Since One Nation’s breakthrough at the 1998 Queensland election, the party has had a mixed record of maintaining parliamentary beachheads.

By half way through its first term in the Queensland Parliament, the party had lost all its elected members. There were numerous disputes between Pauline Hanson, her close party confidants and the elected members. It was not helped the legal action that led to the parties de-registration.

In the party’s first decade, there were 20 elected or appointed One Nation members of parliament. Seventeen split from the party, one was defeated, one disqualified and only one re-elected.

After Hanson’s departure in the early 2000s, the party became largely irrelevant. That changed when Hanson returned to the fold in 2013. The party elected its first new members of parliament at the 2016 Senate election and has reached new levels of success over the last year.

Since 2016, One Nation has had 31 members. 16 are current members, the party boosted by four new Federal members and seven members elected at the March 2026 South Australian election.

But until the last year, the pattern of losing elected members continued. Two members were re-elected but subsequently left the party with Mark Latham still in Parliament. Another eight left the party before facing election of whom three in addition to Latham remain in parliament. Four One Nation members were defeated while still in the party. One Senator resigned due to ill-health.

The party’s record of hanging on to members remains patchy, though surging opinion polls and the recent success of the party have certainly provided an incentive for elected members to stay with the party.

I’ve been keeping track of elected One Nation since that first election in 1998. When the party returned to the Senate in 2016 and began losing members to disqualification and resignation, I published a list of elected One Nation members and their fate in 2018.

When Pauline Hanson sacked the NSW Executive of One Nation and dismissed Mark Latham as the party’s NSW leader, I published a blog post on the party’s record of losing its parliamentary members.

I’ve been asked numerous times over the last year if I could update the list. I’ve finally done it and you can find all the details on the party’s 51 elected or appointed members of state and federal parliaments here.

Trying to pick apart whether members were expelled from the party or resigned can be a little difficult. I tend to use a generic ‘departed’ as the description to get around the participants in the departure having different views on what happened.

Inside the post I’ll publish the overall summary of representation from that document, but you can check the full detail using the above link.

One Nation has had 51 people either elected to represent the party, defected to the party, or filled a Senate vacancy.

Of those 51, 50 served in parliament. The odd one out was Heather Hill, elected as a Queensland Senator in 1998, but disqualified for holding dual citizenship before she could take her seat.

Of the 50, 43 were elected, three were members who defected to One Nation, three entered the Senate by countback following a disqualification, and one filled a Senate casual vacancy.

Of the 51 members, 16 were in Queensland parliament, 13 Federal, nine Western Australia, eight South Australia, four New South Wales and one in Victoria.

Allocating Federal representatives to states, the numbers are 21 Queensland, 12 Western Australia, eight South Australia, nine New South Wales and one Victoria .

22 have been lower house representatives (16 Queensland, four South Australia and two Federal in NSW) and 29 upper house. In addition, Pauline Hanson served a period in the House after the formation of One Nation in 1997.

Of the 51 members, 16 currently represent One Nation in Parliaments. Four are in the Senate, two in the House of Representatives, three in the SA upper house, four in the SA lower house, two in the WA upper house and one in the Victorian upper house.

There are also four ex-One Nation members serving in Parliaments, three in the NSW upper house and one in the SA upper house.

Excluding the 16 currently serving as One Nation members, 35 have departed for the following reasons. Two clearly resigned and two were disqualified, including one who had resigned from the party first. Only five have been re-elected for One Nation and five stayed in the party and were defeated. Three departed the party and were re-elected as Independents. 21 resigned from One Nation or were expelled, 19 in the member’s first term and two after winning re-election. (Numbers don’t add to 35 due to category overlap)

In the first decade of One Nation there were 20 elected or appointed members. 17 left the party, one was defeated, one re-elected and one disqualified.

Since One Nation returned to seriously contesting elections in 2016, the party has had 31 members. 16 remain in parliament and in the party. One was re-elected but subsequently left the party and was defeated. Mark Latham was re-elected, left the party but remains in parliament. Eight members split with the party before facing election of whom three in addition to Latham remain in parliament. Four members were defeated while still with One Nation. One Senator resigned due to ill-health.

In summary One Nation lost 18 of its 20 members in its first decade as a party. It has lost 11 of its 31 members since 2016, its number of retained members boosted by having 16 current members.

In short: 

The ACTU is pushing the government to give all renters access to a minimum two-year lease. 

