How Labor plans to cut migration + The far-right win Australia can't ignore

0:00A Lysna production. Hey, Chris Bear with you. Welcome to The Briefing. A far-right party last week surged to the front of a German state election, and it's the closest any has come to running a state in the country since the Nazi era. So why on a continent used to far-right swings is this one rattling so many? The party incorporates neo-Nazi and extremist elements as well, and of course given Germany's history, this is quite shocking to people that actual open neo-Nazis could have an influence over a major political party. That deep dive into the AFD, what it means for the growing far-right movement, and for us here in Australia, it's coming up in the second half of this episode. First though, let's get into the headlines with Sacha Barbergatt on Thursday, the 17th of September. Hey, Chris, we're starting today with politics, and after a six week delay, Labour will unveil its long-awaited migration plan today. Immigration Minister Tony Burke will front the National Press

1:04Club to outline the policy, which is looking to reduce Australia's intake by an additional 80,000 people to a target of 225,000 by 2028. Now the government's plan will try to achieve this by cutting the number of temporary visas, which is up to three million right now, and force more deportations for overstayers and crack down on onshore asylum claims. When it comes to international students, Labour will keep those intake numbers the same, but will effectively ban them from bringing family. Last year saw over 45,000 dependents and family members of overseas students granted visas. Migration is a major issue facing the country's politicians right now as the country struggles with limited housing supply, and increasing strain on infrastructure, health and education. Now one nation has already announced a plan to cut 750,000 temporary migrants over three years, but the coalition is reportedly struggling to come to a consensus on the issue, with the nationals and Liberal leaders at loggerheads over what direction to take.

2:06Back kind of end, reportedly backing a policy similar to one nation's, while Angus Taylor is preparing to announce a target of less than 170,000 migrants by 2028, and that's compared to Labour's proposed 225,000. Interestingly today, Chris as well, the ABS, the Bureau of Statistics, is releasing its migration data today, which will tell us how many people arrived and left and give us that net overseas migration number. So that will be interesting to see whether because Labour has actually been slowly, because we saw these numbers peak post-COVID, and Labour since being in power has slowly managed to bring the number lower. It's still too high for what they want it to be. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see where that number is today. A warning this next story is distressing. It's been revealed the mother of two children killed by their perth father inside a barley home, watched the horror unfold by a home security camera footage streamed live to her phone. On Sunday morning, the woman was on the phone with her husband, 56 year old Damien John Shaw, when she heard one of the children crying

3:10in the background before the line went dead. At the time, the woman was visiting her family in Jakarta. Bali police say the woman tried to call back, but Shaw wouldn't answer. So she checked security camera footage inside the home on her phone. And she watched as he chased their four-year-old daughter Laura while she said, I love you, Daddy, in English before he took her into a bedroom. Police say their six-year-old son Archie had already been killed. It's understood the mother frantically tried to get neighbours to access the home, but by the time they entered, the children had already been killed and Shaw had taken his own life. At that point, it was around two hours after the initial call between the woman and her husband. Authorities have described these cases unprecedented, saying local police have never had an incident of this nature captured on home security footage or a case of double murder suicide involving a foreign father. The couple had lived in the home since 2022 in the popular tourist and expat area of Legion, which is just north of Kudar. Their lease was signed up until 2029. And if the story has brought up any issues for you or someone you

4:14know needs support, you can call 1-800-RESPECT. Staying overseas, we're in new front in the Middle East conflict continues to grow between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed fighters The Houthis. Saudi wallplanes have pounded Houthi targets in Yemen overnight after the rebel group fired on Saudi cities and seized a key shipping lane in the Red Sea. One of two routes, the kingdom had been using to get its oil out while the street of Hormuz is blocked. The other, an overland pipeline that carries up to 5 percent of global supply was knocked out last week by a drone strike Saudi Arabia has blamed on Iran-backed fighters in Iraq. The U.S. has banned government employees now from traveling within 32Ks of the Yemen border, while D-Fad is continuing to advise Australians to not travel to the country amid the reciprocating strikes. The U.N. says more than 100,000 people have been displaced inside Yemen as a result, placing $9 million U.S. in emergency funding. We've heard from U.N. spokesperson, Stephen Jurasek, who yesterday called for all sides to protect civilians and allow aid

5:16to flow. We call yet again on the parties to protect civilians, to respect international humanitarian law, to respect international law, and to facilitate the safe and unhindered passage of humanitarian aid so we can reach all those who need it wherever they may be. New sides have devastated Yemen before, and the renewed fighting effectively ends a fragile ceasefire that had been in place since 2022. The Saudi-backed government holds the south, the Houthis hold the north, and their offensive is seen as a play to put more pressure on the West amid Israel and the U.S. is offensive in Iran. The escalating fighting has pushed the oil price to around $108 USD a barrel, and that's a near four month high. This has been bubbling away for a few weeks now, and it's very much been described as the new frontier to the Middle East conflict. It is, of course, all tethered to the Iran War, and we're seeing more and more Iran-backed groups trying to put pressure on the West in different ways, and by targeting this vital

