Britain is now impersonating Australia. It’s all it can do to fend off the far right

In politics, as in cricket, Britain lags decades behind Australia. This is not really the place to parse how England’s “Bazball” style of cricket is a low-grade facsimile of the attacking approach with which Australia dominated the sport decades ago. But it is the place to note how British politics seems like a strange echo of our 2010s: that era when our major parties kept axing sitting prime ministers, and asylum seekers were never far from the centre of political debate.

On this, Britain’s impersonation is far more convincing than it is in cricket: four prime ministers in three years, and another in such dire trouble there are now the early rumblings of a leadership challenge. In that context, this week saw Britain’s Labour government finally do what its Rudd/Gillard counterparts did: accept that it is getting walloped on the immigration debate, and announce a conspicuously harsh asylum seeker policy. The details are different, but the thrust is familiar, making it easier to reject asylum claims, harder to appeal them, and conferring fewer rights on those whose claims succeed. On that last point, the headline policy has refugees waiting up to 20 years before being entitled to permanent residency, with their status reviewed every two-and-a-half years.

Illustration by Simon Letch

There is, however, one key difference. Australian Labor went through this process in the shadow of John Howard, while British Labour’s contest isn’t with the Tories, who remain a shell. Rather, it’s fending off one-time fringe dwellers like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, both growing in prominence and the latter a veteran far-right figure. It’s therefore doing this not merely to cling to power, but to prevent the far-right from getting closer to it. That is, British Labour is making these moves amid a growing disquiet with migration as a whole, not just the irregular kind.

That’s very different to the Howard era. Howard ran an expansionary migration policy. He even made our intake significantly less European and more Asian. Howard’s theory, though, was that his hard line on boat people made that possible. That the public would only accept such migration if it had full confidence the border is under our control; that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. That’s why Howard’s supporters tend to argue his asylum policies weren’t fomenting prejudice against migrants, but rather preventing it. Perhaps British Labour is thinking something similar.

But that’s where the current Australian moment has something to tell us. The Australian mood is now suspicious of immigration, polls showing roughly two-thirds of us want it reduced, nearly 40 per cent significantly. Where the Howard era saw a bipartisan consensus in favour of migration, today there’s a new consensus across the political spectrum that immigration is too high, perhaps because it is recognised as the only feasible political position. It is no coincidence that, having emerged from the Coalition’s net zero bear pit last week, Sussan Ley immediately flagged a debate on immigration where she sees a line of attack on the Albanese government, and an issue on which the Coalition can unify.

Where once immigration was necessary for our economic wellbeing, we now cast it largely as a burden, adding unsustainable demand to, say, housing. Which is instructive because the broad foundations of the economic argument haven’t changed. We still have an ageing population, and therefore need to boost the size of our workforce unless we all want to pay much higher tax. Immigration still underwrites much of our economic growth. If we seriously culled it, we’d quite likely end up in recession, at which point housing isn’t likely to feel more affordable.

That’s why Ley made clear that while she will attack the Albanese government for setting the immigration number too high, she will refuse to offer a number of her own until much closer to the election. Because as soon as she offers a number, the government will specify how many billions will be taken out of the economy, and crucially, how much worse off the budget will be. Best to keep the conversation at the level of rhetoric.

But rhetoric is where so much of the danger lies. The Coalition’s conservative wing is uninterested in arguments about infrastructure, for example. It wants it to be clearly and specifically about culture: to make the point that we have too many migrants who are too foreign, who make real Australians feel like strangers in their own country. The problem, then, isn’t the effect migrants have on the cost of housing. It’s simply who many of them are.

And unlike in Britain, this argument occurs in the absence of a boat people crisis. This was meant to guarantee solid, enduring support for our migration program. What we see instead is the bellicosity once reserved for boat people redirected towards migration more generally. Howard’s purported inoculation is now nowhere to be seen. Far more visible is that aspect of his policy that invited us to see asylum seekers as potential terrorists, disparaged multiculturalism, and interrogated certain communities on their commitment to Australian values.

Imagine the dangers in Britain’s case, where anti-immigration sentiment, irregular migration and far-right energy are colliding at once. Perhaps that’s why, instead of specifically targeting irregular migration by, say, turning asylum boats back to France, Labour went broader: stripping refugees of their social standing, implying that ultimately they don’t really belong, and actively making it harder for them to do so. Perhaps that will give the appearance of control, increasing the public’s confidence in immigration. But if Australia’s experience is any guide, it is likelier to achieve the opposite.

You cannot integrate when you’re in limbo for 20 years, unable to put down roots, to hold down a proper job. When that sends refugees to the margins of society, they will then be blamed for their lack of integration. That will then strengthen far-right claims about their unsuitability for British life, an argument that will then spread to migrants more generally under the stewardship of Prime Minister Nigel Farage. At which point, British politics may no longer lag behind ours at all. It might instead be much further down a path we should be desperate to avoid.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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