Taylor’s Trumpian immigration pitch is aimed at fighting One Nation – but puts Australia’s identity at stake

It was not long ago that the notion of Australia as the world’s most successful multicultural country was not just a bipartisan political position but a source of national pride, expressed as enthusiastically by Liberals as their Labor counterparts.

“I believe, no, I know that Australia is the most successful multicultural immigration country on the planet,” the then Liberal prime minister, Scott Morrison, told the National Press Club in 2021.

The consensus has frayed in the years since, but it shattered on Tuesday when Angus Taylor all but declared that multiculturalism had failed in Australia.

In a speech outlining the first planks of a Donald Trump and Nigel Farage-inspired immigration agenda, the opposition leader cast statements such as Morrison’s as “blindly repeated mantras”.

There were lots of good migrants, Taylor stressed, repeating his praise for the workers who helped construct the Snowy Hydro scheme under the watch of his grandfather William Hudson.

But there was a second type of migrant, he said, who came to Australia with “subversive intent” and for “transactional reasons”.

“Not everyone wanting to migrate to Australia has a noble intent. Not everyone wanting to migrate to Australia will be a net benefit to Australia. Indeed, some will be a net drain,” Taylor told the Liberal-aligned Menzies Research Centre, presumably referring to subsequent waves of migration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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The content and tone of Taylor’s address was not a surprise, giving the emphasis he placed on “shutting the door” to “bad” migrants in his first press conference after ousting Sussan Ley as Liberal leader.

But that should not detract from how remarkable – and alarming – it is to hear such statements from an alternative prime minister.

The speech can, of course, be explained by the new political reality the Coalition is grappling with.

The Coalition might be in opposition to a Labor government but it is really fighting Pauline Hanson, whose brand of rightwing populism poses an immediate existential threat to the Liberals and Nationals across the country.

The package of proposals announced on Tuesday, including a of non-citizens and vet the social media histories of visa applicants, are aimed squarely at the masses of voters fleeing to One Nation.