One Nation is driving the conversation about mass migration. Now, they appear to have forced Labor’s hand.

Okay, nudged their fingers. A little.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke infamously cancelled his planned press club address last week where he was due to unveil a long-awaited overhaul of Labor’s approach to migration.

He is doing this because the Labor Party is bleeding working-class voters to One Nation.

For Burke and Albanese, this is a rough one to solve. It may even be unsolvable.

Like Net Zero split the Coalition, twice, migration highlights the ideological fault lines on the Left. Labor, the Greens, Progressives, random independent socialists, Wokeists, and Unionists may not be a formal coalition, but they are a spiritual entity which Labor believes they were born to rule over. It is an alliance that contains mutually exclusive and wholly incompatible demands, so it will be interesting to see how this migration conversation works out for them.

If Labor cannot win this conversation on merit, they will probably do what they usually do and throw taxpayer money at the problem. Election handouts to voting blocs are a great way to paper-over issues in the short-term.

Meanwhile, One Nation has been out on the social media loudspeaker promising to deport visa overstayers, close the university-migration loopholes, and ensure the badly-behaved visitors are promptly returned.

This take-no-prisoners approach suggests One Nation has let go of any notion of wooing MSM or institutions for support. They are targeting voters directly.

Burke’s back-out caught Pauline Hanson’s attention.

‘They’re scared to do anything because of the support that One Nation is getting,’ Senator Hanson turned, mid-swim through the polls, to take a second pass at Burke.

‘And I think we’re having the same impact on the Coalition as well. They’re both really concerned about the support they’re getting based on the one issue that is mass migration that’s happening in Australia.’

The coalition have been wandering around behind One Nation, whispering lite versions of their policies that sound as though they’ve been fed through ChatGPT with a ‘moderate-friendly’ command.

They will talk about deporting visa overstayers. They won’t frame it as a demographic crisis. They will talk about the dangers of antisemitism, but stop short of ordering any sort of formal review of Islamic houses of worship as is happening in France.

All this is interesting, but Senator Hanson wasn’t done with Tony Burke.

After all, the Coalition and One Nation have had their say on migration. It is now up to Labor to present their alternative view on how the future of Australia will look.

Pauline said:

‘Burke’s saying hey, I really need to pull back on my speech that I was going to give at the press club because he’s got to appease the unions, he’s got to appease the other left-leaning in his party as well, and the Greens. So, he’s got a battle on his hands. There’s between 75,000 and I’ve heard 100,000 people that are in the country illegally at the moment [ … ] taxpayers have had enough of this.’

Imagining Tony Burke trying to manipulate these groups into agreement reminds me of that one (and only) time I attempted to shampoo my cat.

She was a Chartreux, abandoned on the dirt road by a rare cat breeder, and took up residence on our hay bale. When we came to lure her into the car with cat food, she turned her nose up and hopped in the back seat as if to say, ‘What took you so long?’ Then she was my cat.

To this day, I’m not sure what possessed me, but I decided it was time for her to take a bath.

We had an old stone square-cut sink downstairs. It was roughly a metre square. As I lowered her toward the water, her four legs sought out each side of the tub, inexplicably elongating to cover what I wrongly presumed to be a large distance, and there we struggled – me trying to capture all four limbs in my hand at once – failing – and my beautifully polite French feline remaining perfectly dry.

Technically, the cat fit in the tub, but the cat and the tub never met in the water. And so it is with the demands of Labor’s factions and friends. They will never meet.

Senator Hanson seems to relish in this knowledge.

‘We don’t need any more Uber drivers, nail technicians, dog walkers… These people – gone. Stop all that. Why do we need people coming in with foreign students? Why do they need their families? You’re here to study, if you want to be. You don’t want to be away from your partner or family? Do an online course!’

Senator Hanson is not wrong, it’s just that the migration scandal has been running for so long, and is so deeply ingrained in various political deals, that neither major party likes to discuss the particulars in such brutally honest terms.

‘That’s a strain on our infrastructure, and then we’ve got 432,000 people on bridging visas in Australia. Why? That is all impacting our country because the governments have been lax in getting rid of those people that should not be here.’

And that is the embarrassing part for Labor and the Coalition.

Other nations deport over-staying butts immediately. Australia sort of maybe gets around to it. Some have even suggested that deporting visa overstayers might upset voting blocs within their cultural communities.

Australians can’t help but feel that, ultimately, migration has a role to play in elections. One that is not to the benefit of Australians whose ancestors helped build the nation, or even generations of migrants who came to the West to escape this sort of voting behaviour that led to dreadful governance in their homelands.

The excuse we were given for Tony Burke’s absence was that ‘some elements of the speech could not be finalised’.

Is this a ‘dog ate my homework’ scenario or a ‘we are feeding the dog our homework’?

Labor has been promising to bring down immigration but … that’s not what’s happening. Even their own unsatisfactory targets look like they are going to be missed. Whatever they offer next will come with a generously lofted eyebrow, suspicious of their ability to deliver.

Can Tony Burke do a Howard and outdo the populists on migration? Alright, FinReview, you got a chuckle out of me with that headline at the end of the week.

If there are any disagreements within the Labor Party delaying Burke’s new migration policy, you won’t hear Labor admit to it publicly. They preach unity through the various pieces of duct-tape holding the open wounds together.