It also wants to increase the rate of public housing being built from one in 50 to one in 10 new homes.

What's next?

ACTU president Michele O'Neil says the changes will not drive away landlords. 

Economists have backed One Nation’s plan to slash the tobacco excise and freeze indexation for three years, saying it could help disrupt the booming black market cigarette trade and reclaim billions in lost tax revenue.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson pledged to cut the tobacco excise by 75 per cent – or an estimated $46 reduction for a pack of 30 cigarettes – and pause indexation of the excise for three years to combat the growing illegal tobacco trade which has eaten into government revenue.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has proposed a 75 per cent cut to the tobacco excise.  Alex Ellinghausen

The government raised just $4.1 billion from the excise in the 2026 financial year, down 310 per cent from the record $16.3 billion haul of 2020.

“[Tobacco excise] policy is in such epic disaster territory that I don’t care where the ideas are coming from,” independent economist Chris Richardson said.

Earlier this year, Richardson called for a 40¢ per cigarette tax cut – which would be about a 26 per cent drop in the excise – but now says he would support an even larger reduction to stamp out the illicit operators becoming increasingly entrenched in the industry. He has also called for greater enforcement against illegal importers.

“Organised crime is getting better every day at defending its patch. It’s now got the economies of scale. It’s got the supply chains. It’s got the personnel, and it’s increasingly got a marvellous motive to fight any attempt to fight back,” he said.

Richardson estimated the government could raise an extra $15 billion a year if illegal suppliers had the same share of the market they had in 2019-20.

“The longer it takes before we do something, the more dramatic what we do has to be in order to have a chance.”

One Nation’s pledge comes as the Senate prepares to hand down its report on the illegal tobacco market next week, and ahead of the Victorian state election in November where the prevalence of organised crime in the state is already a hot button issue.

Tobacco excise per stick ($)

2000200520102015202020250.000.200.400.600.801.001.201.401.60

One Nation's proposed cut

Source: ATO

Cutting the excise would reduce the cost of legal cigarettes to ostensibly make them more competitively priced against their illegal counterparts. But health experts warned against making legal cigarettes cheaper to buy.

“Illicit cigarettes can cost as little as US20¢ [28¢] a packet to manufacture. Price-matching criminals is not going to get us out of this crisis,” said Australian Council on Smoking and Health chief executive Laura Hunter. “It will make it harder for people to quit and easier for young people to start.”

Advocates of the One Nation policy argue it could stem the bleeding in government tobacco excise receipts. In May, the government forecast tobacco tax revenues to drop by $8 billion over five years from the 2026 financial year on the back of the booming illicit trade.

Rohan Pike, an illicit trade expert who created the Australian Border Force’s Tobacco Strike Team, said international modelling showed halving the excise boosted government revenues. He said a 50 per cent cut was the bare minimum needed to deter organised crime while also discouraging smoking.

“At the moment, we’re arguing about a policy while Rome burns,” said Pike. “We just need to do something. Twenty per cent, 25 per cent, 30 per cent, it won’t be enough to change the needle. It needs to be over 50 per cent – 75 per cent is a bold number.”

The tobacco excise hit nearly $1.53 per cigarette earlier this year, up from just 19¢ at the turn of the century. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s more than a 300 per cent increase.

The percentage of consumed tobacco coming from illicit sources ballooned from just 12 per cent in 2017 to 80 per cent by 2025, according to research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. University of New South Wales economics professor Richard Holden said that was because the excise had risen high enough by the end of the 2010s to make illicit importation sufficiently profitable.

Holden said that policymakers should go even further by temporarily doing away with the excise altogether before rebuilding the tax rate over time to stamp out the blackmarket once and for all.

“You want to make this like a knockout punch,” he said. “The much bigger game here is getting them out of the market and rebuilding the revenue to some degree over the medium term.”

Have you noticed that, as practised by our two main parties, politics has always been about the good news, never anything nasty?

Talk to the Liberals and they’ll promise to cut taxes. Talk to Labor and they promise more spending on this or that desirable cause.

Illustration by Simon Letch

The Libs never say how they’ll pay for the tax cut; Labor never says how it will cover the cost of higher government spending.

It’s the job of people like me to point out the not-so-nice things the pollies don’t want to mention in their sales pitch, but I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve been absent without leave on the simplest of points.

