By Patrick Franco
When economic conditions deteriorate, people find a scapegoat. This is a truism in all human history. In Renaissance Europe, bad farming harvests were a strong predictor of witchcraft trials. Crop failures, food shortages, and economic distress were all blamed on supposed witches in control of the weather. Today, we see a similar trend.
In the wake of post-Covid inflationary shocks, a war in Ukraine, and the shortcomings of neo-liberal economics, the pitchforks have come out once again, but this time pointed at migrants. Recent anti-immigration ‘marches for Australia’ are symptomatic of this.
These protests occurred alongside a period of economic uncertainty, housing insecurities, and an increase in grocery prices, with the government supposedly enabling ‘mass immigration’ for electoral gain.
Right-wing, rage-baiting Instagram accounts pour petrol onto this anti-immigration fire. One example is auspilled (a.k.a. Hugo Lennon), who has gained considerable traction blaming immigrants for the problems facing modern Australia—simply swap the witch-accused villager for an Indian family.
In a video post to his Instagram, auspilled alleged that the lack of housing led to lower birth rates, which in turn incentivised mass immigration—speaking in front of an AI generated infographic. The graphic displayed a dark-skinned man and lady with a hijab taking housing, jobs and children away from the white people.
A simple graphic like this can have a profound impact on the attention economy online.
If only the multifaceted, convoluted Australian economy was as simple as that poorly designed Chat-GPT graphic.
However, what auspilled is not telling you, is that he is the son of Anthony Lennon, a non-executive director at Peet, one of Australia’s biggest property developers. The company currently landbanks 30,000 properties—its business model reliant on Australia’s exorbitantly priced housing market.
auspilled has never once mentioned that investors claimed $10.4 billion worth of negatively geared deductions between 2022-2023, or that a recent leaked government brief said: “low and middle-income earners are subsiding the retirement incomes of seniors with significant wealth in addition to their homes.” He has never brought up that Australia’s gas policy is a trainwreck—as we pay international market rates for our own energy.
My point being—while it’s easy to blame immigrants for the issues facing Australia, shifting our focus to the profound structural imbalances of our economy is a far more productive use of our time. Economic analysis shows that supply shortages are the primary cause of housing affordability—the rate in which Australia builds homes relative to population growth has flipped. Furthermore, only 1% of home purchased 2022-23 were from foreign buyers.
Australians are doing it tough, but blaming migrants isn’t going to fix the problem; the government needs to play an active role in addressing the issue.
As Senator David Pocock wrote in the Australian Financial Review:
“When governments fail to listen and plan, a vacuum opens up. This allows extremists—including white supremacists and neo-Nazis—to prey on peoples genuinely held concerns.”
Currently, Australia has no net overseas migration target. We have an arbitrary forecast that Treasury puts out as part of the federal budget, which is often completely wrong. Over the past few years, the Treasury forecast has been short by between 40,000 and 80,000 people.
“These inaccurate figures and the lack of any cohesive plan for population create a sense of a total free-for-all, and feed fears of anxiety and social division that are ripe for exploitation. As Aristotle said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
It’s easy to get emotional when we see Neo-Nazis pour onto our streets, and rightfully so. The often-romanticised ANZACs, so dear to the manosphere, fought against the Nazis, not alongside them. Migrants have, and will, continue to contribute to the foundations on which Australia is built; there is no place for extremism in our society.
But the real grunt work lies in policy. It’s in being clear and upfront about the challenges of Australia’s future, and how a sustainable migration policy contributes to that. Rather than villainise an Indian family online, let’s scrutinise how the government will build 1.2 million homes productively and sustainably.
Uncertainty fuels prejudice and hostility. Australia’s responsibility lies in tackling the big economic challenges of the future through evidence-based decisions, clarity and mutual respect—far more productive than arguing in the comments of an online rage-baiter.
This piece was featured in the 2026 summer edition of Glass Magazine
