One Nation's immigration messaging unravels as MP contradicts party's restrictive stance

David Farley, the One Nation MP for the rural seat of Farrer in south-western New South Wales, walked onto the ABC's Insiders program on a Sunday morning in late August and said something that would force his party leader into damage control within hours. The party's signature immigration target of 130,000 people per year, he explained, was "not too different" from what the Labor government was doing. It was a statement that seemed to unravel months of One Nation's carefully constructed messaging about being the party of immigration restriction.

Farley's argument hinged on a distinction that, to most voters, would have felt like splitting hairs. One Nation's 130,000 figure, he said, represented net overseas migration in what the party called its "true form"—a baseline that excluded skilled workers, backpackers, and labourers brought in through the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme. When you added those categories back in, he suggested, the party was actually planning for a minimum of 100,000 additional migrant workers on top of the 130,000. That meant room for roughly 40,000 Pacific workers and 70,000 skilled migrants, including aged care nurses. The total, he implied, was not drastically different from the government's approach.

Farley's electorate depends on migrant labour in ways that make the distinction personal. More than two-thirds of workers in his seat's slaughterhouses and food processing plants are migrants. He spoke about the need for flexibility in the system, about agriculture and engineering and mining—industries that, in his view, could not function without people willing to come from overseas. "We don't need them in the great urban metroplex," he said. "We need them out to be productive." It was a pragmatic argument, rooted in the reality of his constituency, but it contradicted the party's public positioning.

Pauline Hanson, One Nation's leader, issued a clarification on social media that same afternoon. The party's policy, she insisted, was to cut net overseas migration to 130,000, period. She suggested that seasonal agricultural workers who did not meet the Australian Bureau of Statistics residency test were not counted in the official figure. But this claim was itself inaccurate. Seasonal workers who live in Australia for 12 months over a 16-month period are, in fact, included in the net overseas migration calculation. The Nom, as it is known, measures the difference between people entering and leaving the country over that timeframe, including Australians returning home but excluding short-term tourists.

This was not Farley's first stumble on the issue. Hanson had already been forced to correct him once before, after he suggested during the campaign that Australia's net overseas migration of 306,000 the previous year was "probably not" too many. At that time, Hanson said she had counselled him on the comments, while Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals MP who defected to One Nation in December, described it as a slip-up under campaign pressure.

The confusion exposed a deeper problem. One Nation had struggled for months to articulate a coherent immigration policy, with inconsistent messaging about whether its target figure referred to net overseas migration or permanent migration—two different measures that produce very different numbers. The shadow home affairs minister, Jonno Duniam, seized on the chaos. "One Nation has somehow managed to turn one headline number into at least half a dozen different immigration policies," he said, adding that the party was having "extraordinary difficulty answering the most basic question of all: how many migrants would actually come to Australia under its policy?"

Energy Minister Chris Bowen, speaking for the government, suggested that Farley's comments indicated One Nation now agreed with Labor's approach—a characterization that would have stung a party built partly on opposition to the government's immigration settings. The Coalition, meanwhile, declined to specify its own target but indicated it would be "well below 200,000." For context, the government was forecasting net overseas migration to drop to 245,000 in 2026-27 and 225,000 in 2027-28, down from a post-pandemic surge that had reached 301,000 the previous year.

What remained unclear was whether Farley's comments represented a genuine shift in One Nation's thinking or simply the kind of local advocacy that any MP from a rural electorate might offer—a plea for the workers his region needs to survive. The party's messaging, in any case, had fractured in public view, leaving voters and political opponents alike uncertain about what One Nation actually intended to do about immigration if given the chance to shape policy.