CANBERRA: Australia’s hard-right populist leader Pauline Hanson has called for a monocultural society, rejecting decades of multicultural policy and blaming the nation’s housing crisis on extremely high levels of immigration.
"At the centre of this crisis is the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism. We cannot be a multicultural society,”she told the National Press Club on Wednesday (June 16). "We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”
In her speech to the press club, the first time Hanson has spoken at the venue in a 30-year political career, she pledged to "slash” migration, including restricting entry of people "from places immersed in extremism like radical Islam.”
Hanson and her One Nation party have surged in opinion polls over the past year, accelerating after the centre-right coalition’s vote collapsed in May last year.
Meanwhile, Australians have been buffeted by resurgent inflation, higher interest rates and a surge in fuel costs due to the Iran war - helping One Nation in the polls while Hanson blamed those challenges on immigration and the cost of green energy in the speech
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor party has sought to mitigate the impact of some of these pressures with a temporary cut to fuel excise and sought tax reforms to ease a housing affordability crunch.
He’s pointed to the rise of populism and "simplistic grievance based politics” as a reaction to an economy that isn’t working for people anymore. - Bloomberg
