One Nation is polling like a major party for the first time, which prompted two AMP economists to ask a hypothetical: what would Pauline Hanson’s platform actually do to the economy?
One Nation has been leading or near the top on the primary vote in several recent polls, with Roy Morgan putting it at 29.5 per cent in mid-June. But a primary-vote lead is not the same as power. The party holds two of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, trails Labor once preferences are counted, and Hanson herself sits in the Senate. On every current poll, Labor is still projected to govern.
So a Hanson prime ministership is still a national thought experiment. It’s one worth doing, though, because the support behind the platform is real.
AMP economist My Bui and deputy chief economist Diana Mousina set out to answer what the thought experiment would do to the economy.
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The pair started with the label of populism itself. “Populism isn’t really defined by the left or the right,” they said. “It’s just parties that are saying things that the popular public likes.” It tends to gain ground, they added, “when the average person feels like they have been left out from economic gains”.
The policies
Start with immigration, the One Nation centrepiece for about 30 years now.
Under its most recent plan, One Nation would cap visa grants at 130,000 a year, a sharp cut to the current intake. That’s a cap on grants, not a net-migration target: for scale, the ABS counted about 263,000 people leaving Australia in 2024-25, most of them departing temporary visa-holders, against net overseas migration of roughly 306,000. Hanson’s case is that high immigration is what’s driving up housing costs.
On housing itself, the platform would suspend the GST on building materials for new homes and ban non-residents and non-citizens from buying property. The economists’ caution here was about leverage: the real fix for affordability is building more homes, and foreign buyers are only a small slice of total sales, so a ban touches less of the market than it sounds.
On energy, One Nation would scrap Australia’s net-zero target and lean back into coal, gas and nuclear, arguing the net-zero push is what’s lifted power prices. On tax, it promises a 50 per cent cut to the fuel excise, an end to the excise on alcohol served at pubs and clubs, and no increase to the GST. It also wants to wind back multiculturalism, though that one sits outside the economic ledger.
The economist verdict
Our pair of AMP economists didn’t outright dismiss the new One Nation positions in their brief analysis.: “Some of these policies are actually reasonable,” they said. The problem is durability: many are “really good in the short term, but might not work in the long term”.
Fuel excise was the example they reached for. Cutting it, they noted, “only increases more demand for fuel”, which does nothing to fix the underlying supply problem and can leave prices back where they started.
The broader worry is the budget. “Populism tends to be inflationary, and you run up against budget constraints,” they said, pointing to Europe and the United States, where populist governments have not narrowed inequality. They flagged a “lack of details about how to fund a lot of these programs”, and warned that subsidising failing industries tends to “increase government spending, inflation” and “reduce productivity over the longer term”.
For all the policy detail, the pair put the party’s surge down to something simpler. The rise of One Nation, they said, is “part of the trend that Australians are sick of the two-party system” and want more choice.
Whether that support holds is the open question. The next federal election isn’t due until 2028.
