I. The Table
It began, as many important things do, over breakfast. An early morning meeting with a client – a professional man who speaks impeccable English, educated in the United Kingdom and the United States. His wife is a highly intelligent woman, a devoted mother whose world, when she first arrived in Australia, contained not a single word of English. That did not matter. It was a family reunion. They built a life here, as so many have, within the laws of the land and by the rules of the day.
His family joins mine regularly for Friday night Shabbat meals. Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists – all around the same table, breaking bread together. Our daughters are friends. This is not a policy position. It is not a multicultural thought experiment. It is simply our lives, unremarkable in its ordinariness, remarkable only when set against the political theatre that insists it cannot exist.
It was at breakfast that he raised Pauline Hanson and One Nation. He spoke quietly, precisely, the way a man speaks when he has turned a thing over many times in his mind. He said that people in his community feel the periodic outbursts not as political commentary but as a wound – inflicted on people who have done nothing wrong, who came here legally, who built lives here honestly, and who are now made to feel like a problem to be solved.
He made a distinction that deserves to be heard more widely. If there are genuine concerns about immigration policy, direct those concerns at the government. Direct them at the parliament. Direct them at the laws, the visas, the settings that were established by elected governments of both major parties across decades. Those things can be debated. But the people who came here under those laws did nothing wrong. To attack them is not policy critique. It is scapegoating.
I listened. Then I gently pushed back. Hanson and One Nation do, at times, attack policy. The problem is not that they are entirely without policy substance. The problem is that the finer points of the argument get drowned in unstructured delivery, in the performance of grievance, in the spectacle of outrage. The message collapses into noise. And what the community hears, and carries home, is not a policy debate. It is the wound.
But my client’s framework – attack the policy, not the person – is the right framework. The question I want to sit with in this essay is whether we are actually applying it, on all sides of this debate, with the rigour it demands.
II. Imagination as a Political Act
There is a word that sits at the centre of all of this, though it is rarely used in political discourse. That word is imagination.
Imagination is, at its most fundamental, the capacity to perceive something that is not there. To hold in the mind a thing that does not yet exist, or that exists only in the eye of the beholder. It is the faculty that allows a scientist to theorise a particle before the instruments exist to detect it, that allows a poet to write the grief of a generation into fourteen lines.
It is also, and this is less often acknowledged, the faculty that allows a demagogue to build a monster – and the faculty that allows a comfortable liberal consensus to mistake its own preferences for the general will.
Both failures of imagination are on display in the current Australian debate. Hansonite politics imagines a monocultural Australia under existential siege and seeks to force that vision on a nation that is, in reality, irreversibly plural. But a certain kind of progressive politics has made a mirror error: it has imagined that the anxiety driving the One Nation surge is simply fear and ignorance, that it has no basis in material reality, and that it will dissolve under sufficient exposure to the right values. Both of these are failures to see what is actually there.
The polls of June 2026 are a correction to the comfortable imagination. Multiple independent surveys – Redbridge/Accent, DemosAU, Roy Morgan – show One Nation leading on primary vote at 28 to 31 percent, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition. The Lowy Institute found in 2025 that 53 percent of Australians believe the migrant intake is too high. An IPA poll put that figure at 60 percent – including, and this is the figure that should give pause for thought – 42 percent of non-citizens and 59 percent of first-generation Australians. This is not fringe noise. This is the centre of Australian public opinion, measured across multiple methodologies.
An essay written to persuade only the already-convinced is a satisfying document and an ineffective one. If the argument for a plural, generous, outward-facing Australia cannot engage with these numbers honestly, it will not move a single vote. So let us engage with them honestly.
III. The Legitimate Grievance
The post-pandemic migration surge was real, rapid, and inadequately managed. Net overseas migration drove the bulk of Australia’s recent population growth to approximately 28 million people. The infrastructure – housing, hospitals, public transport, schools – did not keep pace. It could not, because it was never designed to, and because successive governments of both major parties chose not to fund it at the scale required.
