Angus Taylor went to the Sydney Institute on Thursday night to warn Australians that a One Nation government would bring "an eternity of pain". By the time Pauline Hanson had finished answering him from London, the speech had a bigger problem than her: at least one of the "reckless" One Nation policies he costed is his own party's policy too.
The Opposition Leader claimed One Nation's four biggest commitments could cost "in the order of a trillion dollars over a decade", force interest rates up by around 3 percentage points, add $20,000 a year to the average new mortgage and end in a sovereign debt crisis. He called the party a "column of smoke" and likened it to the Greens.
Angus Taylor attacked four One Nation policies. One is his own, another is out of date
Taylor's trillion dollar warning is built on what he says are One Nation's four most expensive promises: stopping bracket creep by indexing tax thresholds, letting couples split their income for tax, lifting defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, and what The Australian's report called “net zero migration”.
Here's the problem. The first one, indexing tax thresholds, is a Coalition policy. Taylor promises it himself. One Nation simply backs it. So part of the "reckless" trillion dollar bill he's waving at voters is his own promise.
The migration number is stale. “Net zero migration” is an old One Nation WA branch position from the COVID years. The party's current federal platform is a cap of 130,000 visas a year, a cut of more than 570,000 from Labor's levels. Taylor costed a state branch's old slogan instead of the policy One Nation is actually running on.
The defence numbers are just as awkward. Taylor wants defence spending at 3% of GDP. Hanson wants 3.5%. He's calling the extra half a percentage point the road to ruin. And the trillion dollars isn't an independent costing. They're Taylor's own numbers, built on the assumption that every One Nation policy starts on day one and none of it is paid for.
That's what politicians mean by “unfunded”: no money named to pay for a promise, so the cost lands on the budget as new borrowing. One Nation says the money is there, in a $90bn a year cut to government waste. Taylor says that wouldn't come close. Labor plays the same trick on him: Jim Chalmers claims Taylor's promises leave a $544bn black hole. The trillion he says Hanson would cost is a forecast. The near trillion Australia already owes is real, and the Coalition governed for most of the decade it piled up in.
Then there's his record. Taylor was the Coalition's energy minister when the Morrison government signed Australia up to net zero in 2021. That's the policy One Nation blames for a decade of rising power bills, and the one it wants scrapped. The man warning about tomorrow's pain signed off on today's. A One Nation spokesman put it to The Australian directly:
"The Coalition had almost 10 years to end the real cost-of-living pain caused to Australian households and businesses by net zero and did nothing. The Coalition had almost 10 years to end the real housing pain caused by mass immigration and did nothing. There's imagined pain, and then there's real pain. Who's responsible for the real pain?"
The "constantly changing positions" charge, from the party that keeps adopting them
Taylor's other claim was that One Nation is "a random grab bag of poorly defined, contradictory, and constantly changing positions that leave no clear sense of who they are or what they stand for".
He even got the supporting detail wrong. Taylor introduced Malcolm Roberts as the party's “longest serving MP”. Roberts is a senator, and one who lost his seat in the 2017 citizenship fiasco and didn't return until 2019. One Nation's longest serving parliamentarian is Pauline Hanson, first elected to the House in 1996 and in the Senate since 2016, and it isn't close. She has argued the same case since she founded the party: cut immigration, cheaper power, put Australians first. Nobody in Australian politics has moved less in 30 years. The Greens comparison inverts the same way: he's likening a party that wants immigration cut and net zero scrapped to the party that wants the opposite of both.
Hanson from London: I'm not your enemy, and you know it
Senator Hanson answered the same day in a video posted to X, and the feedback reaching her had already made up her mind.
“I've got a lot of feedback about Angus Taylor's speech. People aren't happy with what he said, and his comments about One Nation and myself. I'm very disappointed with this.”
“You know, Angus, I'm not your enemy,” she said, pointing to his own budget reply speech, which she said had “picked up … a lot of One Nation's policy, so I don't agree with you having to go at me and what I stand for”. The Coalition followed One Nation's lead on cutting immigration and on opposing the Voice, she said, and his claim that her policies won't work is “not the truth at all”.
“The people of Australia are crying out for change. Listen to the people, Angus, and work with me. Stop denigrating One Nation and work together.”
Why now: Hastie's war, Secret Harbour and a November election in Victoria
Taylor didn't start this fight, he inherited it. For a fortnight the running has been made by Andrew Hastie, who vowed he'd rather be taken out in a box than bend the knee, reached for Sun Tzu, collected a public cheer from Anthony Albanese and set off rumours he could walk from the party. Thursday was the leader adopting his rival's war before it was used against him.
The timing gives the game away. A by-election is coming in Secret Harbour, the state seat that sits wholly inside Hastie's electorate of Canning, and One Nation is treating it as a dry run for Canning itself. Victoria votes in November, where Labor is already trailing One Nation and the Liberals are nowhere.
The strategy is to frighten defecting voters home with a trillion dollar number built on his own assumptions. But those voters didn't leave over costings. They left over immigration, energy and a party that stopped listening, and the latest Newspoll has One Nation on 28% nationally to the Coalition's 19%, ahead of them in every state.
If the speech was meant to win those people back, Secret Harbour will mark it first. Taylor aimed his biggest speech at the party his voters moved to, and the party he keeps borrowing from. Hanson's offer to work together is still on the table. The polls say she can afford to make it.
