One Nation’s 130,000 net overseas migration figure a third higher than when Pauline Hanson was first elected

Pauline Hanson’s immigration target is actually a third higher than where it was when she was first elected to Parliament three decades ago.

Shortly before the last election, the One Nation leader told the Senate in February 2025 that net overseas migration should be capped at 130,000.

“This will allow Australia to catch its breath, catch up with housing and catch up with services and infrastructure,” she said.

One Nation’s 130,000 figure — covering permanent and long-term arrivals of at least a year minus departures is well below the record-high 548,800 number in the year to September 2023, during Labor’s first term in power.

But it’s a third higher than the 97,444 level of 1996, the year Senator Hanson was first elected to Parliament as the-then disendorsed Liberal candidate for Oxley, as John Howard’s Coalition swept to power after 13 years in the wilderness.

The level is also almost four times the 34,822 level of 1993 when Paul Keating was Labor prime minister during a period of double-digit unemployment in the aftermath of a deep recession.

Nonetheless, MacroBusiness chief economist Leith van Onselen said One Nation’s 130,000 figure would return annual immigration levels to where it was in the mid-2000s, and still see Australia’s population shrink as the more than 2.6 million temporary migrants now in Australia left the country, like they have in Canada.

“As a percentage of the population, 130,000 is about right,” he said.

“If One Nation’s migration policies come in, we’re going to get negative migration for a few years, because effectively what it will do is adjust down the temporary migrant stocks.”

David Oldfield, who co-founded One Nation in 1997, said a pause on immigration with a ban on family reunions, asylum seekers and refugees, and a dramatic cutback in overseas student numbers would be a better policy.

“My recollection is that One Nation policy was originally same in, same out — that’s what I would have thought it should be and be paused along those lines while they come to a determination of a final figure in accordance with what their supporters expect and that is a massive cut to the migration that’s been undertaken in recent years,” he told The Nightly.

The former One Nation MP also called for the party at a Federal level to have a dedicated immigration spokesperson.

“They need a person who is their immigration spokesperson and that’s what that person talks about and nobody else speaks on their behalf and nobody contradicts what they say,” Mr Oldfield said.

“No one, including them, seems to know what they’re saying.”

Rookie One Nation MP David Farley told ABC Insiders on Sunday net overseas migration should be 100,000 higher than One Nation’s 130,000 target, so it could accommodate aged care nurses and guest workers from the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility program that started in April 2022 under Scott Morrison’s Coalition government.

“Now, on top of the NOM (net overseas migration), of course, we’ve got all the other programs that we run. The PALM program, which is important to my electorate, Farrer; the skilled, registered, aged care nurses etc, are all very important,” he said.

“If you just took the PALM program in itself, that’s about 40,000 a year; you take the skilled, aged care nurses, probably 68,000 to 70,000 a year, then you come down into the technical sides of mechanicing and engineering, again, there’s quite some numbers there.”

Asked by David Speers if that meant potentially another 100,000 people on top of One Nation’s 130,000 target, Mr Farley, a former chief executive of the Australian Agricultural Company, said: “A minimum of 100 (thousand) but the 130,000 is what we call the true NOM.”

That would take net overseas migration to at least 230,000, approaching the May Budget’s 245,000 forecast for this financial year before the numbers eased to 225,000 in 2027-28.

One Nation defector Barnaby Joyce, who was Nationals deputy prime minister in 2017 when Australia had a net overseas migration rate of 240,400, said his new party’s policy was a hard cap of 130,000 net overseas migration.

“It’s 130 net. We’ve been saying that all along,” Mr Joyce told Sunrise on Monday morning.

Asked directly whether there would be another 100,000 migrants on top of the figure, Mr Joyce was unequivocal.

“There’s not going to be an extra hundred on top of that. No.”

The Coalition is yet to nominate a net overseas migration figure but Liberal frontbencher Andrew Bragg, who holds the housing portfolio, has suggested 180,000.

One Nation’s net overseas migration target is higher than it was during every year of the 1990s and during most years of the early 2000s before the mining boom saw a surge to 301,200 in 2008 during Kevin Rudd’s first year as Labor prime minister during the global financial crisis.

The Sustainable Australia Party last year struggled to get more than 0.3 per cent of the Senate vote in most states of Australia with a policy of capping net overseas migration at 70,000, a level also long advocated by entrepreneur Dick Smith.

In a crowded political market, where fewer voters are backing the major parties, an emotive message resonates more than just a set of numbers.