New research shows immigration is not driving voter anger, yet the Coalition is targeting it anyway – risking further losses in the diverse, urban seats it must win back.

There is a question worth asking before any analysis of Tuesday’s ‘Australian Values Migration Plan’: what problem, exactly, is it solving?

Taylor’s announcement to the Menzies Research Centre was a calculated pitch to the One Nation flank – ICE-style deportation taskforces, social media vetting, a “safe countries” list, and “values” made legally enforceable. The language barely concealed its audience: migrants from liberal democracies, Taylor said, have a “greater likelihood of subscribing to Australian values” than those from “places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists and dictators.” Chinese Australians may have good cause to be concerned.

The premise was that immigration is a core driver of voter anger, and that the Coalition could recapture voters drifting to One Nation by hardening its position.

Our research, conducted with Accent Research across a nationally representative sample of 2,016 voters in March, tells a different story, and it is one the Coalition’s strategists should be reading carefully.

The wrong villain

When we asked voters who they blamed for rising prices and interest rates, only 6 per cent pointed to immigrants. Politicians led on 40 per cent, followed by CEOs of big businesses at 20 per cent. Nearly a quarter, 24 per cent, said no one in particular; it’s just the market.

The One Nation numbers are particularly instructive. Among One Nation voters, 59 per cent blame politicians and 9 per cent blame CEOs. Just 14 per cent blame immigrants, a figure that rises somewhat above the national average but still leaves immigration as a secondary explanation for the cost-of-living crisis even among the voters most receptive to anti-immigration politics. The primary emotion driving One Nation support is a profound institutional fury, not an immigration grievance dressed up in economic clothing.

This matters enormously for how we read Taylor’s play. The One Nation vote is, at its core, an expression of total distrust in the political class. Our data shows net trust in politicians at -90 among One Nation voters, an almost complete rejection of the entire institutional framework. The statement “almost anything is better than the way things are going now, I just want to vote for change” returned a net agreement of +81 among One Nation voters.

They want to burn the system down. They are not, in the main, waiting for an immigration policy from the Liberal Party.

The Coalition cannot compete with One Nation on this terrain. One Nation owns the institutional fury space. The Coalition will always run second here; an imitation cannot outperform the ‘real deal’. Aside from that, what Taylor announced this week is a policy designed to solve a problem voters are not primarily defining in the terms he has chosen, aimed at winning voters whose core grievance is with the political class itself, of which the Coalition is a conspicuous member.

The arithmetic of where elections are decided

The 2022 election shattered the Coalition’s relationship with inner and middle metropolitan Australia. 2025 compounded it. Across the two elections, the combination of urban, diverse, university-educated and younger voters has cost the Coalition more than twenty seats, seats that are now, structurally, gone. Not marginal. Gone.

The data explains why. Australia has fundamentally changed who it is. As of the 2021 Census, more than half of all Australian residents, 51.5 per cent, were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. In inner metropolitan electorates, that figure rises to nearly 66 per cent. In outer metropolitan areas, it sits above 61 per cent. The seats the Coalition must win back to form government are not filled with the Australia of 1996. They are filled with the Australia of now.

And Labor’s seats reflect this most sharply. Across the 94 Labor-held seats, the combined first and second-generation immigrant population averages 57.6 per cent. Across the 18 Liberal-held seats, it is 43 per cent. The nine National seats average just 23 per cent. These parties do not share an Australia. They represent fundamentally different demographic realities, and the Coalition’s policy settings are increasingly calibrated for the one that is shrinking.

There is another number worth sitting with. Inner metropolitan voters, the heaviest concentration of the immigrant generational cohort and the young, show the least pessimism of any geographic group in our survey. Thirty-four per cent say Australia is headed in the right direction, against 49 per cent who say the wrong direction. That gap is significantly narrower than in provincial Australia (24 vs 57 per cent) or rural Australia (28 vs 56 per cent).

University-educated voters, who dominate these seats, are even less pessimistic: 37 per cent right direction, 44 per cent wrong, by far the most sanguine of any education cohort. These are not voters looking for a cultural restoration project. They are not the audience for Tuesday’s announcement. And they are the voters the Coalition cannot afford to keep losing.

