The billionaire immigration paradox: Australia’s populists want fewer migrants, but the economy they champion needs them

 

There is a revealing episode in Gina Rinehart’s history that deserves another look.

In 2012, Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting was trying to build the enormous Roy Hill iron ore project in Western Australia. There was a problem: workers. Australia’s mining boom had created acute labour shortages and the company argued that it could not find enough people locally to construct the mine.

The solution was immigration.

The Gillard government approved Australia’s first Enterprise Migration Agreement for Roy Hill, permitting the project to bring in up to 1,700 overseas workers where positions could not be filled locally. The project was expected to employ about 6,700 Australians as well. Contemporary reports noted that Rinehart had long advocated easier access to temporary foreign workers to overcome labour shortages.

Fourteen years later, Rinehart has become one of the most conspicuous wealthy supporters of a political movement built partly around doing the opposite.

Reuters reported in May that Rinehart had been encouraging wealthy Australians disillusioned with the Liberal-National Coalition to support Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The relationship has involved fundraising events, use of company aircraft and a Cirrus aircraft worth about $1.5m donated to One Nation. Reuters also reported two $500,000 donations from executives associated with Rinehart companies.

One Nation, meanwhile, proposes capping visas at 130,000 a year, saying migration is putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and wages.

And on 31 July, Rinehart herself urged the Coalition to cut immigration as part of a broader prescription that included leaving the Paris climate agreement.

Something has changed.

Or perhaps the more interesting possibility is that two different political objectives have become entangled: what businesses need economically and what populist parties need electorally.

The economy is sending a very different message

Australia does not presently have a large reserve army of unemployed workers waiting to fill vacant jobs.

The unemployment rate was 4.4% in June 2026. Employment actually increased by 76,000 during the month.

Skills shortages have eased from their post-pandemic extremes, but they have certainly not disappeared. Jobs and Skills Australia continues to identify shortages across important occupations, while the Commonwealth explicitly describes skilled migration as a mechanism for filling labour-market shortages. The permanent migration program for 2026-27 remains at 185,000 places, with about 70% allocated to the skilled stream.

Look at construction, the industry supposedly at the centre of the argument that migration must be cut to solve the housing crisis.

Master Builders Australia says the country needs about 116,000 additional residential construction workers and more than 300,000 additional infrastructure workers in coming years. Its chief executive argues that Australia cannot meet its housing objectives without both domestic training and a properly functioning skilled-migration system.

This produces one of the strangest circularities in the entire migration debate.

Migration is blamed for increasing demand for housing. Yet Australia does not have enough tradespeople to build the housing needed to meet existing demand. Cutting the migration of tradespeople may therefore reduce housing demand at the same time as reducing the economy’s ability to build houses.

Master Builders goes further. It argues that skilled construction migration is being obstructed by slow qualification recognition and licensing barriers, and says about 18,400 permanent migrants already in Australia have building and construction qualifications but are working below their skill level.

The problem, in other words, is not simply “too many migrants”. It is also a failure to get the migrants Australia already has into the jobs Australia desperately needs them to perform.

The contradiction becomes even harder to ignore in healthcare and aged care.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says 51% of residential aged-care employees were born overseas. Health minister Mark Butler put the dependence particularly plainly in February: aged care, disability services, hospitals and regional general practice are heavily reliant on overseas workers.

Australia is also facing a projected nursing shortfall of around 79,000 by 2035 without reform.

Then there is defence. Australia is simultaneously promising an enormous expansion of defence capability while struggling to find the people required to deliver it. The Australian Defence Force has already responded to workforce shortages by opening recruitment to eligible permanent residents from New Zealand and subsequently the United Kingdom, United States and Canada.

Construction, infrastructure, mining, healthcare, aged care and defence are therefore competing for workers in an economy with unemployment of just 4.4%.

This is the economic setting in which Australia is being told that substantially reducing immigration is essential.

Rinehart understood the labour equation perfectly well

That is what makes Roy Hill so important.

The 2012 argument was straightforward. A huge mining project required thousands of workers. The domestic workforce could not supply all of them at the required time and place. If the workforce could not be assembled, the investment risked being delayed.

