‘australian values migration plan’: the Coalition’s renewed commitment to migrant threat construction and deportation policy mimicry    

Jemima McKenna 

May 2026 

On April 14, the Coalition released the ‘Australian Values Migration Plan’. The plan was initially delayed due to the Bondi Beach massacre and consequent social cohesion concerns, and now promises to put ‘Australian values at the heart of immigration policies.’ In his address to the Menzies Research Centre, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor criticised immigration in Australia as too high, with declining standards that have seen ‘our door opened to migrants of subversive intent’. Existing commentary has focused on practical constraints of the Coalition proposal and their calls to reinstate controversial measures such as Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEVs). This article focuses on the Coalition’s renewed commitment to constructing migrants as threats in order to justify exceptional policy measures such as deportation. 

The Australian Values Statement and the Anglosphere

The Australian Values Migration Plan calls for establishing compliance with the Australian Values Statement as a universal visa condition. The Values Statement emphasises freedom of religion, speech and association, commitment to rule of law and parliamentary democracy and a ‘fair go’, which involves embracing mutual respect, tolerance, compassion and equality of opportunity. While the Values Statement itself is innocuous, Taylor’s invocation of it is not. It creates a binary of desirable and undesirable migrants, with Taylor’s vision of an acceptable migrant hinging upon a vision of assimilation and ideological alignment with an Anglospherist imagining of Australia.

The Anglosphere is an imagined cultural allegiance between Britain and other western liberal democracies, linked through shared cultural, linguistic and historical similarities. An Anglospherist imagining of Australia encourages a rejection of Australia’s geographical identity within Asia and a commitment to ‘western civilisation’. Taylor invokes these ideas, arguing that ‘Those who migrate from liberal democracies have a greater likelihood of subscribing to Australian values compared to those migrating from places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists, and dictators.’ He establishes a clear binary of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant, with the first category describing those of ‘noble and patriotic intent’ versus the migrant of ‘subversive intent’, who ‘rejects our way of life - who does not want to change for Australia, but wants Australia to change for them.’ The migrants then constructed as threats to this Anglospherist imagining are ‘the Gazan cohort of 1,700 people here on visas presents a high-risk to our nation. That cohort must be re-assessed entirely with far greater scrutiny.’ Taylor qualifies this threat construction as ‘for an immigration program to work in the national interest it must discriminate based on values.’ In singling out refugees from Gaza that have already undergone extensive security screening, Taylor undercuts his premise that the proposed policy is indeed ‘values-based’ and not racialised. 

However, constructing the migrant as a threat to security and national culture is not a new approach in the Coalition playbook: this has been a consistent migration framing since the Howard government. In constructing the migrant as a threat to state security, to national values and to ‘housing, infrastructure, and services’, Taylor justifies the more exceptional measures the plan advances – including increased deportation spending.

Deportation policy mimicry

Deportation operates within the ‘state of exception’, outside the normal rule of law. States will often resort to extraordinary means such as indefinite detention and deportation to counteract a perceived, or indeed constructed, threat. Despite its exceptional status and the lack of empirical evidence of its efficacy, deportation is increasingly normalised, with the Australian government spending $408 million on a controversial deportation deal with Nauru for the NZYQ cohort just last year. 

As part of the new Coalition plan, Taylor promises to ‘Provide extra funding to law enforcement to identify, deport and remove unlawful non-citizens’. The undeniable backdrop to this proposal is the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations in the US, which indicates Coalition policy mimicry of deportation, engaged dually as a method of migration control and an appeasement strategy to its far-right faction. This is not the first time Australia has been inadvertently linked to ICE deportations, as Management and Training Corporation (MTC) is the contractor responsible for immigration detention on Nauru and Australian onshore detention, and is the same private prison company holding thousands of detainees in Texas, New Mexico and California. This demonstrates the diffusion of carceral networks of immigration detention in both Australia and the US, with a trend towards privatisation. 

Taylor justifies increased deportation spending as a way to ‘protect Australians’ way of life and restore Australians’ living standards by reforming our migration system.’ Inevitably, migration becomes the scapegoat for the rising cost of living, framing deportation as a mechanism through which to restore living standards. The emphasis on restoration appeals to the imagined ‘great past’, an unspecified period of time that we need to return to. The connotations are not as stark as former Senator Jacinta Njampijinpa Price’s vow to ‘make Australia great again’, but in a country whose migration policy is built upon the legacy of White Australia, it’s difficult to envision what is meant by the great past other than deliberate intervention into shaping the racial (disguised as value-based) demographics of Australia.

Conclusion

The Coalition’s Australian Values Migration Plan is less a plan than a renewed commitment to the reductive binary of desirable and undesirable migrants. While migrant threat construction and an appeal to Australian national identity are not new strategies, increased deportation as the restorative solution is. In blatant imitation of the US’s deportation policy, the Coalition portrays migrants as threats to an Australian way of life in order to justify extreme, costly measures as imperative.                                        

Jemima McKenna is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research examines external asylum agreements between destination states and third states.