The result is visible and measurable. A housing affordability crisis that has locked a generation out of ownership and pushed rents beyond the reach of essential workers in every capital city. Hospital wait times that have become a national emergency. Roads and public transport systems in outer suburbs – where many new arrivals settle – that are chronically underfunded. These are not imaginary grievances. They are the lived experience of millions of Australians, including many of those migrants whom Hansonite politics has chosen to blame for the consequences of policy failure.
The student visa system has been used, by operators and by successive governments who preferred not to notice, as a de facto backdoor to permanent residency – flooding certain sectors with labour that depressed wages and crowded out domestic workers from career pathways. International student numbers grew beyond any rational assessment of educational capacity or labour market need. These are policy failures that can be named and should be named.
One Nation’s policy platform – capping permanent visas at approximately 130,000 per year, ending student visa distortions, prioritising skilled migration that does not undercut wages, increasing infrastructure investment – contains proposals that are, in their broad shape, discussed across the mainstream policy spectrum. The migration cap is debated by economists of every persuasion. The student visa distortion has been acknowledged by the government’s own review processes. These are not fever-dream positions.
The grievance is real. The infrastructure failure is real. The policy mismanagement is real. The wrong answer to a real problem is still the wrong answer.
My client at breakfast was making precisely this point. Hold the government accountable for its policy settings. Question the visa categories and the infrastructure planning assumptions and the wage protections that were or were not in place. Ask hard questions of the institutions that made these choices. This is legitimate. This is necessary. This is the policy debate Australia needs to have.
What is not legitimate – what is the wrong answer to a real problem – is to collapse that policy critique into a personal attack on the people who arrived under those policies. The migrant family in the housing queue did not design the migration program. The international student working in the cafe did not set the visa conditions that allowed their employer to pay below award. The couple at the Shabbat table did not choose the infrastructure investment settings of the Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, and Albanese governments.
IV. The Mechanism of the Wound
So why does the political conversation so consistently slide from the legitimate critique to the personal wound? Why, when policy failure is the correct target, do so many find themselves aiming at people?
The answer is not simply cynicism on the part of political operators, though cynicism is certainly present. The answer is that abstract policy failure is invisible, and people are visible. The housing crisis is a structural condition produced by decades of planning decisions, zoning laws, negative gearing tax policy, interest rate settings, and infrastructure underfunding. It has no face. A new apartment block going up in a suburb that used to be quiet has a face – or rather, it has the faces of the people who will live in it.
This is the mechanism Hansonite politics has exploited with considerable skill: take a real grievance generated by policy failure and make it visible in the form of a person. Once you have made a person the embodiment of a policy failure, you can do something you cannot do to a policy: you can resent them. You can be afraid of them. You can vote against them. Policy requires analysis. People require only emotion.
And this is precisely where the data becomes more complicated than it first appears. The finding that 42 percent of non-citizens and 59 percent of first-generation Australians support lower migration does not validate the politics of personal targeting. It validates something quite different: that the people most directly exposed to the consequences of rapid, under-supported migration – competing for housing, competing for entry-level wages, navigating overcrowded infrastructure – have legitimate concerns about the settings that produced those conditions. They are not endorsing the politics that would make them the villain of the story. They are asking for the same thing my client asked for at breakfast: fix the policy.
This distinction matters enormously, and it is the distinction that gets lost in the performance. When a first-generation Australian expresses concern about immigration levels, they are, in most cases, making a rational assessment of material conditions. When Hanson deploys that concern, she transforms it – the rational policy assessment disappears, and what remains is the image of the outsider, the threatening other, the person who does not belong.
V. The Genealogy of the Image
The technique is not new, which is worth acknowledging clearly and without overreach.
I want to be careful here, because an analogy that proves too much proves nothing. Contemporary Hansonism is a democratic surge in response to rapid, policy-driven change. It is not equivalent, in law or in kind, to terra nullius – the legal fiction by which the colonial state erased sixty thousand years of First Nations sovereignty – or to the White Australia Policy, which was a state-enforced program of racial exclusion. To equate them as moral categories would be both historically inaccurate and rhetorically self-defeating.
