This will possibly be the second-last budget reply delivered by a Liberal MP. That reads as hyperbole until you sit with what Angus Taylor actually announced on Thursday night. The Coalition, he told the country, will strip non-citizens of the NDIS, Jobseeker, Youth Allowance and Family Tax Benefit. And this is the part Canberra’s press gallery has not properly digested: the policy includes permanent residents. Welfare for citizens only.
The political logic is straightforward. One Nation just demolished the Liberals in Farrer. Pauline Hanson’s primary is climbing. So the Coalition has picked up her policy folder and read straight from it. Pauline herself said the quiet part out loud: the Coalition has “finally seen the light”.
She was being generous. What the Liberals have actually done is sign a public confession that they no longer have a project of their own. But leave the tactical theatre aside. The truly remarkable thing about this announcement is that Angus Taylor has misread who actually lives in his country.
Roughly 4.5 to 5 million people in Australia are non-citizens. That’s one in six residents. And ABS data tells us that even among permanent migrants, only 59 per cent had taken citizenship by 2021. The rest sit in queues, defer the test, or simply live their lives as PRs – permanent residents – because the immediate utility of a citizenship ceremony, when you already have full work rights and Medicare, is not obvious from inside the household.
That last word, household, is the one Taylor has not thought about. Non-citizens do not vote. That is the entire premise of his policy. Punish a group with no representation, pick up votes among those who resent them. Clean tactical logic, the kind you can sell to a focus group in Wagga Wagga in 40 minutes. The problem is that non-citizens do not live in demographic quarantine. They live in families. And those families vote.
I grew up in Footscray, then Northcote, then Meadow Heights. Greek household, Greek street. My parents arrived in the wave that filled the factories of inner Melbourne in the 1960s. They worked. They bought houses. A striking number of their generation never naturalised, not from alienation, but because for a woman who left school at 12 in a village in the Peloponnese and now worked the cutting floor in Brunswick, the ledger came out as: what would change? Nothing on the kitchen table. The children, born here, were citizens by birth. The household would vote. The yiayia did not need to sit a test about prime ministers she had never heard of.
That household pattern, a mix of citizens and non-citizens under one roof or living within the same suburb, with the voting members representing the whole, is the operating template of postwar migrant Australia. And it is alive and well in the suburbs that decide elections.
Drive through our big cities, you will find, with statistical regularity, three-generation households. Grandparents on partner visas. Parents on PR, working through the citizenship queue or not bothering yet. Citizen children enrolled to vote, doing the family’s Services Australia paperwork at the kitchen table.
In a great many of these households, the adult children are on the roll while the grandparents are not. It is exactly the shape of the post-WWII migrant family. The citizen kids vote for the household. They vote, very deliberately, for the people in their family who cannot.
Strip the NDIS from a permanent resident and you have not touched a single voter directly. You have touched their daughter. Their citizen nephew, who watched his autistic cousin lose his therapist because a man in Goulburn decided welfare was for passport holders only.
The Liberal Party’s only credible path back into metropolitan Australia runs directly through these households. Bennelong, Reid, Banks, Chisholm, Menzies, Aston, Tangney, Hasluck. Taylor has just told every one of them that in his Australia, their parents are second-class.
He thinks he is chasing Hanson voters in Farrer. He has not considered that the seats he needs to actually form government are the seats where this policy will read as a declaration of hostility against the household.
On Thursday night, the Liberal Party formally walked away from them. Its status as a credible alternative government can only be conferred by the cities. Take that status away and what you have left is not an opposition. It is a permanent third party of regional grievance, fighting Hanson for the same shrinking pool of votes, while Labor governs the country, preparing to face the next emerging opposition party, One Nation. One more election will confirm it. After that, the budget replies will be delivered by someone else.
Kos Samaras is the director of the social research group Redbridge. This is an edited version of his article for Redbridge’s Insights and Intel substack.
Kos Samarasis the director of the social research group Redbridge.