The two diasporas and what they hear

The Coalition’s relationship with Indian and Chinese Australians was already in distress before this week. Our research tells us something important about what happens when these communities hear the kind of language deployed in Taylor’s announcement: they think he is talking about them. Not migrants in general. Not “those people.” Them.

This is not an unreasonable reading. The “liberal democracies” framing was presented as a neutral values screen, but it lands with precision in communities that have watched their members face scrutiny, suspicion and periodic political targeting over many years. When you are told that people from certain places are less likely to share Australian values, you notice which places are being implied.

The demographic backdrop makes this politically acute in a way that is rarely acknowledged. India is now, at the national level, on the cusp of overtaking England as Australia’s largest overseas-born diaspora. When the ABS releases its annual population-by-country-of-birth data later this month, covering the year ending June 2025, India will almost certainly cross above England for the first time. As of June 2024, the gap was approximately 47,000 people: England at 963,560, India at 916,330. India has been growing at around 50,000 net per year. England has been declining by around 5,000 per year. The crossover is happening now.

In 1996, England’s diaspora was 956,680. India’s was 80,470. The country Taylor is implicitly invoking, the Anglo-settler Australia that imagines itself in the phrase “Australian values”, is not the country he is pitching to from opposition, and it is not the country he needs to win.

This shift has already played out at the state level, largely without political commentary. Victoria has had India as its largest overseas-born community since around 2019, with China overtaking England in 2021. In New South Wales, China surpassed England in 2016. Queensland’s largest overseas-born community has been New Zealand since the mid-2000s. England now leads only in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.

The median age contrast is the final punctuation mark. The median age of England-born Australians is 59.6. For India-born Australians, it is 35.8. The Greek and Italian-born populations sit at 76.5 and 73.7, respectively. One diaspora is the future of Australia’s demographic and electoral landscape. A values-based immigration policy with implicit European reference points is not a plan for governing a country that looks like this one. It’s political suicide.

The generation problem

Layer over this the generational data, and the Coalition’s predicament becomes structural rather than merely cyclical. Melbourne and Sydney’s inner metropolitan electorates lead the country in combined Gen Z and Millennial populations, Melbourne at 57 per cent, Sydney at 48.4 per cent, and Brisbane at 48 per cent.

These are the electorates where the Coalition once competed and increasingly does not. Gen Z is breaking hard toward the Greens. Millennials remain Labor’s most reliable metropolitan constituency, despite a portion, particularly in outer-suburban and provincial areas, migrating toward One Nation under financial stress.

None of these cohorts are responding to language that reads, to them, as a recycled version of a politics they have already rejected. The university-educated among them, concentrated in inner-city electorates with the highest immigrant generational density, are particularly unreachable through the values framing. The Certificate III-and below Gen Z and Millennial cohort, concentrated in rural and provincial seats, is more receptive, but these are voters the Coalition already holds, not the voters it needs to win back.

The trap

The tragedy of Tuesday’s announcement is that the underlying concerns driving immigration scepticism are real and politically tractable. Housing pressure, infrastructure strain, pressure on wages in specific sectors, these are genuine grievances that cross ethnic and generational lines, including within migrant communities themselves. Our data confirms cost of living is the dominant frame through which voters interpret almost everything. Politicians are the primary villain in that story, not immigrants.

A serious Coalition pitch on immigration would start there, with the cost-of-living consequences of rapid population growth, with housing supply, with the wages and conditions of workers competing with large temporary labour pools. That pitch has a genuine audience, including within the diaspora communities the Coalition has been losing. What it cannot do is pursue that pitch through a values test that, in the ears of communities central to electoral arithmetic, sounds like something else entirely.

What the Coalition cannot afford to lose again are the voters it was still competitive for in 2019: the Chinese-Australian professional in Chisholm, the Indian-Australian family in Menzies, the university-educated Millennial in Wentworth. These voters did not go to One Nation. They went to Labor and the independents. Taylor’s announcement is a further signal to them about their place in the Coalition’s political imagination.

Chasing votes, you will not win, whilst losing votes you cannot afford. That is the electoral arithmetic of what happened this week, and the numbers on Australia’s changing demography won’t wait for the Coalition to work it out.

Republished from Redbridge Intel, 15 April 2026