The Business Council of Australia defended the Roy Hill migration agreement on precisely those grounds. Its then chief executive Jennifer Westacott argued that there was a genuine labour shortage on major remote projects and that overseas workers were needed to “top up” the Australian workforce so projects could proceed.

There was nothing mysterious about it. Capital requires labour.

That remains true in 2026.

Mines do not operate because somebody owns mineral rights. They need geologists, engineers, electricians, fitters, mechanics, drivers, technicians and construction workers. Gas developments require specialist workers. Defence projects require engineers and advanced manufacturing skills. Housing requires carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other trades. Hospitals require doctors and nurses. Aged-care facilities require carers.

One Nation’s answer is that immigration can be drastically reduced while retaining “truly skilled migrants” for workforce gaps.

In principle, that is possible. There is a perfectly legitimate debate to be had about reducing poorly targeted migration while preserving, or even increasing, migration of workers in genuinely scarce occupations.

But that is a far more complicated proposition than the political slogan “stop mass migration”.

It also exposes the fundamental problem with presenting migration primarily as a number.

A migrant electrician and an international student are not interchangeable economic units. Neither is a migrant nurse equivalent to a wealthy retiree, a construction engineer, a partner-visa holder or a temporary farm worker. They impose different demands on infrastructure and contribute different kinds of labour.

The economically meaningful question is not simply how many migrants Australia admits. It is who comes, with what skills, at what age, to which parts of the country and into which occupations.

Enter the populist coalition

This is where political economy provides a more persuasive explanation than conventional left-versus-right labels.

Reuters’ reporting on the wealthy shift towards One Nation is instructive. Sydney stockbroker Angus Aitken, who committed $1.1m to the party after previously supporting the Liberals, explained the attraction in explicitly business terms: wealthy people were frustrated by regulation and believed Hanson and One Nation would cut through it.

That sits remarkably comfortably beside One Nation’s energy policy.

The party promises to abolish the Safeguard Mechanism, abandon net-zero policies, accelerate gas and oil development, cut what it describes as red, green, black and blue tape, and require decisions on project approvals within six months.

Reuters has also noted that Rinehart’s Hancock Energy owns coal seam gas interests in Queensland and conventional gas interests in Western Australia, while reporting on the close political relationship between Rinehart and One Nation.

None of that proves a quid pro quo. There is no publicly established evidence that Rinehart gave political support to One Nation in exchange for particular regulatory decisions, and it would be wrong to say otherwise.

But neither is it necessary to imagine such an arrangement to understand why wealthy resource-sector figures might find the movement attractive.

The benefits they may seek are visible in the policies themselves: lower regulatory costs, faster approvals, weaker climate constraints, expanded fossil-fuel production and a political environment more sympathetic to resource development.

Immigration may perform an entirely different political function.

What if immigration is the electoral glue?

This possibility deserves more attention.

Modern right-wing populism has repeatedly succeeded by assembling voters whose economic interests are not necessarily identical.

A billionaire mining owner, a suburban mortgage holder, an employee worried about wage competition, a retiree concerned about social change and a small-business owner angry about regulation may have very little in common economically.

They can nevertheless vote for the same political movement.

Immigration can help bind that coalition together because it touches several anxieties simultaneously: housing, population growth, congestion, cultural change, wages, access to services and perceptions that governments have lost control.

One Nation explicitly connects immigration to housing pressure, wages and infrastructure.

That message has been politically effective enough that mainstream conservative politics is moving towards it.

On 12 August, shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg proposed reducing net overseas migration to below 180,000 over the forward estimates, principally through reductions in international students, working holidaymakers and other categories while seeking a higher proportion of skilled migrants tied to industry needs. He acknowledged that the 180,000 figure was not yet formal Liberal policy. Pauline Hanson promptly claimed that the major parties were following an agenda she had set.

That is a striking shift. Only a year earlier Bragg had argued that Peter Dutton’s strategy of blaming migrants for the housing crisis had damaged the Coalition by alienating multicultural voters.

