For thirty years, Pauline Hanson has warned that jobs in Australia are at risk from overseas labor.
With One Nation reaching 25% in the most recent Essential survey, she currently leads a party that is polling at all-time highs. What is her stance on AI immigrants, the greatest group of foreign workers to ever enter the Australian economy?
Katherine, a 24-year-old medical receptionist at a clinic in Sydney's Inner West, was summoned to a meeting with three coworkers four days prior to Christmas.
They were informed by management that calls would now be routed to a "natural computer AI." Emails would be automatically filed. A general computer-generated response would be sent to patients.
The four young ladies were fired when their six-month probation was about to expire, and to make matters worse, they were ordered to assist with setting up the systems that would take their place.
After that, Katherine gave her dad a call. He is an IT worker who oversees IT for an insurance fund, and he was furious. None of her younger coworkers had ever been fired. Stunned, they sat in the room together, not quite realizing that this was what professional life could be like.
News Corp. initially covered Katherine's story in May 2025, and it is not an anomaly. It reveals a huge gap in the political discourse surrounding the protection of Australian workers and is the shape of things to come.
Like in most prosperous democracies, Australia's immigration debate is based on a labor market argument dressed in cultural garb.
Too many people are vying for too few positions. wage pressure to decline. disturbance of long-standing communities. Regardless of how you interpret it, the fundamental logic is economic: new hires alter wage floors, career ladders, and negotiating strength.
This reasoning has been the foundation of One Nation's whole platform. 78% of One Nation voters think the next generation will have a worse life than their parents, according to a RedBridge survey. They are voting not just on cultural grievances but also on economic anxiety.
The issue that should be posed to Hanson, Angus Taylor, and Anthony Albanese is this: Why are we limiting human arrivals while allowing the highest influx of workers in history?
Because an AI agent, rather than a human, is the most significant new hire to arrive in Australia.
Not the chatbot that composes your kid's schoolwork as you look on. I am referring about systems that are currently in place within businesses that can take a list of tasks, plan the steps, carry them out using various software tools, and generate completed work while you are asleep.
Compressed into something that works without sleep, without pay, and without boundaries, this is administrative labor, professional support labor, and increasingly the early layers of professional judgment.
A person arrives in need of community, housing, education, transportation, and healthcare. They put in eight to ten hours a day at work. They are entitled to rights. They pay taxes, spend their earnings locally, and have children who will grow up to be citizens and workers.
None of this is necessary for an AI agent. It travels across the border at high speed. It comes with a subscription package. It is labor without the social infrastructure that comes with a new workforce.
The CEO of the US AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has issued a warning that AI might remove half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in five years and increase unemployment to ten to twenty percent.
Graduate employment has "deteriorated considerably," according to the US Federal Reserve. According to Oxford Economics, the harm is concentrated in technical domains like computer science and finance, which are also the areas where AI skills are developing at the quickest rate.
The Productivity Commission of Australia has recognized the revolutionary potential of AI, and its head, Danielle Wood, has stated that using generative AI is now essential to reversing the nation's worst productivity decline in 60 years.
A software CEO recently told the New York Times that his company only hired one data scientist to complete tasks that previously required a team of seventy-five.
The wage of an Australian employee hired by an Australian business circulates throughout the Australian economy. It covers taxes, groceries, child care, and rent. Before it settles, a dollar given in wages has several rippling effects on the local economy.
The money travels in a different way when that same business signs up for an AI service. It usually goes straight overseas to a few US tech companies, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, or Anthropic.
Groceries in Marrickville cannot be purchased with the subscription fee that took Katherine's paycheck. In Parramatta, it does not pay rent. Every month, it automatically leaves the Australian economy through direct debit.
When you scale this up, the consequences are dire. We are not just losing jobs if AI replaces a sizable portion of white-collar labor in Australia. We are creating a systemic current-account outflow by methodically moving wages that were formerly earned domestically into the coffers of international digital behemoths.
The productivity benefits stay with the companies. Silicon Valley's subscription income is derived from the labor savings. Australia continues to have high unemployment.
Why does one type of labor competition garner a lot of political attention while a much larger one receives very little?
Our threat-detection systems have developed to react to visible threats. On the horizon is a boat. a line at the boundary. A face that is not like ours. For generations, politicians have been aware of this. The most successful terror ads are always based on easily imagined scenarios. I hope you have trouble seeing an AI agent coming to Australia. No boat is present. No airport. Not a face. Through a subscription contract, a procurement portal, or an overnight software update, an AI agent joins the workforce. It is labor that never shows up.
People may shrug at a million jobs being replaced by invisible software, yet they will march in the streets over a hundred asylum applicants.
The vividness of human migration has served as the foundation for Hanson's political movement. However, she has nothing to say about a threat that is much more significant and more difficult to perceive. Her quiet is not calculated; rather, it is a lack of creativity shared by nearly all of the nation's politicians.
This is an example of a serious policy.
The public should be informed if a corporation fires employees because AI can perform their duties. Quarterly. by legislation. The easiest first step is mandatory disclosure, which is also the most difficult for politicians to oppose.
Tax foreign AI if it is extracting value that was previously distributed as Australian salaries. AI memberships will be subject to a digital services fee, with the proceeds going toward worker transition funding. Redesign entry-level jobs before it vanishes if AI takes over junior tasks. mandate that firms provide young employees with opportunities to develop their judgment and advance.
While we act as though AI is not a problem for the labor market, none of this will occur. The Albanese government does not say anything. The Coalition remained mute. Despite its outcry against immigrant labor, One Nation had nothing to say.
If safeguarding Australian workers is the goal, then all politicians claiming that title should respond to the straightforward question, "Where is your strategy on the coming AI workforce?"
Because arriving by plane or boat is the biggest interruption to Australian employment. The login screen is how it is coming in. Furthermore, we lack a firewall.
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