The Liberals have hit mute on anti-migrant rhetoric — and we have Trump’s ugly agenda to thank

A funny thing happened on the way to the election: the immigrant — or, at least, the more hand-wavery “out of control immigration” — was meant to act as the amplifier to the voice of hard-man Dutton, echoing him metaphorically to the Lodge (and, if he got his druthers, physically to Kirribilli House). 

But suddenly, it didn’t. The tumult and the shouting from the Liberals and Nationals died away, replaced by the more occasional dog-whistles on what should be safe grounds of “housing” and “crime”. 

Of course, Dutton being Dutton, he blows that whistle pretty forcibly — enough to get across his message that cutting migration will solve Australia’s housing woes and, for voters who don’t actually live in Victoria, that migrant-dense Melbourne is a criminal hellscape where shopping is the most dangerous thing you can do.

But it’s still soft enough for the notoriously hard-of-hearing political commentariat to Sergeant Schultz it with: “I hear nothing!” — or, at least, nothing that would oblige them to call it out for racism.

Labor has grabbed the opportunity to just not talk about it. When Dutton has attempted to bait his opponent with jabs about Labor’s “Big Australia” policy during their debates, Albanese has declined to bite, other than a short waffle about a post-COVID surge.

In part, it’s simply that the heat is going out of the issue with the migration surge now starting to fall. It’s also partly that the Dutton-shtick just doesn’t work as well in the often heavily migrant, urban seats his party needs to win. 

But it’s an eerie shift all the same: being out and proud about building panic around immigrants has been the go-to positioning for the global right, pretty much since 2015 when Donald Trump wrenched the standard migration-as-a-good discourse to his then “eccentric”, now notorious, comment that: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”

And then? We had Brexit and the rise of the far-right parties across Europe — into government in Italy, Poland, Sweden and now the Netherlands and leaping to major-party status in France — all while the traditional centre-right parties, like the British Conservatives, hurried along behind.  

Just this past February, anti-migrant rhetoric roiled Germany’s elections, with the Musk-backed fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) surging to 20% of the vote, while the traditional centre-right Christian Democrats’ (CDU) main line of attack on the Social Democrat-led government was its alleged open-door migration policy.

Earlier this month, incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU, announced that the new coalition government will make it tougher to get into the country, with border controls that challenge its Schengen-zone commitments, returns of asylum seekers at the border, intensified deportations, and suspension of family reunifications. They’re also making it harder for migrants to transition to citizenship, with a demand for tougher proof of at least five years’ “successful integration”, replacing the former government’s recent easing of qualification to three years’ residence.

But the German election also demonstrated the oddest part of the global anti-migration panic: it’s strongest where migrants, well, aren’t. Areas where the problem isn’t foreigners moving in; it’s everyone else moving out. Take the AfD stronghold of Thuringia, for example, where the population has fallen by almost 20% since the 1990 reunification. At the same time, the cities where migrants actually live — like Hamburg or Dortmund, even eastern Berlin — stuck with parties of the left.

It’s why Dutton’s code red alarm about Victorian shopping this week should be read as weakness. Like Trump’s regular attacks on Democrat-run cities such as Chicago and San Francisco (or Dutton’s now infamous “African gangs” in Daniel Andrews’ Melbourne), it’s base mobilisation, a way of hanging on to those regional and small-town voters who never go near the big smoke.

The election-time grab for discretion by the Liberals and Nationals is in stark contrast to their pre-election rhetoric, which came straight out of the Trump playbook: in February, Dutton attempted to Australianise the noxious Great Replacement Theory with false claims Labor was fast-tracking citizenship for people from Gaza in time to vote. In March, the Coalition floated a referendum to give prospective prime minister Dutton the power to cancel citizenship of the half of all Australians born overseas (or with a parent or grandparent born overseas) who may be eligible for dual citizenship. 

It’s not just Australia. Canada, too, has found itself in an election where the anti-migrant rhetoric has suddenly been switched off. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has had to throttle back his Trumpian talking points, while new Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney is happy to not talk about migration at all.

Back in 1993, Australia’s anti-GST vote in that year’s elections foreshadowed the Canadian repudiation of its conservatives in punishment for introducing a similar sales tax a few months later. This year, Canada votes first, on the Monday before our election. Will that foreshadow the Australian result? And can we hope that, together, they’ll mark the end of the right’s electoral rise from the cynical exploitation of global hysteria over migration?