Please explain: One Nation challenged to reveal cost of immigration crackdown

Opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam has accused One Nation of failing to explain key details of its proposed migration crackdown after leader Pauline Hanson did not front media to answer questions about the party’s headline policy.

One Nation announced on Monday it wanted to cut 750,000 temporary visa holders over three years to push the country into net-negative migration, but has not presented modelling on what the cost to the economy would be.

“They’ve got to come out and explain their policy. Don’t just throw it out there and hide as they have,” Duniam told Radio National on Tuesday.

“The idea of just bluntly cutting international education and international student numbers is a great headline, but the detail is where it is at.”

Under Hanson’s plan to drastically curb temporary visas, international students would bear the brunt of cuts, while the families of skilled migrants would be barred from joining them in Australia. After a three-year “reset”, the party would aim for a ceiling of 130,000 in net migration – less than half today’s levels.

The announcement spurred the national debate around immigration as Labor grapples with its own delayed plan to bring migration levels down from 300,000 to 225,000 in two years, and as the latest Resolve Political Monitor showed a majority of Australians support reducing immigration.

Hanson kept a low profile in Canberra on Monday, with One Nation treasury spokesman Barnaby Joyce holding interviews after the party leader posted a prerecorded clip on social media. Joyce avoided questions about the policy cost, dismissing suggestions the deep cuts would tip the nation into recession.

Joyce denied on Monday that Hanson was avoiding the media over her attack on the prime minister’s late mother for living in public housing for decades.

The One Nation leader has also been under fire for her cartoon labelling Liberal frontbencher and SAS veteran Andrew Hastie a traitor, and for branding Indigenous Australians “the most primitive race on earth”.

Asked why Hanson would not be taking questions over the party’s key policy, Joyce said: “Well, I’m here talking about the policy.”

Later, on ABC’s National Forum, Joyce told an audience that Australians were tired of economists.

“The issue of what it is going to cost, I think, is contentious, but I have no concern about following the will of the Australian people,” he said.

“I think the Australian people are sort of tired of the fact that you have to go to an economist to come up with public policy, to go to the Parliamentary Budget Office, and, to be quite frank, I have been around this game for a while and I have never seen a forward estimates in any budgetary paper be even close to the mark.”

Sitting next to Hastie, Joyce chuckled through the Q+A-style program, even when the Liberal frontbencher attacked Hanson for not fronting the media to discuss her immigration policy.

“This is someone who wants to be the prime minister of Australia,” Hastie said. “She hasn’t had the courage to front the media today and explain the budgetary, the economic, and the human impact of these policy changes that she’s suggesting.”

Hastie said that while he’d been “at war” with One Nation all week, Joyce had apologised and he’d accepted that.

“You know, we’re right. We’re back in the bed together,” Joyce said.

“I wouldn’t say that, mate,” said Hastie.

Duniam said on Tuesday Australians expected to be able to interrogate policy proposals, and the Coalition’s plan, which he would announce within weeks, would be fully costed.

In a separate interview on News24 (formerly Sky News), he denied it would replicate One Nation’s plan.

“I would never copy a piece of work that has not been modelled, has not been costed,” he said, adding every declined visa came at a cost.

“It’s great to throw out some numbers. Some of them [visas] are uncapped. Some of them are capped. We’re not sure which ones, what impact it will have on the economy. Sorry, that is not a robust piece of work.”

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