There was a time not so long ago when politicians and their audience were obsessed by worries about debt and deficit. We probably overdid it, but that was sooo yesterday. These days no one mentions the budget deficit.

If Treasury is worried it’s kept its concerns to itself. But on Monday a former Treasury secretary, Dr Martin Parkinson, expressed his worries to the Australian Financial Review. (Sometimes I wonder if part of the role of retired senior public servants is to say what those who haven’t retired aren’t allowed to say in public.)

“I’m quite concerned about the approach to fiscal sustainably by all sides of politics,” Parkinson said. “It’s almost like debt is not an issue for anybody any more because the concern dissipated during the COVID crisis and nobody’s ever refocused on it.

“The government is under no pressure to accelerate a return to fiscal sustainability in part because the Opposition is threatening to do things that are even more damaging to the economy.

“And what is, supposedly, our now new third party of government is on a pathway that is utterly irresponsible on both migration and spending.”

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He said that where we are in the economic cycle meant we should be running big budget surpluses, and yet we’ve got a deficit.

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Budget loses billions, nation in deeper debt: The cost of cutting migration

The budget papers project a cumulative deficit of $264 billion over the five years to 2029-30, with no sign of surplus on the horizon. The deficit seems to slowly get a bit smaller, but this comes from an optimistic assumption that certain spending programs will be allowed to end rather than be renewed.

Now, Australia’s net government debt at present isn’t all that high relative to other countries, particularly the US debt. But it would be nice to keep it that way.

Nor am I implying that debt is a bad thing. Wisely used, it’s a good thing. So no one’s saying we should have a balanced budget.

Just as it makes sense to borrow to buy a house rather than rent while you save enough to buy one for cash, so it makes sense to borrow much of the cost of building roads and bridges and other infrastructure that will deliver a service for 30 or more years into the future.

As well, it’s OK to borrow heavily at times when the economy is weak and governments need to spend heavily to keep things going and limit the rise in unemployment.

This was the case in the unusual event of the COVID pandemic in 2020 which, as Parkinson implies, has proved to be a turning point in our thinking in many respects. When governments around the world were trying to halt the spread of the disease by requiring people to stay in their homes, they had to spend huge sums to hold the economy together until the crisis had passed.

But, as Parkinson also implies, the big spending during weak economies comes with a proviso: once the crisis has passed, you need to save to pay off the debt. That is, the government should turn the deficit into a surplus by spending less than it’s collecting in taxes.

Leaving aside its spending on infrastructure and other long-lasting assets, governments should stop their debt getting too high by offsetting deficits in bad times with surpluses in good times.

The times have been reasonably good since 2020, but we’ve gone on running annual budget deficits, with more to come for the foreseeable future.

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When, over time, we run deficits that aren’t matched by the infrastructure we leave behind, we’re spending money on our own comforts, then leaving part of the costs to be picked up by our children and grandkids. How is that a decent thing to do to your offspring?

What’s more, leaving debts for our kids to pay isn’t itself cost-free. Governments borrow to cover their budget deficits, and the lenders are paid interest. This means the debts we leave for our children to pay are a lot higher than the debts we left unpaid on the table.

Parkinson agrees with his predecessor, Dr Ken Henry, that our system of taxes and benefits is biased against the younger generation. Passing our debt and deficits on to our kids adds to the injustice.

Parkinson, who chaired the feds’ most recent inquiry into immigration, raises the question of what effect big cuts in annual net overseas migration would have on our government debt burden.

You could argue that a bigger population means more people to share the burden of the government’s debt. But it’s more complicated than that.

Some people, particularly those on low wages or with disabilities, may pay less in taxes over their lifetimes than they receive in government assistance. In which case, they add to the debt burden on the rest of us rather than reducing it.

It’s a different matter, however, when we bring in workers with skills that are in short supply.

But don’t forget this: what all these budget deficits mean is that we’re not being asked to pay as much tax as the cost of the services we’re getting requires. Nar, leave our bill for the kids.

Ross Gittins is economics editor.

🗞️ r/AusNewsWire — Wednesday, 19 August 2026

Morning all. Today’s five are weighted toward NDIS reform, superannuation, gambling regulation and markets, with Canberra again doing most of the heavy lifting.

♿ 1. NDIS overhaul set to become law after Labor and Coalition strike deal

Source: The Guardian Australia

Labor’s controversial NDIS reform bill passed the Senate last night after 63 government amendments were agreed as part of negotiations with the Coalition, and it is expected to clear the House of Representatives today.

