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May 14, 2026 — 5:00am
During a post-budget press conference on Wednesday, NSW Liberal leader Kellie Sloane was asked whether she believed Australia’s migration intake was too high.
“Yes, they are too high,” she said after a bit of back and forth. “They’ve been too high for too long. Two million on Albo’s watch is too much, when it can’t keep up with infrastructure.”
When she declined to nominate her own migration target – “well, let’s start with the prime minister’s own targets, which he can’t seem to meet” – she was asked about One Nation’s stated plan to slash net overseas immigration to a rate of 130,000 a year.
“I’m not going to get into their policies,” Sloane said. “We need sustainable migration. It has to be fair and workable.”
Sloane is an effective communicator, and comes across as quite likeable in interviews, but she is talking about the wrong things. In fact, if you were a casual observer of politics in NSW, you’d be forgiven for thinking that immigration and One Nation are all Sloane talks about. In an interview with ABC Sydney on Tuesday, the questions were all along the same lines.
The Liberals had been given “a kick up the backside” in the byelection for the federal seat of Farrer on the weekend. Yes, immigration was too high “because we haven’t been able to keep up with housing in our state, that’s a fact”. No, she had not decided whether the Liberals would preference One Nation. “I’m just going to be honest with people and say that at this part of the political cycle, I am not even considering it.”
After a surge of optimism after Sloane took over as Liberal leader late last year, the result in Farrer – in which her party received 12 per cent of the primary vote, and the combined Liberal-National vote was about 22 per cent – the Coalition is again taking on water, thanks to One Nation.
In the NSW parliament, Labor is eagerly exploiting the opposition’s woes. During the past fortnight, Labor has used its question time Dorothy Dixers — usually an opportunity for the government to ask itself what a good job it’s doing — to test-run attack lines on the Liberals.
One Nation has featured ad nauseam. The government has been kicking the Liberals for not ruling out a preference deal with Pauline Hanson’s party at the state election next March and claiming the Libs are shifting to the right to placate One Nation voters on issues such as renewable energy.
“She will not give a straight answer on One Nation preferences and will not give a straight answer on renewable energy,” said NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully in one typical exchange.
That the government is seeking to criticise the Coalition over this perceived attraction to One Nation, while also plainly seeking to exploit the Hanson party’s rise for its own electoral benefit, is fairly obvious. But Labor’s attacks also carry the weight of some evidence.
Since the Nationals ditched the net zero target from their policy platform, the party’s MPs have been vocal critics of how renewable energy zones – established by the former Coalition government in NSW – have been rolled out.
This week, Sloane met a group of landowners from Walcha in New England to hear their concerns. When asked at a later press conference whether the Liberals were considering shifting their position, she said: “We’re listening because we believe Labor is bungling the rollout.”
Criticising Labor over the rollout and criticising the renewable energy zones themselves are two very different things, obviously, but it speaks to the evergreen problem the Liberal Party has in walking a line between appealing to both the city and regional electorates it represents.
A former television journalist and not-for-profit CEO, Sloane was elected Liberal leader in November, during her first term in parliament. It was a breath of fresh air for a party which, as the Herald wrote at the time, had “suffered a form of rigor mortis” since Labor’s defeat of the Dominic Perrottet-led Coalition government in 2023.
Almost immediately after Sloane’s election came the Bondi massacre. That upended any plans for a summer spent with her head in policy briefing books. It has meant that Sloane and her Liberal inner-circle have probably had only about three months of somewhat normal programming. And, with only 10 months until the election, the Liberals are seemingly still struggling to articulate, or agree, on what the party should look like into the future.
On that score, the upper house Liberal MP Chris Rath has some pointed advice for his own party. “We will never be able to out-One-Nation One Nation,” Rath warned in a speech to parliament. “We will never win by being home-brand Hanson or One Nation lite. People will just vote for the real thing.”
Rath’s solution – to more heartily embrace free-market economics – runs counter to the logic of Liberals such as Andrew Hastie or the federal Nationals’ leader Matt Canavan, who believe the Coalition should adopt a more interventionist approach in economic policy. “No one’s going to reward us for a final stand for neoliberal politics,” Hastie said in March.
It is a good debate to have, but it threatens to rapidly become redundant if the Liberals keep polling 12 per cent in seats such as Farrer.
In other words, Sloane desperately needs to change the conversation away from the things that Labor and One Nation want the Liberals to talk about. The only way to do that is to start rolling out some policies of their own.
Michael McGowan is the NSW state political editor.
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