One Nation does not need to form government for its politics to matter. If a rising populist party causes the Coalition, and eventually Labor, to shift migration policy in response, it has already exercised considerable influence over national policy.

This is how political agendas move.

The billionaire does not need everything in the package

The mistake is to assume that a wealthy supporter must personally benefit from every policy advocated by the party they support.

Political coalitions have never worked that way.

A mining billionaire can favour a party because it wants faster project approvals and weaker climate regulation while accepting an immigration policy that creates difficulties for some employers.

A construction worker might vote for the same party because he believes less immigration will raise wages.

A homeowner might support it because she believes slower population growth will reduce housing demand.

Another voter might support it because of cultural or national-identity concerns.

The coalition holds together not because everyone wants the same thing, but because each constituency sees something it values.

Seen this way, the apparent contradiction between billionaire support and anti-immigration populism becomes less mysterious.

The immigration policy does not necessarily have to maximise the billionaire’s economic return. It may help elect politicians who advocate a broader policy package substantially more favourable to the billionaire’s interests.

That is an inference from the observed alignment, not a proven account of any individual donor’s private motivation. But it fits the structure of the political coalition unusually well.

There is also a legitimate argument hiding underneath the populism

None of this means that calls to reduce immigration should simply be dismissed as xenophobia or billionaire manipulation.

Australia has genuine capacity constraints.

Migrants need homes. They use roads, public transport, hospitals and infrastructure. Where governments permit population growth to outrun housing and infrastructure construction, living standards can suffer.

Employers should not be allowed to use immigration indefinitely as an alternative to training Australians, improving working conditions, increasing productivity or paying wages sufficient to attract workers.

Indeed, the Roy Hill agreement itself recognised that problem. Overseas workers were to be brought in only where positions could not be filled locally, were required to receive equivalent pay, and the arrangement included domestic training commitments.

That is a much more defensible model than treating migrant labour as an unlimited low-cost workforce.

But it also demonstrates why the sensible policy argument is about migration composition and labour-market design, not simply migration volume.

If Australia cuts 50,000 migrants but discovers that among those people were the nurses staffing regional hospitals, electricians building transmission infrastructure, engineers working on defence projects and tradespeople constructing houses, the country may discover that it has reduced population pressure by simultaneously reducing its capacity to solve the shortages supposedly caused by population growth.

Australia risks solving the wrong problem

The danger is that migration becomes a convenient political explanation for failures whose causes are much more complicated.

Housing is the clearest example.

Australia can reduce demand by reducing population growth. That is real.

But it cannot solve a structural housing shortage merely by suppressing demand. It still needs land release, infrastructure, finance, planning reform, construction productivity, materials and, above all, workers.

Master Builders’ current argument could hardly be clearer: the industry says skilled migration is necessary to build the houses Australia needs and that domestic training, while essential, takes years to produce qualified tradespeople.

The same problem repeats through the economy.

Cut migrants to relieve pressure on hospitals, but remember that the hospitals employ migrant doctors and nurses.

Cut migration to reduce housing demand, but remember that construction needs migrant tradespeople.

Expand Australian mining while restricting migration, but remember why Roy Hill sought 1,700 overseas workers in the first place.

Spend dramatically more on defence, but remember that Defence itself has widened recruitment eligibility because Australia lacks sufficient personnel.

The contradictions are not peripheral. They go to the heart of the emerging Australian populist project.

The question voters should ask

The important question is therefore not whether Australia should have “high immigration” or “low immigration”.

That binary argument is politically useful and economically crude.

The better question is whether Australia has a migration system designed around its actual productive capacity and social needs.

How many nurses do we need? How many builders? How many engineers? Where should they live? How rapidly can housing be supplied? Which employers genuinely cannot recruit locally? Which industries should be required to train more Australians? How should overseas qualifications be recognised? What minimum salaries should employers pay before they are permitted to sponsor workers?

Those questions are difficult.

“Stop mass migration” is easy.

And perhaps that is why the slogan has become so valuable politically.