6:17waterway, it's caused the Saudi government to panic because one, this is a major military setback losing territory that they effectively controlled is not good for them, but also they have been relying on this given what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz. And the waterway now that has been shot is one that they were using to get around that closure, and the way that Iran has been trying to claim control of different transporting routes. This is just another one that could potentially fall. The U.S. has been talking to Houthi leaders. A reminder, the U.S. signed a ceasefire with the Houthis last year. The U.S. says they're going to continue honoring that ceasefire. They're not going to join Saudi Arabia in striking, but they have condemned these later strikes. Interesting, the new development that they've said for U.S. officials to not go into the country or into the region that could spell a change in tune, but that's not something that we know just yet. Back home now, AI giant Anthropic has signed a deal to build Australia's biggest data center in Australia in Queensland.

7:18The $32 billion facility will be constructed in the Western Downs, and the amount of power it uses will be comparable to one and a half million Aussie homes. But the state's Premier David Christopher Lee says it will not increase power prices. Anthropic plans to get it up and running pretty quickly, aiming to start using the center next year, but the 725 hectares site still requires Council approval. And this, of course, all comes after the federal government locked horns with the Queensland government over new rules for the development of data centers in Australia. The federal government wanted all new projects to be powered by renewable energy, but the state managed to successfully argue that it could go its own way and use a range of energy sources, including coal and gas. It's understood Anthropic will have to foot the bill to connect this huge data center to the grid. And according to reporting in the ABC, it's understood that the site will be used to power its artificial intelligence chatbot, Claude, to answer questions, rather than using it to train AI models.

8:19OK. So it's going to be used every time you pop a little search bit. That's the data center that's going to be used. I don't understand, though, why we need such a large site for things that are already being powered and already being used. I know that the idea is that as more and more of us sign up to these things, we're going to need more infrastructure to get it done. But we're talking about a site so large that requires investment that is almost five times greater than that has been invested in the Brisbane Olympic and Power Olympic games. This is huge. And it's not lost on me that Queensland is chosen as the site after they got the renewable car bound. So it's something that I don't think we should forget this morning either. And it was 10 years ago that Kim Kardashian found herself the victim of a violent armed robbery in a Paris hotel room. And now she's received her compensation payout of a single euro. The reality star has been awarded the compo by a Paris court. And it is an amount she has asked for, according to a lawyer involved in the case.

9:19In a statement to the Associated Press Kardashian and stylist Simone Horouche, who was also there at the time of the heist, said the experience was deeply traumatic and its impact had stayed with them. They went on to say it's not about compensation, but accountability and recognition. Eight people were found guilty last year for their roles in the robbery during which Kardashian was tied up a gunpoint with the thieves then making off with $16 million Australian dollars worth of luxury goods among them. Her $5 million engagement ring from Kanye West. I can't believe it's been 10 years. I know. I remember they held on to the, there was the big Kardashian episode. I keep when they were still keeping up with the Kardashians that they did of her finally kind of talking about it. But yeah, when you read what happened to Kim, like awful. Yeah, I hope she got therapy because oh my gosh, like I just don't even know how you go through something like that and feel safe in public again, especially as someone like Kim Kardashian, who's so public and she's always out and about.

10:20And actually she did talk about that in the wake of feeling really unsafe, traveling and having to be in the public eye again. So yeah, no joke what went down in that Paris hotel room, but yeah, one euro compensation, which as they said, isn't about, it's not about getting money. It's about the recognition and the accountability. Yeah, and I do think if that one euro amount was higher, I don't think anyone would be upset at that. And I think about that today, I was like, would people have seen a bigger price tag and gone, oh, Kim doesn't need it, but I'm kind of like you're a victim of crime. Yeah, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't, I don't want to say, yuck, yeah, yum, because this is a terrible thing that's happened. But I don't think I would have been like, she didn't deserve it. But yeah, when you're good for her and yeah, 10 years on, I'm standing by it. I just can't believe that the times, times flown. Time flies when you're having fun. That is it for headlines today. I don't know if that one works. But yes, get us out of here onto the deep dive. Now it's time for your deep dive, Chris, and it's looking into the rise of the AFD party in Germany. It's a far-right party. What the consequences are for not only Germany and Europe, but also Australia, that's coming up after this.

