One Nation vs Labor vs Liberals. By Rebecca Weisser in The Spectator.

Taylor, Albanese and Hanson each come from different backgrounds, and their thinking has been shaped by their working lives.

1. Albanese has spent a lifetime immersed in the left faction of Labor politics. He’s an extremely skilful politician.
2. Hanson has also spent the last 35 years in politics but as the quintessential outsider, and she is extremely accomplished at communicating the anger of those who are outraged at the absurdity, waste and arrogance of Australia’s self-appointed elite.
3. Taylor has spent most of his life outside of politics. Before entering Parliament in 2013, he spent most of his career working with businesses; that’s why he knows how to cost a program, anticipate its unintended consequences, and balance the books. Those differences in background are reflected in the way they govern or propose to govern. …

Costings of policies distinguishes One Nation and the Liberals:

One Nation wants to be regarded as a serious party of government rather than merely a protest party. Fair enough. But parties aspiring to govern should expect their policies to be scrutinised, costed and criticised. That is what Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has done — but One Nation’s supporters have not taken kindly to it.

Taylor’s estimate that One Nation’s four headline policies would cost around $1 trillion over a decade sparked outrage. It shouldn’t have. Conventional costings put tax indexation at around $371 billion, income splitting at about $69 billion, lower migration at roughly $200–225 billion and higher defence spending at perhaps $275–350 billion. Whether every assumption is right is open to debate, but the arithmetic is within the right order of magnitude.

The difficulty is not the arithmetic but the lack of detail. One Nation’s migration policy illustrates the problem. It proposes a 130,000 visa cap but provides almost no breakdown by category. Senator Hanson exempted Pacific workers, essential temporary workers and working holiday makers, but the remaining allocations have to be guesswork. One thing, however, is clear: unless skilled migration is slashed, the cuts would fall overwhelmingly on international students — one of Australia’s largest export industries. That may reduce pressure on housing, but it also reduces export income, university revenue and the supply of skilled labour. Those trade-offs deserve to be acknowledged rather than ignored.

One Nation supporters were furious at Taylor’s critique that their policies are uncosted, incoherent and lack any credible plan to pay for their commitments, other than to abolish parts of the bureaucracy, a proposition that would cover only a tiny fraction of the cost. They would prefer that Taylor sing along with the One Nation cheer squad while they relentlessly deride the Coalition as the ‘uniparty’, identical to Labor. …

Three immigration policies:

Here’s another difference between Labor, the Coalition and One Nation.

1. Labor recklessly increases international student numbers and visa charges, then simply pretends it has not created a housing crisis, instead increasing taxes on property investors.
2. One Nation arbitrarily chooses a migration cap and provides no details on how it will work.
3. Taylor says the Coalition will cap migration to match housing supply. …

Three strategies:

1. Labor deludes itself Australia can tax, regulate and decarbonise its way to greater prosperity.
2. One Nation proposes to sharply reduce migration, restrict foreign investment and shrink one of our largest export industries without acknowledging the economic consequences or addressing them.
3. Taylor argues that prosperity depends on expanding the nation’s productive capacity while managing those trade-offs honestly.

Voters may or may not agree. But pretending the Coalition is simply Labor’s identical twin in disguise ignores one of the most significant shifts in Coalition policy for many years.