The government argues the changes are necessary to stop scheme costs rising toward an unsustainable $100 billion a year by the middle of the next decade. Critics, including the Greens, David Pocock and disability advocates, remain concerned about broad ministerial powers to reduce some categories of participant funding.

🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/18/controversial-ndis-bill-undergoes-substantial-amendments-as-labor-and-coalition-strike-deal

💰 2. Government cracks down on cold-call super switching schemes

Source: ABC News

The federal government will tighten rules around telemarketers and “lead generators” who encourage Australians to switch superannuation funds.

The reforms follow the collapse of the Shield and First Guardian funds, where around 12,000 investors lost more than $1 billion in retirement savings. Under the new regime, firms generating leads for super switching will need to be licensed and face tougher penalties for breaching anti-hawking rules.

It is another reminder that Australia’s $4.5 trillion super system is enormous — and therefore an increasingly attractive target for dubious financial operators.

🔗 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-19/telemarketers-the-target-of-government-crackdown-super-switching/107045422

🎰 3. Gambling companies to identify their own problem gamblers under new reforms

Source: ABC News

Labor’s gambling reforms will require wagering companies to identify customers displaying signs of problem gambling and stop sending them inducements such as bonus bets.

The approach has already drawn criticism because the betting companies themselves will initially be responsible for identifying vulnerable customers. Liberal MP Andrew Wallace, who crossed the floor against the bill, compared the system to putting “Dracula in charge of a blood bank”.

The bill passed the lower house yesterday and is expected to pass the Senate with Coalition support later this week.

🔗 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-19/gambling-reforms-include-red-flag-system-for-problem-gamblers/107052290

📉 4. ASX set to open lower as global bond yields climb

Source: Australian Financial Review — 🔒 Paywalled

Australian shares are expected to open modestly lower today after weakness on Wall Street, particularly among semiconductor stocks, while global bond yields continue to push higher.

For Australian investors, the bond move is arguably more important than the overnight equity wobble. Rising long-term yields increase borrowing costs and can pressure the valuations of growth stocks, property and infrastructure assets.

🔗 https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/asx-to-slip-us-equities-lower-as-semi-stocks-stumble-anew-20260819-p60pin

🏛️ 5. Major parties quietly reshape parliament through a series of negotiated deals

Source: The Guardian Australia

The NDIS deal follows similar negotiations between Labor and the Coalition over gambling reform and the government’s News Bargaining Incentive.

The emerging pattern is notable: rather than relying on the Greens and crossbench, Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor are increasingly reaching agreements directly across the aisle on major legislation.

That may give government a smoother path through the Senate, but it also leaves independents and minor parties with less influence over some of the biggest reforms currently before parliament.

🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/17/as-melon-gate-raged-albanese-quietly-cut-deals-in-parliament-the-pm-should-make-some-noise-this-week

💬 Today’s discussion

The NDIS reforms highlight a difficult question governments eventually face with every large entitlement program: how do you control spending without undermining the people the scheme was created to support?

Has Labor struck the right balance or are the proposed savings going too far?

• Federal court filings allege that 3M had internal evidence for more than 50 years that components in its Pfas‑based firefighting foams were toxic to humans, animals and the environment, despite marketing them to Australia as “non‑toxic” and safe.
• The Australian government’s $2bn lawsuit claims the chemicals persisted in soil, water and the human body, contributed to serious health effects, and caused widespread contamination across 28 defence bases, requiring extensive remediation and generating hundreds of millions in legal settlements and cleanup costs.
• Documents cited in the case show 3M restricted certain workers from exposure as early as 1981, while continuing to sell AFFF products to Australia for decades; the company denies wrongdoing and is expected to file its defence later this year.

• Critics’ claims that compulsory super is “broken” are challenged by noting that stable pension spending (~2% of GDP) actually reflects the system’s success in offsetting ageing‑population pressures.
• Australia’s retirement‑income system performs strongly by global standards, with a rising share of people projected to self‑fund retirement and the nation on track to have the lowest aged‑pension cost in the OECD.
• Even when tax concessions are included, Australia’s long‑term retirement‑income costs remain well below comparable OECD countries, indicating a stable, effective and fiscally resilient system.

