Australians are being crushed by mortgage repayments and a cost-of-living squeeze that Labor's own members admit is driving voters to One Nation. Labor's answer, laid out in the platform it will take to its national conference, is more Welcome to Country and a national anti-racism strategy.
What Labor is changing at its national conference
Facing the surge in support for Pauline Hanson, Labor has rewritten its draft national platform ahead of its 50th national conference in Adelaide, according to The Australian. The changes commit the party to developing a national anti-racism strategy, formalise its support for Welcome to Country ceremonies, and keep it tied to the "principles" of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
A senior Labor source said the anti-racism strategy was added since an earlier draft as a "direct response" to One Nation's rise. The draft reads: "Labor will develop and implement a national anti-racism strategy to address racism, promote multiculturalism and support education and prevention initiatives."
On the ceremonies, the platform now states: "Labor recognises the importance of welcome to country and acknowledgement of country ceremonies." There was no such recognition in the party's 2023 platform.
The cost-of-living crisis it isn't answering
The tell is what's driving the change. Inside Labor's own ranks, the concern isn't racism, it's mortgages. The party's own platform debate concedes that interest rate rises are, in its words, a "blunt instrument which hurts workers and vulnerable Australians first", and one Labor figure warned that rate pain is "sending mortgage holders into the arms of Pauline Hanson".
Labor for Housing convener Julijana Todorovic, pushing to soften the platform's language on the Reserve Bank, put it plainly: the party is losing voters to One Nation on "anti-institutional" and "anti-establishment" sentiment. "If Labor says that we support the use of interest rate rises, that is going to further alienate a group of people that we need," she told The Australian.
So Labor knows exactly why it's bleeding support. Its headline response is not relief for those mortgage holders. It's a racism taskforce and a ceremony.
Albanese calls a seven-minute Welcome to Country 'wonderful'
The Prime Minister's priorities were on display in Perth, where he sat through a seven-minute Welcome to Country at a five-star hotel function hosted by the Chamber of Minerals and Energy, and could not have been happier.
"It uplifted all of us, didn't hurt anyone, it's about bringing people together," Albanese said, according to Sky News, thanking the speaker for the "very warm Welcome to her Country".
"Didn't hurt anyone" is a low bar for a Prime Minister with a cost-of-living crisis on his hands. While he applauded a seven-minute ceremony at a mining industry lunch, the mortgage holders his own colleagues say are fleeing to One Nation got no such warmth.
The Anzac Day booing that lit the fuse
This debate didn't come from nowhere. At Anzac Day dawn services, Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies were booed by sections of the crowd, at Martin Place in Sydney, where Kabi-Kabi and Gurang-Gurang man Uncle Ray Minniecon was met with almost a minute of booing, and at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, with police issuing move-on orders after disturbances at Kings Park in Perth. The booing was widely condemned as disrespectful on a day of remembrance, but the fallout was real enough that the Returned and Services League confirmed it would review whether the ceremonies belong on Anzac Day at all.
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce condemned the booing, but drew the sharper line on the ceremonies themselves.
"People who have served our nation, who signed on the dotted line, they don't need to be welcomed to their country," Joyce said. "They've put their lives on the line for our country, they'd been willing to die for our country, and when you say 'welcome to' it suggests that they're not part of it."
Even Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says Welcome to Country has become divisive
The clause backing Welcome to Country was added after Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said the ceremonies had become "overdone" and "devalued", and after Liberal Party president Tony Abbott accused Labor of delegitimising the national flag by flying it alongside Indigenous flags at civic events.
"I think Welcome to Country has been overdone in Australia. I think it's devalued those Welcomes to Country," Taylor told reporters.
But the sharpest critic isn't from the Coalition. Warlpiri senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Aboriginal woman, has called the daily rollout of the ceremonies "definitely divisive".
"Australians don't need to be welcomed to their own country," Price said. "It's not welcoming, it's telling non-Indigenous Australians 'this isn't your country', and that's wrong. We are all Australians and we share this great land."
Labor's defence, put by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, is that the ceremonies are simply "a respectful thing to do". That's the point of difference. When the ceremony is performed at every meeting, flight and match, it stops being an occasional mark of respect and starts sorting Australians into hosts and guests by ancestry. Done once, it honours. Done daily and mandatory, it divides.
Doubling down on everything One Nation opposes
The platform is a study in a government talking to itself. It stands by the "principles" of the Uluru Statement while quietly walking away from actually implementing it, leaving treaty and truth-telling to the states after the Voice referendum was rejected by a majority of Australians in every mainland state. It commits to promoting multiculturalism at the very moment One Nation is winning the argument against it, as we've reported with the party's push to scrap the federal multiculturalism minister and Victoria's decision to hand $4.9 million to multicultural groups while $167 billion in debt.
Every one of these moves is aimed at the things One Nation opposes, not at the Australians One Nation is winning over.
The bigger pattern
This is the same fight playing out everywhere. Pauline Hanson's argument is one nation, one people, everyone equal under one flag, the monoculture case we explained here. Welcome to Country done daily, and a platform that ranks belonging by bloodline, is the institutional opposite of it.
Australians worried about paying the mortgage were told, in effect, that Labor hears them, and the fix is a ceremony and a taskforce. On current polling, they're answering at the ballot box.