But there is a mechanism they share that is worth naming. Terra nullius was not merely a legal fiction. It was an act of deliberately constrained imagination: the decision to see a continent as empty, to refuse to perceive what was plainly there, to make a people invisible by the force of political will. The White Australia Policy was an attempt to enforce, by legislative fiat, an imagined version of the nation – homogeneous, racially bounded, protected from the world’s complexity.
Both failed, as all such acts eventually fail, because the world does not conform permanently to the fantasies of those who would constrict it. But both did enormous damage along the way. And the mechanism – the political decision to make certain people invisible, or to make them legible only as threats – is not historically exhausted. It recurs, in different registers, whenever political failure requires a target.
What we can say, without overreach, is this: Australia has a long practice of resolving the anxiety produced by rapid change by focusing that anxiety on a person rather than a policy. We have done it before. We are doing it again. Recognising the pattern is not the same as claiming moral equivalence across every historical instance of it.
VI. What the Table Actually Is
Let me return to the Shabbat table, because I think it has been misread – including, perhaps, in the first draft of this essay – as a symbol of frictionless pluralism. It is not that.
The table I am describing is not a table without difficulty. The people around it carry histories – of persecution, of dispossession, of exclusion, of violence – that do not dissolve because we have chosen to sit together. My own position at that table is not simple: a Wiradjuri man with Jewish heritage, sitting on the lands of the Ngunnawal people, hosting guests from communities that have their own complex relationships with colonialism, with displacement, with the experience of being made to feel like outsiders in countries they call home.
The Muslim family at my table is not a symbol. They are people who have navigated a housing market that treats them as a demand problem. Who have children in school systems that are underfunded. Who pay rent that absorbs an unconscionable proportion of their income because successive governments chose tax settings that reward property ownership over productive investment. They have every reason to be angry about policy failure. They are angry about it.
What the table is, actually, is a place where that anger can be directed at its correct target. Where the conversation can be: the government failed on housing, the government failed on infrastructure, the government failed to manage the migration program with any coherent relationship to the services required to support it – and that failure has hurt all of us, the long-established and the newly arrived alike. What it is not is a place where any of us become the target of each other’s legitimate frustration.
The table is not a symbol of easy pluralism. It is a model for the difficult conversation – the one that names the real failure and refuses the false target.
This is what my client at breakfast was calling for. Not a softening of the policy debate. Not a refusal to acknowledge that things have gone wrong. A precise application of accountability: hold the government responsible for the government’s choices, and do not make the people who lived within those choices into the embodiment of failure.
It is a harder thing to do than it sounds. It requires the capacity to hold a grievance and a distinction simultaneously: yes, the housing crisis is real and it has been made worse by migration settings; no, the family next door is not the housing crisis. The policy is the problem. The people are not the policy.
VII. The Harder Arithmetic
The numbers of June 2026 are not comfortable, and they should not be made comfortable by rhetorical sleight of hand.
If One Nation is polling at 28 to 31 percent on primary vote, this is not a fringe movement that can be dismissed. It is a plurality of the Australian electorate expressing, through the available instrument, a set of concerns about the direction of the country. The question is not whether to engage with those concerns – the question is how.
The progressive response to date has been largely inadequate. It has oscillated between dismissal – the Hanson voter as simply racist, as simply afraid, as unworthy of serious engagement – and a kind of competitive grievance management that concedes the frame while arguing about the dosage. Neither has arrested the surge. Neither will.
The adequate response requires something more demanding: the willingness to say, clearly and without qualification, that the policy failures are real and they will be addressed – and then to actually address them. The housing crisis requires a transformation of planning law, tax policy, and public housing investment at a scale that no government has yet been willing to contemplate. The infrastructure deficit requires capital expenditure that is currently being avoided. The student visa distortion requires a genuine reform of international education that the sector has successfully lobbied against for two decades.
These are not Hansonite policies. They are the policies of basic governmental competence, and the failure to implement them has driven voters who would otherwise never have considered One Nation to reach for the instrument that appears, at least, to be naming the problem even if it is naming the wrong target.
