One Nation will include 100,000 more people in its migration targets, bringing in more people than planned for under Labor in net overseas intake, MP David Farley says.
The member for Farrer, who clinched Sussan Ley’s old seat from the coalition at a by-election earlier this year, said his party had decided to separate the net overseas migration figure into a “true NOM” which didn’t include other migration in their total.
He said One Nation’s policy of getting net overseas migration down to 130,000 from the budget forecast of 225,000 in the following four years, excluded people under a Pacific scheme, aged-care nurses and other in-demand skilled workers.
This total would mark an additional 100,000 arrivals, and an increase of 5000 people from the budget forecast.
“What we’re doing is we’re focusing on the NOM in its true form, and then we’ve got these programs that have been available now for over a decade that drive our economy,” Mr Farley told ABC’s Insiders.
“The raw number is not too different, but the reality is, where do we need them?
“We don’t need them in the great urban metroplex – we need them out to be productive, working in agriculture, engineering, mining.”
Opinion polls have shown that voters trust One Nation to manage migration better than the two major parties.
It comes as One Nation leader Pauline Hanson declared she would take her racial discrimination challenge with Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to the High Court.
Senator Hanson lost a Federal Court appeal last month against a ruling which found her in breach of racial vilification laws after she told the Greens senator to “piss off back to Pakistan”.
Asked if racial discrimination laws should be changed, Mr Farley said he wasn’t convinced they should be.
He said his leader’s comments “can be taken as an insult” but wasn’t inciting racial discrimination.
“Hanson’s got every right to challenge it,” Mr Farley said.
“I think if we went through the pub test, I know which way it would go. It’d go in Pauline’s favour.”
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