Senator Barnaby Joyce accuses Taylor of “basically reading off the One Nation script”.
He says immigration must be linked to the skills the country needs in certain areas, while making sure people from “febrile” areas of the world are “precluded”.
“As what we’ve said all the way along, we look at a stocktake of what Australia can absorb,” Joyce told 7.30.
“As we know we’ve been bringing in about the population of Canberra a year. It sort of waned a little bit lately, but we just didn’t have the houses, we didn’t have the schools. We certainly didn’t have the dams, we didn’t have the universities, we didn’t have the hospitals.
“And it’s Australian people who are waiting in emergency departments and you know, fighting.”
Joyce says he wouldn’t have stayed with the Coalition even if it had adopted harsher immigration policies like these.
Asked if Taylor has “stopped the flow” towards One Nation with this speech he responds simply: “No”.
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