Australia has always done best when we have looked outward with confidence rather than inward with fear.
That is why the recent attacks on trade and migration from Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor are so misguided. The National and Liberal leaders are trying to turn real pressure on households into an argument for retreat. Both are offering the same populist manoeuvre: pick an external force, blame it for domestic failures, and present withdrawal as strength.
Canavan does it with trade. Taylor does it with migration. Different target, same instinct. Shut the gate, raise the drawbridge, and imply Australia would somehow be better off with fewer connections to the world.
That is not a serious economic strategy. It is grievance dressed up as policy.
Start with trade. Canavan wants Australians to believe that a more protected economy would somehow be a more prosperous one. But tariffs are not a growth strategy. They are a tax. They raise prices for households and input costs for firms. They protect weak businesses while making life harder for the exporters, manufacturers and service providers that have to survive in world markets.
Australia has tried this before. It did not make us stronger. It made us sluggish and expensive. The bipartisan trade reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were not an act of national surrender. They were part of a broader modernisation that helped turn Australia into a bigger, more productive, more competitive and more dynamic economy. More open markets forced firms to lift their game, adopt better technology, charge fairer prices and find new customers. That is one reason living standards rose.
Along with technology, trade brings disruption. It reshapes workplaces, industries, jobs and communities. But the answer to change is not to pretend the clock can be turned back. It is to help workers move into new opportunities, back regions through periods of adjustment, and make sure the benefits of growth are more broadly shared. Nostalgia is not an industry policy.
Canavan likes the language of making things. So do I. The Australian Government backs advanced manufacturing. We are working to strengthen skills, cut business bottlenecks, and ensure energy is reliable and affordable. But there is a vast difference between building industrial capability and pretending a tariff wall is a substitute for competitiveness. Making consumers pay more at the checkout is not nation‑building. Nor does it create the kind of business sector that builds, innovates, exports and invests for the long term.
Then there is migration. Taylor is trying to turn it into the master explanation for falling living standards. It is cheap politics. It is weak economics.
Australia is a migrant nation. We have been shaped by people who came here, worked hard, built businesses, raised families and became Australian. Migration has added to our workforce and our skills base. It has helped universities, strengthened business links, and widened the horizons of a country that has always depended on engagement with the wider world. It has also given employers access to talent, created opportunities, supported entrepreneurship and connected Australian firms to global markets. Australia's 2 most recent Nobel Prize winners were both born overseas.
None of that means every part of the system is beyond criticism. Strong population growth puts pressure on housing, transport and services when governments do not plan properly. Under Labor we've cut net overseas migration by more than 40 per cent from its peak when the Coalition was in government.
Blaming migrants for a housing shortage is a convenient way of excusing the Coalition's housing policy failure - their 9‑year period when the federal government vacated the housing policy field and built virtually no new homes. Over that era, house prices skyrocketed primarily because the system throttled supply. Migrants aren't the culprits - in fact, they're often part of the solution. With 28 per cent of people working in building and plumbing trades born overseas, you don't have to spend much time on a building site to meet migrant workers who are helping to build the homes Australia needs.
Taylor also edges towards the argument that social cohesion has been weakened because Australia has been too relaxed about who comes here. That is a debate that demands care. Australia has every right to expect newcomers to respect the law and embrace liberal democratic values.
A migration system should be rigorous, orderly, lawful and aligned with the national interest. But it is a profound mistake to slide from that proposition into the suggestion that openness itself is the problem and past migrants are sub‑standard human beings. Plenty of Australians whose parents don't speak perfect English will rightly feel offended by Taylor's implication that they are somehow lesser citizens.
The closed mindset is often sold as realism. In truth, it reflects a lack of confidence in Australia and in Australians. It assumes we cannot compete, cannot adapt, and cannot absorb change without losing ourselves. That is a strangely defeatist message for a country whose prosperity has long rested on trade, investment, talent and the capacity of business to respond to new opportunities.
Australia's history tells a different story. We have gained from the exchange of goods and ideas, and from the movement of people. We have enjoyed higher living standards by engaging with the world than we ever would have by putting up a Keep Out sign. Openness has not only enlarged the economy. It has made it more inventive and more flexible. In a small tribe, suspicion of outsiders may once have been useful. In a modern economy, it more often becomes a recipe for stagnation.
The real task is not to retreat from openness. It is to do the domestic work that openness requires. Build more homes. Invest in infrastructure. Lift skills. Enforce workplace standards. Spread the gains from growth more fairly. Give business the conditions to invest, hire and expand. When people feel secure in their own future, they are much less likely to be tempted by extremists who peddle anger and anxiety.
Canavan and Taylor are right about one thing. Global uncertainty has left many Australians feeling nervous. But they are wrong about the cure. The answer is to govern well enough that people can see the benefits of a strong, self‑confident, outward‑looking nation.
Australia does not need a politics of retreat. It needs a politics of confidence.