The imagination that is required of us is not the imagination that says all will be well if we simply choose to be kind to each other. It is the imagination – harder, more demanding, more politically costly – that can see both the legitimate grievance and the illegitimacy of the proposed solution, and can then construct an alternative that addresses the one without capitulating to the other.
VIII. Imagining It Into Being
There is a phrase I keep returning to: we can imagine it into being.
This is not magical thinking. It is a description of how human societies actually work. Every institution that exists was first imagined. Every right that has been won was first articulated as a possibility, usually by people who were told it was impossible. The abolition of slavery was unimaginable to those who profited from it. Universal suffrage was unimaginable to those who monopolised political power. The recognition of First Nations sovereignty – still incomplete, still contested, still resisted – was unimaginable to those who built their world on its denial.
And yet these things have happened, are happening, will continue to happen. Not because the universe is just, but because enough people imagined them hard enough, long enough, and together enough to make them real. The imagination preceded the institution. The vision preceded the world.
The Australia that needs to be imagined now is not a simple one. It is an Australia that fixes its housing crisis by reforming the settings that produced it – not by reducing the people visible in the housing queue. It is an Australia that manages migration with a coherent relationship to the services and infrastructure required to support it – not by making existing migrants into the symbol of past mismanagement. It is an Australia that has the genuinely difficult conversation about integration, about what we ask of each other across cultural difference, about what a shared civic life requires – at a Shabbat table, in a parliament, in the full complexity of actual human contact.
The 28 to 31 percent who are currently registering a vote for One Nation are not, most of them, voting for the imagined besieged monoculture. They are voting against a political class that they believe has mismanaged the country and refuses to acknowledge it. That is a vote that can be spoken to – not by conceding the false target, but by credibly committing to address the real failure.
The eight billion people on this planet are also doing the work of imagination, also constructing the realities they will inhabit, also choosing what to see and what to refuse to see. The world those eight billion people are building is not the world of Hansonism – not because that world is impossible, but because the forces of human connection, economic interdependence, and the irreversible mixing of peoples are stronger than any act of political will that seeks to reverse them. The question is not whether the plural world will arrive. The question is how much damage is done on the way.
The table is already set. The question is whether we will do the work that makes more tables possible – or whether we will let the noise convince us that the table does not exist.
IX. The Candles
Every Friday evening, the candles are lit. The blessing is said in Hebrew, a language that has survived exile, persecution, and the long centuries of those who imagined Jewish life out of existence – and failed. Around the table, people who have no business being together, by the logic of those who would divide us, are together.
My client at breakfast is right. The people who followed the laws, who built the lives, who brought their families here, who struggle with a new language and a new country and the distance from everything familiar – they did nothing wrong. They deserve better than to be made into figures in someone else’s political nightmare.
And the 28 to 31 percent who are reaching for One Nation – who are frightened about housing, angry about infrastructure, worried about wages, uncertain about the pace of change – they also deserve better. They deserve a politics that takes their material circumstances seriously enough to change them, rather than one that takes their fear and uses it to wound people who did not cause it.
The Shabbat table is not a retreat from that difficulty. It is a model for navigating it. It is a place where the conversation can be honest – about failure, about policy, about what we owe each other and what our governments have failed to deliver – without making any person at the table into the problem. The housing crisis is the problem. The infrastructure deficit is the problem. The decades of policy mismanagement by governments of every colour is the problem.
Fix those things. Name those failures. Hold those governments to account. And do it across the table from the people who are also living with the consequences, rather than across a barricade from the people who have been made, falsely, into the cause.
The table is already set. The candles are lit. The question is whether we will do the work that makes more tables possible – not just more Shabbat tables, but more conversations, more policy debates, more genuine accountability – or whether we will let the noise outside convince us that the table does not exist.
It exists. I have sat at it. Our daughters have grown up at it. The imagination required is not the imagination of innocence. It is the imagination of adults who know what has gone wrong and choose, together, to build something better.
We can imagine it into being. But first, we have to be honest about what needs to be built.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, June 2026
