to act in the public interest. Imagine, for example, the wrenching feeling if you were to learn that a long and dear friend were to be exposed as a paedophile.
The other story is about corruption. Not the corruption of a brown paper bag stuffed with $100 banknotes, but the corruption of processes and values. It’s about the sycophantic behaviour of public servants so determined to ingratiate themselves with their political masters, or so fearful about losing their jobs, that they left aside basic moral principles, including respect for the truth. It’s as if Morton is in Hannah Arendt’s place watching Adolf Eichmann’s trial, except that the person in the dock, the coldly amoral Beamte offering the plea of loyalty and obedience, is a senior Australian public servant.
Morton’s book on Robodebt – Mean streak: a moral vacuum and a multi-billion dollar government shakedown– has won the top non-fiction prize at the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.