11:21Something happened in Germany last week that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. A far-right party recorded a historic result in a state election, winning 39 of the 83 seats and coming within three seats of controlling the government in its own right. Now it'd be easy to pop that in the over there basket, but it's a win that drew a well-done from Elon Musk who's thrown his support behind the party and victories like this aren't just happening in Germany. Italy is run by a party with roots in post-war fascism. The far-right leads or sits inside governments in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden and Croatia. And over the weekend, Nigel Farage has reformed banked the biggest political donation in British history, 72 million pounds from two crypto-billionaires who say they want to even the playing field for the far-right party and get it ready to govern. So the money's flowing, the winds are landing, and the movement's getting closer and closer

12:25to power. Which begs the question, how exactly is the far-right gaining so much ground globally and how's it tracking in Australia, especially now that a no-neo Nazi group is fighting the government in the high court for a legal right to exist? To help us unpack it all, I'm joined by far-right researcher Dr. Kaz Ross from the University of Tasmania. Dr. Kaz, welcome back to the briefing to start us off, I want to set the scene. How do you define a far-right political party? What are some of the hallmarks? I think a far-right political party is almost certainly going to have a stance on issues like the nation, the people and race. This is a form of politics which defines a group of insiders and a group of outsiders. So for me, the far-right is an appeal to an in-group, which is the Anglo-Keltic heritage people in Australia. And opposing an out group which are recent migrants or not so recent migrants, people

13:30of a different skin colour race ethnicity. So for me, that is one of the dividing lines between sort of the far-right and maybe a populist right. If you look at, say, someone like Pauline Hanson in the past, she's talked about things like, well, as long as people assimilate, I'm happy for them to be called Australian. So I would call that a sort of a populist position. But when you start talking about, well, we have to celebrate our Anglo-Keltic Christian heritage, then you're moving into the territory of far-right. Well, let's apply some of that thinking now to what we saw happen in Germany last week. A party, the AFD, they manage to win a lot of seats in this state election. It's a bit of a historic win for that party. What can you tell us about the party and some of its core policies? So the alternative for Deutschland formed in 2013. And it's found a lot of support in the former East Germany. So this is a region of Germany that was forcibly reunited with West Germany

14:38and felt that they really are lost out in that reunification in terms of economics, leading to a population drain of all their talent leaving that particular area. So this is an area that feels a bit disenfranchised and a bit not connected. And they've been a breeding ground for these kind of far-right policies. The AFD itself has been slowly gathering momentum and getting more and more people elected to the German Parliament. They have, I think, over 150 members now in the German Parliament. And they're broadly based on an anti-European union stance and an anti-migration stance. Their popularity really took off after the refugee crisis handled by Angela Merkel where our borders shouldn't be open, we should be having closed borders and particularly we shouldn't be allowing Muslims into the country. They've managed to surf the wave of the global culture wars against LGBTQIA people,

15:42against trans people, even something like renewable energy. So they've had these very conservative stances on these cultural war issues and they've found support. So somewhere like the recent elections, they managed to get over 40% of the vote in the state of Saxony. And that was a big shock for the ruling Christian Democrats. Talk us through the significance of that victory and why it came as such a shock because the way I see it, at least when we're talking about Europe and far-right or the growth of the far-right and the popularity of the far-right, it seems to be one of the same now. You talk about far-right expansion and growing influence and you think about Europe. Why did that come as such a shock to those in Germany? I think partly because the sort of centre-right party of the Christian Democrats had recognised that there was a movement against migration and they themselves in the last year have been cracking down on migration and carrying out some anti-immigration policies. So they felt that it was kind of in the bag. Okay, people think migration's gone too far.

16:43That's okay, we've changed our policies. We've gone harder on migration. So this state that we've run for 20 years should still be ours. And they didn't take into account that people thought that that was too little, too late and that they wanted harder policies on something like immigration. Whether one state government, you know, it's one of the five states now formed out of East Germany, whether one state can have a big impact on the national immigration policy, is another question. The point is, is this going to lead to a trend where people say, you know, what maybe the AFD is an alternative and maybe we don't have to stick to these centre-right parties that are not really fishnour foul. You know, they're not going hard enough in the areas we want them to go hard on and they're too soft on the areas that we want them to crack down on. So I think it was a shock, particularly because the party incorporates neo-Nazi and extremist elements as well. And of course, given Germany's history, this is quite shocking to people

17:46that actual open neo-Nazis could have an influence over a major political party. Now, the AFD has pushed back on that far-right label. It says that it's not a far-right party. And some of the examples that you provided before would set it up as a conservative party. But then when you drop neo-Nazism and extremist elements in the mix, I can see how it starts to push more into far-right. Are there some other examples you could provide as to what makes this party sit on the far-right as opposed to just being a conservative party? I think remigration. If you have a policy on migration and you have strict border controls, you could call that a right-wing party. But when you start talking about remigration, you're talking about sending people back. And these could be people that have a legal right, a current legal right, to be in your country. Then you're starting to move into far-right and neo-Nazi territory. And basically, this is where you get the nativist element coming in.

