In the same week that rental prices reached another record high, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave Narendra Modi a rockstar welcome in Melbourne.
“We are a better nation because we have you in it. You are the living bridge between Australia and India,” he told the crowd of thousands of Modi fans.
“Australians,” he told them, “have been enriched by your bringing your culture here, and adding it to our multicultural character.”
It wasn’t simply a symbol of diplomacy – when was the last time a British Prime Minister got a stadium welcome?
It was a sign of where Labor sees an increasingly important political constituency – and likely a future source of electoral strength.
Don’t shoot the messenger – that’s not according to me, that’s according to the ABC.
“He wants to make all of those Indian Australians his voters, right?” host Patricia Karvelas asked the Insiders the same week.
“There is,” the panellist admitted, “an electoral advantage for the Prime Minister to bring that diaspora on side.”
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that India has now overtaken England as Australia’s largest overseas-born population.
Some 971,000 India-born people now live in Australia – around one in every 28 Australians.
India also remained the largest source of migrant arrivals, with approximately 74,500 India-born migrants arriving during the last financial year.
Labor is favoured by recently arrived voters, pollsters have revealed – a fact surely not lost on the party’s strategists.
Whether it was engineered this way on purpose, or whether it’s just a happy accident, the electoral incentives for Labor created by mass immigration are impossible to ignore.
Which perhaps explains a lot about their rather relaxed attitude on immigration.
Despite record high rental costs, a housing crisis, strained public services, and a skyrocketing One Nation primary vote, Labor has still refused to cut immigration by any serious amount.
That is also despite immigration and its endless side effects being deeply unpopular among voters, including, increasingly working-class Labor voters.
Do they know it’s unpopular?
Of course, they just don’t really care, because they don’t have to care.
This is Albo’s great immigration gamble.
Their roll of demographic dice is about whether they can win more voters out of newer groups – see: new migrants – faster than they lose voters due to the unpopularity of mass immigration.
Sure, this may mean the continued controlled demolition of Australian living standards.
But pull this off, and they can expect to be in power for a long time.
There is one real risk to Labor’s power plan.
And that is a serious challenge from an organised, populist, largely working-class right.
It’s what happened with Donald Trump, and it’s what is happening in the United Kingdom at the moment with Reform UK.
There, the Labour government is throwing everything they can at Nigel Farage and his party to try and stop his party from winning the next election.
As Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings warned on a podcast in January, with eerie prescience, Farage’s opponents would “leak medical records”, “leak tax records” and even bug his phone, saying they will “do anything” to prevent him from winning.
But before that happens here, it’s likely that Labor and Anthony Albanese are betting on something much simpler to keep them in power.
In-fighting.
For weeks now, figures from both One Nation and the Coalition’s camps have been in headlines and on screens trading blows, offering olive branches, stealing policies, calling for war, and ruling out coalitions.
Now, nobody really knows where the parties stand – do they hate each other or not? Will they work together or not?
It changes by the day, and we’re still two years from an election.
Of course, the group that nobody bothers to ask here is the Australian voters.
Ask them, and it’s likely they won’t really care who works with who, or even who’s in charge.
They just want their politicians to put them first for a change – before party, and before personal ego.
Ultimately, their enemy is likely not the Liberal Party, nor is it One Nation.
Their enemy is the Labor government, the out-of-touch media class, and the Canberra bubble.
The very same one that just resided in another record in rental costs, in ongoing mass immigration.
They know that 2028 is a crossroads for Australia.
Australians know that if Labor stays in, it will, in all likelihood, mean millions more migrants – and as a result, a more powerful and entrenched Labor government.
It will make it even more difficult for the right to win back power.
It will make it even more difficult for young people to buy a home, to start a family to get ahead.
It would mean greater pressure on hospitals, schools, roads and public services, as well as faster demographic and cultural change.
So with the stakes as high as they are, you can excuse Australians for not really caring who will win in the conservative race for second place.
Because while the right fights it out amongst themselves, expending valuable energy, air time and political capital, Labor gets one step closer to achieving its grand plans.
And if Albo wins this gamble – we’ll have only ourselves to blame.
It is time the right picked their battles.
Jordan Knight is an adviser and director of the National Conservative Institute of Australia. He is a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, known as the nerve centre of the American right, and the founder of Migration Watch Australia.