- Posted on 27 Oct 2026
- 6-minute read
Thirty years of “please explain”
Thirty years ago, on 13 October 1996, 60 Minutes reporter Tracey Curro asked Pauline Hanson: “Are you xenophobic?” Hanson replied: “Please explain?” The moment became a national joke. But the laughter did not make xenophobia disappear.
Today One Nation proposes cutting migration by 750,000 places over three years. In 2022, 24% of Australian adults said immigration was too high. As arrivals surged after the pandemic, that share rose to 51% in 2025, the highest the Scanlon surveys have recorded.
Xenophobia, the fear of strangers, is real, even when it is misplaced. It deserves acknowledgement, not ridicule. But it is aimed at the wrong target.
Fear is not the same as racism
International agencies define xenophobia as behaviour based on “the perception that the other is foreign”. Racism, by contrast, rests on physical traits such as skin colour. The two often overlap, and one can easily lead to the other.
Today’s fear is mostly about money and housing. The Scanlon researchers found that concerns about immigration levels “more commonly relate to concerns around the economy and housing”. Among people who think immigration is too high, 71% still say multiculturalism has been good for Australia. Of that group, only 9% name immigration as the country’s most important problem; 58% name the economy or housing.
A multicultural success story?
We like to think so. In 2025, 83% of adults agreed multiculturalism has been good for Australia. But the support is often symbolic. Only 33% agree ethnic minorities should get government help to keep their customs and traditions.
Tolerance also turns into blame quickly. Among people who think immigration is too high, 79% agree that “immigrants increase house prices”. Those who believed it in 2024 were 2.2 times more likely than others to have stopped agreeing, a year later, that immigrant diversity makes Australia stronger.
And acceptance has a pecking order. Some 61% of adults feel positive about migrants from the United Kingdom, and only 4% negative. About two in five feel negative about migrants from Iraq and Sudan. The researchers call this “a persistent hierarchy of acceptance”.
In her 1996 maiden speech, Hanson said Asian migrants “have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate”. Thirty years on, the closer newcomers are to an Anglo-European norm, the warmer their welcome.
From tolerance to recognition
Xenophobia is not new and requires constant attention. Over 200 years ago, Goethe wrote the most important quote on how to deal with it: “Tolerance should be a temporary attitude only: it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to insult.” The keyword he used was Anerkennung, which means recognition but also appreciation.
To tolerate is to put up with something. Recognition and appreciation go further: they value difference rather than enduring it. Habermas made the same case for modern democracies. The majority culture must stop treating itself as the nation’s culture, so that all citizens can “identify on equal terms” with their country’s political culture.
How do we get there? Contact helps. Meeting people from other groups reduces prejudice, especially before racial and ethnical prejudices manifest. Start early. Prejudice peaks around ages five to seven, and contact with other groups helps reduce it. Schools matter: programs that bring children together, or teach empathy and perspective-taking, work best.
Homes need trains, roads and schools
Australia is not building enough homes. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council links poor affordability to insufficient supply. It expects about 980,000 new homes over the five years of the National Housing Accord, roughly 220,000 short of the 1.2 million target, before counting the effects of the conflict in the Middle East. This year it reported that affordability “continued to deteriorate”.
New homes need more than bricks. They need roads, sewers, transport, schools and childcare. The government’s own Housing Support Program funds “enabling infrastructure and amenities essential for new homes”. And they need more workers aka migrants, not fewer.
The Prime Minister calls Newcastle to Sydney high-speed rail “a housing policy”. The business case projects 160,000 new households in the Hunter. Yet so far only a two-year, $659.6 million development phase has been funded. Construction awaits a later investment decision.
Paying for it is the hard part. The Commonwealth ended 2025-26 with a $22.3 billion deficit and $971.4 billion in gross debt.
The tax that isn’t paid
Some of the money that could build this infrastructure never arrives. The Australian Taxation Office estimates that large corporate groups fell about $6 billion short of the income tax due in 2022-23, or 5.9%. After its compliance work, $3.7 billion was still unpaid. Since 2016, its Tax Avoidance Taskforce has secured more than $36 billion in extra tax from multinationals and large businesses. But the tax gap measures only what current law already requires. It says nothing about profit shifted offshore within the rules.
That is a global problem. Economists Thomas Tørsløv, Ludvig Wier and Gabriel Zucman estimate that “36% of multinational profits are shifted to tax havens globally”. In 2015, profit shifting cost Australia about 7% of the corporate tax it collected. Between 1985 and 2018, the global average statutory corporate tax rate roughly halved, from 49% to 24%. “One reason for this decline is international tax competition,” they write.
Xenophobia is real, even when it is misplaced. It deserves acknowledgement, not ridicule. But it is aimed at the wrong target.
Blaming the least responsible
So why does the anger land on migrants? Sociologist Colin Crouch notes that after the 2008 financial crisis, discontent was “mainly targeted, not at deregulated finance and a deteriorating public realm” but at old elites, immigrants and international organisations. The backlash “took the form of xenophobia rather than a class critique”.
Part of the answer, I would argue, is corporate power. Management scholar Daniel Nyberg argues that corporate political activity excludes “citizens' voices from public deliberation” and, although legal, “corrodes democratic processes”. They are the same corporations that fund the political campaigns of political parties, so do not expect politicians to speak up against corporate power. Fuelling xenophobia is an easier option for those at the helm.
The stakes are high. Habermas warned that “procedurally correct majority decisions that merely reflect the fears and self-defensive reactions of social classes threatened with downward mobility” will “end up eroding the legitimacy of democratic procedures and institutions themselves”. Such decisions, he wrote, reflect “the sentiments of right-wing populism”.
A better answer to “please explain”
So what do we do with the fear? First, acknowledge it. People worried about rent and mortgages are not fools, and most still value multiculturalism.
Second, move from tolerance to recognition and appreciation. Difference is not something to put up with. It is something to value.
Third, educate and aim the anger at a real gap: the tax that corporations are not paying. If they paid their fair share, governments would have more to spend on the trains and roads that connect new homes to jobs, and on the schools and childcare around them.
Thirty years on, that is a better answer to “please explain”.
Robert Finkeldey is a PhD Scholar of Corporate Corruption of Democracy, a Designated Country Expert for Australia for Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), and a Fellow of the Ultimo Institute at UTS.
AUTHORED BY
Robert Finkeldey, PhD Scholar of Corporate Corruption of Democracy, UTS
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