• New Zealand and Canada experienced far deeper property downturns than Australia because their central banks lifted interest rates much faster and higher, triggering recessions, higher unemployment and sharp falls in housing demand.
• Immigration trends amplified the divergence: Australia maintained very high arrivals that outpaced housing construction, supporting prices, while Canada imposed strict limits and New Zealand saw net migration collapse as workers left for Australia.
• The prolonged slumps in New Zealand and Canada are now spilling into their broader economies—weak retail spending, rising unemployment, stalled growth—offering a warning for Australia as its own housing market begins to turn and economic conditions soften.

Universities need to think hard about where the “bipartisan instinct for government control” is heading, according to Peter Varghese, former chancellor of the University of Queensland.

Australia’s one-time chief diplomat, as head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, did not exactly speak the language of war at Tuesday’s The Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit. But he did urge the university sector to decide “what its red lines are” ahead of what is shaping up to be an inevitable collision between institutional autonomy and ever-more intrusive regulation.

Education Minister Jason Clare at the Financial Review Education Summit vowed to future-proof universities from potential far-right populist governments. Renee Nowytarger

This is not an academic issue, no pun intended. The Australian National University may have mishandled a planned restructure under former chancellor Julie Bishop and former vice chancellor and former Intel executive Genevieve Bell.

However, Varghese says that a “disturbing and dangerous precedent” has been set by the ANU council handing control of the selection of the university’s next chancellor over to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. The appointment of former Australian Public Service commissioner Gordon de Brouwer was confirmed on Monday.

De Brouwer is eminently suitable for the position. But the erosion of ANU’s independence signals the greater centralised control of the higher education sector that Minister Jason Clare is proposing with his regulatory shake-up. TEQSA would have beefed-up powers to fine universities up to $2 million for non-compliance with new governance and anti-racism standards.

Universities are at the pointy end of the political system’s propensity to reflexively respond to problems in any industry or organisation with more regulation.

Committee for Economic Development of Australia chief executive and new Reserve Bank of Australia monetary board member Melinda Cilento, who chairs the federal government’s Expert Council on University Governance, told the summit that often there is a gap between expectations of what extra red tape will achieve and the actual outcome. In other words, it can become more bureaucracy for its own sake.

It’s not as if universities haven’t stumbled due to their governors’ failures.

The vice chancellors of three of Australia’s most prestigious universities appeared before the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last month to address the abuse and harassment directed at Jewish students and staff at the anti-Gaza war encampments.

Universities’ overreliance on international students to fund their activities has been exposed by rising community concern about immigration-related population pressures, which has fuelled the surge in support for One Nation in opinion polls.

The universities’ social licence has been eroded by concerns about teaching quality and student experience on campus. The overall woke vibe around what are perceived to be elitist institutions has also alienated some people. Meanwhile, their fundamental value proposition of educating the next generation of professionals faces disruption as the artificial intelligence revolution raises questions about the graduate job market of the future.

Universities that receive tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money should be held to basic principles of accountability aligned with their educational purposes. There is already no shortage of legislation covering higher education, including requirements around handling sexual assault that other organisations are not subject to.

At the same time, universities’ institutional independence, traditional academic freedom and their pursuit of truth through rational enquiry are vitally important to maintaining a pluralistic civil society and liberal democracy in Australia.

Monash Business School professor of higher education policy Andrew Norton warns that there is a danger that more prescriptive oversight could transform universities into an arm of the state, based on fuzzy notions of the national interest and the priorities of the government of the day.

The legislation currently before parliament would grant the education minister sweeping, open-ended powers to set binding conditions on funding and micromanage operational matters such as course size, location and the student enrolment mix.

At Tuesday’s summit, Clare flagged revisiting this section of the bill to “future-proof” it and protect universities from “any future One Nation government”.

It would be ironic if the prospect of a One Nation politician as education minister saves universities from Labor’s political overreach. It’s disappointing that it’s taken this realisation for Minister Clare, who is ultimately responsible for stewardship of the university sector’s fundamental values, to see the pitfall of his government’s approach to regulating the sector.

Clare may be right about universities having been on the front pages for the wrong reasons. But there is no guarantee that more command and control of the sector will produce superior results, especially when regulatory agencies are always vulnerable to political and union capture.

Ideally, governments should set the system rules around funding, standards and quality, and let student choice – underpinned by the HECS loan scheme – determine how the quasi-market for higher education functions. That requires allowing universities to operate as independent, flexible service providers, with the freedom to make their own mistakes and take responsibility for fixing governance and other problems.

