‘Fewer People, Fewer Problems’: The Convenience of Far-Right Populism
The complaint circulates with impressive confidence. Immigration is too high. Housing is unaffordable. Wages no longer stretch. The solution presents itself with admirable simplicity: reduce the number of people. Fewer tenants, fewer problems. The system itself requires no modification. It has merely been crowded.
This politics mistakes congestion for causation and treats proximity as proof of guilt. It proceeds by subtraction—legible, and most importantly, photogenic. People can be counted, people can be removed. Markets rarely pose for portraits. They, by contrast, are abstract, impersonal, and prone to resisting instruction.
In Australia, support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has risen into double digits, with recent polling placing it above 20% nationally. Among its voters, immigration ranks as the central political concern. Distrust of political institutions is markedly higher than the national average. The figures are not puzzling. When institutions fail to deliver security, explanation becomes urgent; the nearest visible change is promoted to primary cause.
Housing scarcity is real. Rents have climbed at their fastest rate in decades; vacancy rates remain tight. Younger Australians face entry prices that bear little resemblance to median wages. But public housing has not been built at scale for a generation. Planning regimes restrict density where demand concentrates. Tax settings reward speculation. Shelter has been treated as an appreciating asset class long before it was treated as a social guarantee. These arrangements are longstanding, technical, and difficult to photograph.
Net overseas migration did not design negative gearing. International students did not freeze land release. Refugees did not financialise housing. Yet of all the variables in the housing market, one has the advantage of being human, visible, and conveniently removable. The market is treated as weather: unfortunate, unavoidable, and best discussed in tones of mild regret. Migrants, by contrast, can be given an address. Markets are rendered apolitical; migrants are rendered actionable.
This substitution is efficient. Structural reform is slow, technical, and confrontational. It requires challenging incumbents, reallocating resources, and absorbing political cost. Reducing migration is administratively neat and theatrically satisfying. It offers the pleasure of diagnosis without the inconvenience of construction. No spreadsheets are required.
Right-wing populism excels at clarity. It proposes that national decline has an identifiable author. It promises restoration through subtraction: fewer people, unchanged systems, and the reassuring sense that something has been done. The appeal is emotional before it is empirical. Visibility becomes evidence.
Australia is not unique in this approach. The rise of the Sweden Democrats, the durability of Donald Trump in the United States, and the afterlife of Brexit politics shaped by Nigel Farage all follow the same conversion. Economic dislocation is re-described as demographic intrusion. Wage stagnation becomes cultural dilution. The social contract is condensed into a border checkpoint.
Of course, there are real pressures beneath this rhetoric: deindustrialisation, housing markets accelerating beyond wages, the erosion of civic institutions that once mediated conflict. But the leap from pressure to person is interpretive. It is not inevitable. It is chosen. Blame moves more smoothly sideways than upward.
Among One Nation supporters, distrust of politicians and mainstream media runs deep. This distrust is not irrational. When political language about growth and opportunity fails to register in lived experience, scepticism follows. What is notable is where that scepticism comes to rest. It does not typically settle on regulatory design or capital concentration. It relocates toward those who rent rather than own, who arrived rather than inherited. Resentment is treated as analysis. Direction substitutes for accuracy.
The difficulty is that subtraction is not construction. Reducing migration without reforming housing supply does not produce affordability. Restricting student visas without addressing labour market precarity does not generate secure employment. It may ease demand at the margins; it does not redesign the system. The border begins to substitute as policy imagination.
This is how such movements can succeed electorally without altering fundamentals: rearrange who is blamed, not how resources are distributed. They govern feeling while leaving the economic architecture largely intact. The satisfaction is expressive, the scarcity remains material.
There is a generational vulnerability embedded in this logic. Younger voters facing insecure work and unattainable housing are primed for explanations that personalise obstruction. When pathways to stability narrow, the suggestion that the blockage is human rather than structural acquires a certain coherence. It offers a person to blame, a face to argue with. Zoning law does not argue back. The appeal, in this sense, is admirably simple.
Over time, however, a politics that trains citizens to read every shortage as the fault of the newcomer reshapes civic life. Belonging becomes conditional and suspicion becomes an organising principle. Once established, this habit rarely confines itself to migration. Every failure acquires a culprit.
Critics often respond with moral denunciation. They label voters xenophobic and withdraw. This is insufficient. Housing insecurity and wage pressure are not inventions. Institutional distrust is not imagined. The error lies not in the experience of strain but in its translation. When systemic design is narrated as demographic intrusion, reform is displaced by ritual accusation.
Why argue with an abstract bureaucratic framework when a person will do? Blame is a simpler skill than governance. It requires no planning reform, no confrontation with incumbency, no redistribution of risk or reward. It requires only a figure close enough to name. A politics built on this convenience may feel decisive. It may even endure. But it does not build. And societies that forget how to build eventually discover that exclusion does not produce shelter. It produces smaller rooms, thinner walls, and calls it ‘efficiency’.
Note: This article is awaiting links of sources.
Image courtesy of Niv Bavarsky via New York Times, ©2018. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