18:48You know, who are the original Germans? Who are the real Germans? And those other not real Germans all need to go. And that's when you're moving into the far-right based on ethnicity, race, and religion kind of politics. So let's talk then how this win is going to be treated by other far-right leaders and groups abroad. How do you see this being interpreted? Oh, great. A great celebration. Even someone like Elon Musk has congratulated them and sees it as the start of a major change across the democracies of the world. For parties like the Restore, Britain party in the UK, they're even further right of the current far-right reform party. They see it as a great bolster. They say we need to go hard on not just migration but re-migration. That's the key word that the AFD really bring to this, which is we're not just hard on migration. We're sending people back.

19:49And their success sends a message to all those other far-right parties across the world or far-right groups. You can be successful if you just keep plugging away and pushing your message. So it's a really chilling case that although Saxony is a very small state, it's only has a population of 2 million. Its impact is huge. This win is a huge impact. This is the first state that will be controlled by the AFD. And let's hope it's the last. Well, let's talk about that hope because I guess when we do talk about the far-right, the idea is that it's a threat against democracy. It poses a very large threat against democracy. But is there some sort of counter-argument here that if this is what the people are voting, isn't this democracy in action? Yeah, that would be the argument I hear frequently from Australian neo-Nazis, which is let the population decide, let the voters decide. And it's certainly true that in general, there's been a lot of discontent

20:51against the kind of centre-right, centre-left party. Some people call it the uni-party or the blob that these parties are not really differentiating themselves out. They're not going too far to the right or too far to the left. And so there is an argument to be made. Well, people should have the choice to vote far-right or however they like. And of course, I mean, that's the idea in a democracy. However, these parties and these sorts of policies of remigration are based on racial discrimination and hate speech. And so we have to make a decision, you know, are we going to allow political parties that are preaching hate speech and are preaching discrimination? And this has come up very recently in Australia with the attempts by Australian neo-Nazis to form a political party called the White Australia Party. And just last week, they were in the high court in Australia, challenging recent hate speech laws which came in after the Bondo massacre.

21:56And they were arguing, well, of course, people should have freedom of political expression. They should be able to vote however they like. The Commonwealth was arguing that to allow a party that's based on race, which is only white people can join and it is for white people and promoting white people, breaches a number of international treaties and obligations. And he's also discriminatory and therefore unlawful. So I think that's where we have to kind of make a decision that some particular policies that might be dressed up nicely, like remigration. It doesn't sound that bad, right? It just sounds like getting on the plane and going home. But actually, when you drill down into it, this is something that can lead to concentration camps. It can lead to massacres. And I've actually heard the Australian neo-nazis joking about, well, we don't actually need airplanes to inverted quote marks, re-my-great people. So I think that when there's policies that are based on ethnic discrimination,

23:00racial discrimination, that these parties should not be on the table because they're actually unlawful. What do we know about the system of government that these parties advocate for? Because as I understand it, the white Australia party or the national or socialist network in Australia, they're not really advocating for democracy, right? No, the ultimate goal is an authoritarian neo-nazis state with no brown and black people in it. That's their ultimate goal. They advocate for freedom of speech, but it's only freedom of speech for neo-nazis. And they believe that anybody who's gay or communist or fat or black or brown should be sent out of the country. And that includes Australian aborigines in that category. So they're arguing for a white ethno-state ruled by men. Women should not have the vote according to neo-nazis, ruled by white men, for white men. So it's not a liberal democracy at all. They're using the tools of liberal democracy, such as the high court,

24:03to bring down liberal democracy or to attempt to. And they genuinely believe that over time they will be successful. Now, Kaz, before we let you go, what lesson do you think remains for Australian politicians and lawmakers right now that can be taken from what's just happened in Germany? I think the major lesson hasn't been taken, which is moving further to the right to try to capture a shift in sentiment around immigration, doesn't necessarily stop the far right from winning. And that's the lesson that we learned from the AFD. That by shifting your policies further and further to the right, you're not actually helping your own cause. And you're giving more and more to the far right, which want to take more and more. It'll never be enough. So I think parties need to stand their ground, and they need to debate issues like immigration and the cost of living openly and honestly with facts and figures and not let the overall global culture war win out on this one. Kaz, thank you so much for joining us again on the briefing.

25:05You're very welcome. That was far right researcher Dr. Kaz Ross from the University of Tasmania speaking with me there. And that is it for this episode of The Briefing. If you learned something new in this chat or you have a thought, feeling or a reaction, drop us a comment if you're listening on Spotify or sliding to our DMs at the briefing podcast on Instagram. I'm Chris Beur, catch you next time.