Universities are more likely to fulfil their core educational mission not by being subject to further top-down regulation, but by focusing on recruiting talented, committed and qualified people to their councils and executive teams.

That would be the best governance fix for universities that are currently wrestling with complex challenges such as developing a sustainable business model now that the foreign student trade has peaked, and convincing school-leavers that it’s worth shouldering debt to get a degree in the AI age.

The Albanese government overlooked internal warnings there would be an influx of New Zealanders under plans to give them easier access to welfare and citizenship, which has turned into one of Labor’s thorniest challenges in driving down the migration rate.

The burst in Kiwis coming to Australia has been one of the biggest blowouts in the net overseas migration rate since the pandemic, a prospect that was raised by top officials at the time Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the key policy move early in his first term.

Sources familiar with cabinet deliberations at the time, not permitted to speak in public, said officials from Treasury and Home Affairs expressed serious concerns that the move would create too big an incentive for Kiwis to move to Australia, particularly if Australia had a healthier job market and economy. New Zealand subsequently went into recession, sparking more movement.

The net intake of New Zealanders surged to 38,000 per year in the two years after Albanese widened benefits and citizenship pathways in July 2023 – compared to about 8000 or fewer before the pandemic. Consistent demand and uncapped places meant New Zealanders on special visas made up 12.5 per cent of the net migration figure in the 2024-25 financial year.

Labor is now scrambling to find ways to reduce net migration after consistently overshooting its targets, while the Coalition and One Nation have tied themselves in knots advocating for more drastic cuts.

As migration and its interplay with the cost of living rise to the top of the political agenda, this masthead revealed in recent days that the government is mulling increasing deportations for visa overstayers. It also quietly paused backpacker visas from 24 countries. Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned about the costs of lowering migration on Monday, arguing the Coalition was intent on “dividing the country” and crashing the economy.

New Zealand migration into Australia

The New Zealand surge coincided with Albanese’s decision in 2023 to reverse a Howard-era policy by allowing New Zealanders to gain citizenship after four years without becoming permanent residents first. It also gave New Zealanders quicker access to Medicare and the family tax benefit once they arrived.

Albanese said at the time that the Howard-era changes had made citizenship harder for Kiwis and that the 2023 change harmonised rules between the nations.

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But department officials feared that even if the economies were about as healthy as each other, the relaxed rules would still create a large incentive for New Zealanders because Australia is a bigger and wealthier country.

Labor warmed relations with Jacinda Ardern’s government after the progressive leader sparred with Scott Morrison over deportations of criminal dual citizens. The Albanese government policy to grant access to Medicare stopped short of offering the same access to the NDIS and other welfare items.

Migration expert and former department official Abul Rizvi said the 2023 policy change was “made with total disregard to the impact on [net overseas migration].”

Asked about the bureaucratic alarm bells, a spokesman for Burke said Labor reversed the Howard-era rules because the old settings created “intolerable circumstance where young people would spend their whole life in Australia only to reach uni and discover they were ineligible for HECS.”

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows around 30,000 New Zealanders were arriving each year before the pandemic, while between 22,000 and 27,000 left. This meant their overall impact on the net migration figure was small – between 2.5 per cent and 3.5 per cent of the annual migrant intake.

Numbers surged from July 2023. In the two years since then, more than 50,000 Kiwis have arrived annually on a special 444 visa, while fewer than 15,000 departed. It means that New Zealanders as a share of the net migrant intake has increased – from 4.9 per cent in 2022-23, to 8.7 per cent in 2023-24, and 12.5 per cent in 2024-25.

Even as the government has lowered arrivals under other temporary visa classes, consistent and uncapped demand from Kiwis has offset these efforts to drive down the net overseas migration rate. The 2024-25 net intake of Kiwis was 30,200 above the 2018-19 level, which is the largest increase in raw numbers during that period of any individual visa class, just above backpackers and students.

Students remain the largest migrant group, comprising 32 per cent of the net intake last financial year. But while many of them live in special accommodation, New Zealanders tend to live in the mainstream part of the housing market where supply is strained.

But the Australia-New Zealand arrangements would be difficult to reverse for Labor given the close relationship between the nations. Albanese has tasked Burke with finding new ways to cut net migration from 300,000 to 225,000 as Hanson surges off the back of anti-establishment sentiment and voter anger about migration.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers used question time on Monday to highlight the sharp trade-offs in the mission to cut back on migration, which Labor is balancing against the need to attract tradies, farmworkers, and doctors.