For Gina Rinehart, history supplies an especially awkward footnote. When one of her own great mining investments confronted a serious labour shortage, the economic logic prevailed. Hancock needed workers, Australia could not provide enough of them, and overseas labour helped fill the gap.

Today she is helping to propel a political movement in which restricting immigration has become one of the principal rallying cries.

The lesson is not necessarily that Rinehart has contradicted herself. It may be more revealing than that.

The migration policy that helps win political power does not have to be the same policy that every wealthy supporter would choose for their own business.

If anti-immigration politics helps construct an electoral coalition capable of delivering deregulation, faster resource approvals, weaker climate constraints and a government more sympathetic to the interests of capital-intensive industries, then the apparent contradiction begins to make political sense.

Whether it makes economic sense for Australia is a very different question.

AUKUS adds another contradiction

AUKUS makes the immigration argument more complicated still. The government expects the nuclear-powered submarine program to create around 20,000 direct jobs over its life, while Osborne alone is expected eventually to become Australia's largest industrial workplace, employing about 7,000 people across submarine and frigate construction and sustainment. Yet Defence Minister Richard Marles has acknowledged that the secure workforces at Osborne and in Western Australia will have to be Australian citizens. He also conceded the obvious consequence: drawing thousands of skilled Australians into AUKUS inevitably removes them from construction, engineering, maintenance and other sectors that are already struggling for labour. His conclusion was striking in the context of the immigration debate. If Australia simply "closes the door" without considering where replacement workers will come from, he said, it can do considerable economic harm.

That creates an extraordinary policy collision. Australia is proposing simultaneously to undertake the largest and most technically demanding defence-industrial project in its history, build hundreds of thousands of homes, expand renewable and transmission infrastructure, increase mining and critical-minerals production, strengthen conventional defence manufacturing and care for an ageing population. All of those projects compete for engineers, electricians, welders, technicians, construction workers and other skilled labour. Restricting skilled migration does not eliminate that competition. It intensifies it. Because many of the most sensitive AUKUS positions require Australian citizenship, migration may actually become essential indirectly: migrants can fill civilian vacancies created when Australian citizens are drawn into the protected defence workforce, while some skilled migrants can eventually become citizens and enter that workforce themselves.

There is a sovereignty issue buried inside this labour problem as well. AUKUS was sold as creating an Australian "sovereign capability", commanded by the Royal Australian Navy and sustained by Australians in Australian shipyards. But Australia is starting from a position of deep dependence. Hundreds of Australians are being trained in US and British submarine establishments, around 1,000 Australians are expected to be trained by the Royal Navy, and the AUKUS partners are explicitly working to make their defence industrial bases more integrated. Most significantly, the nuclear propulsion systems for Australia's first SSN-AUKUS boats will not be manufactured in Australia at all. They will arrive as complete welded units from Rolls-Royce's submarine facility in Derby, with Australian taxpayers contributing £2.4 billion over ten years to expanding that British production capacity.

That dependence is supposed to diminish as Australian expertise develops. But if domestic workforce shortages prevent Australia from building the engineers, nuclear specialists, tradespeople and maintainers required to operate the enterprise independently, dependence on Britain and the United States risks becoming structural rather than transitional. US personnel and contractors are already being established at HMAS Stirling under Submarine Rotational Force-West, alongside British and Australian personnel, specifically to help Australia acquire the skills required to sustain nuclear submarines. There is nothing inherently inconsistent with sovereignty in learning from allies. The problem arises if Australia never reaches the point at which it can perform the essential functions without them.

That produces perhaps the sharpest contradiction of all. A political movement may campaign for tighter borders in the name of national sovereignty while simultaneously supporting a defence strategy whose feasibility depends on importing foreign technology, foreign expertise, foreign-built nuclear reactors and, during the transition, foreign military and industrial personnel. Cutting skilled migration while proceeding with AUKUS could therefore make Australia more, not less, dependent on the United States and Britain. The government might still call the submarines sovereign because Australia owns and commands them. But meaningful strategic sovereignty requires something more demanding: the independent national capacity to crew, maintain, repair, sustain and ultimately make decisions about a weapons system without indispensable external assistance.