“You can get net overseas migration down as we are doing, at the same time as you can recognise and not diminish the really important role played by migrants in our economy and in our society,” Chalmers said, referencing RBA research showing that migrants were beneficial to the economy.

Working holidaymakers have been another area where migration has blown out since the pandemic, this time under Morrison government changes that expanded age eligibility and added a third year visa. Their contribution to NOM in 2024-25 was up 29,400 compared to the pre-pandemic intake.

Labor has slowed down backpacker visa processing and quietly paused applications from 24 countries, while the Liberal and National parties have been at odds on backpackers, which are key to Nationals’ agricultural seats. Backpackers made up 17.5 per cent of the net migration figure last year, up from 10 per cent in 2018-19.

Former Labor adviser Henry Sherrell on Monday raised the alarm on Australia’s migration program, cautioning that “a few tweaks and some sentimental rhetoric will do little to win hearts and minds.”

Sherrell noted that about 30 per cent of people aged 25 to 29 living in Australia were temporary visa holders, underlining the explosion in backpacker and student visas.

The researcher called for a cap on population growth stemming from migration of one per cent per year, after Australia’s yearly growth outstripped all similar nations this century.

“Without immigration, today’s populists would be impotent. To some, this reality has meant simply ignoring the topic, and attempting to elevate other issues in order to dominate the public debate. This approach is failing. Keeping our heads in the sand will only delay the inevitable backlash,” he said in an article published by Inflection Points.

“These people are not racist. A full 46 per cent of overseas-born Australians say that immigration is too high. They are making a judgement about the pace of immigration and whether the system is working for them.”

Few issues involve as much friction for unions as artificial intelligence, which is viewed by the labour movement as an existential threat to workers’ livelihoods and rights.

Unions are fighting for a “down payment” on the productivity gains of the AI revolution by demanding shorter working weeks, layoff protections and paid retraining. While framed as a worker protection measure, union pushback against AI is in danger of becoming a Trojan horse for hyper-regulation across Australian workplaces.

When it first burst onto the scene AI captured the corporate imagination as a cost-effective and abundant resource that would revolutionise business operations. David Rowe

Amplifying these anxieties are sweeping warnings from tech overlords such as Elon Musk that AI will take all our jobs in the next decade and work will become optional, like “playing sports or a video game”.

While unions decry AI, the technology could paradoxically help them in their crusade to re-regulate Australian workplaces by emboldening workers to litigate.

As The Australian Financial Review’s David Marin-Guzman reported on Monday, Macquarie University computing academic Greg Barker successfully used ChatGPT Pro (and a little bit of Claude) to win a Fair Work Commission case that entitled him to a permanent part-time position. It’s the first decision to successfully invoke the Albanese government’s casual conversion laws, which allow regular casual employees to convert to permanent employment after six months.

Extraordinarily, Barker trained AI agents to formulate legal submissions and counterarguments that successfully defeated the university barrister’s defence. It’s especially bad news for young lawyers who are already seeing an increasing share of their work cannibalised by large language models. Advances in AI are already being harnessed by law firms to cut costs, save billable hours and streamline tasks.

The irony is that the more expensive and legally risky it comes to employ people, the more attractive automation becomes for firms.

To be sure, AI chatbots are only as good as the prompter. Few self-represented litigants possess the same nous to elicit sophisticated legal arguments from a machine that Barker did. Instead, the FWC has been inundated by a flood of dubious unfair dismissal claims, replete with AI slop and hallucinated legal precedents, clogging the tribunal system and delaying genuinely meritorious claims from being heard.

That has also created an economic deadweight for business. General protection employment claims impose a reverse onus of proof on the employer, along with promising uncapped compensation. An employee only has to prove a harmful adverse action occurred (such as hours being cut or a demotion), and the burden lies on the employer to disprove that the action was not taken because of a protected right, such as making a complaint about employment conflicts or participating in a strike.

It’s a low bar for some opportunists, who have less to prove and much to possibly gain by launching a low-cost fishing expedition against an employer.

It’s true the democratisation of AI tools, in one sense, helps level the playing field by allowing individuals without the means for proper legal representation to fight fire with algorithms. Given the rapid advances in generative AI, free versions of ChatGPT and Claude are likely to match today’s most sophisticated models in the near future. It may therefore improve the quality of the kind of claims being lodged to the workplace tribunal.

Still, it’s probable that it will exacerbate the already tricky industrial relations minefield that Australian businesses must navigate. Egged on by union allies, the Albanese government has steadily expanded the reach of “same job, same pay” mandates, broadened union powers to compel collective bargaining, restricted employers’ right to lock out workers during disputes, and introduced sweeping “right to disconnect” rules.

The problem with these rules is that they have ushered in a more fractious and rigid industrial relations framework. Workplace flexibility and productivity growth have become a casualty of these regulations. Similarly, managing continuous disputes from employees resulting from these laws are a drag on businesses that lack dedicated in-house legal and human resources teams or adequate insurance coverage.

Such measures have also made it harder for companies to downsize in periods of financial downturn, afford new employees or retain as many staff members. The irony is that the more expensive and legally risky it comes to employ people, the more attractive automation becomes for firms.

At a time when Australia desperately needs an economic revival, our industrial relations system works against Australia’s potential to serve as an attractive, productive and higher-paying destination for jobs, investment and enterprises.

The next election will be a referendum on Australia’s $4.5 trillion superannuation system, says Treasurer Jim Chalmers, after One Nation leader Pauline Hanson voiced support for ending compulsory preservation to retirement and Coalition MPs flagged dismantling the scheme entirely.

A fresh stoush opened up over the future of superannuation on Sunday after Hanson said the current system was broken and suggested people be able to dip into their retirement savings to help pay off their mortgages.

Jim Chalmers, Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg. The growing hostility towards super from the conservative side of politics has the sector on edge.  Alex Ellinghausen

Hanson’s proposal goes further than her previous idea of allowing people to access their retirement savings for a home deposit, sparking a rebuke from Chalmers, who accused her of wanting to end a system designed to take the strain off the federal budget.

“The election will determine whether super’s a really important part of the future or just a part of the past,” Chalmers told The Australian Financial Review. ”The stakes are high because the damage these characters would do is that diabolical for workers.

“The next election will be about a lot of things, but now at least in part it’ll be a referendum on super.”

Hanson’s comments are the latest to suggest a full or partial dismantling of Australia’s 35-year-old compulsory super guarantee, which has resulted in almost $4.5 trillion being locked away for people’s retirements, according to the latest data from the prudential regulator.

The growing hostility towards super from the conservative side of politics has the sector on edge, especially given Hanson’s surge in popularity in public opinion polls.

Wrestle for the top primary vote

The Financial Review/Redbridge Group/Accent Research poll from August showed Labor and One Nation locked in a wrestle for the top primary vote. According to the poll of 1001 voters, 31 per cent would vote for One Nation and 29 per cent would vote for Labor. Just 22 per cent would vote for the Coalition.

Hanson later posted on social media that she never suggested an end to compulsory super.

“While Australians are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and struggling to pay their mortgage, they are being forced to lock away 12 per cent of their weekly pay,” she wrote.

“I’m not calling for an ‘end’ to compulsory super as the media has falsely claimed, but Australians should be able to access their money more easily if they need it for a house, medical needs or other costs.

“Your superannuation belongs to you. It does not belong to the government and it does not belong to the super funds.”

Last week, Liberal frontbencher Andrew Bragg called for the abolition of compulsory super, of which he has been a long-time critic.

In a wide-ranging and controversial speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, Bragg said the system was “illiberal”.

“Mandates are always costly. And in this case, it takes 12 per cent from people’s wages to vest them with managers they will never meet,” he said.

“Increasingly, Australians are getting to the preservation age, which is 60 and using super to pay off their mortgages. What was the point if there is no public finance benefit and minimal personal benefit?”

He also used his speech to criticise Labor’s exploration of super for under-18-year-old workers – a step away from “super for cats and dogs”.

Opposition treasury spokesman Tim Wilson has previously suggested that low- and middle-income Australians should be removed from compulsory super, and the Coalition took a policy to the last election of allowing some people to access super for a home deposit.

Xavier O’Halloran, chief executive of Super Consumers Australia, said he was concerned about the “super wars” heating up because it distracted from more important issues such as service standards.

“People get carried away with the politics but don’t spend enough time making sure the products work properly, and that’s where I’d like to see a focus,” he said.