At a business lunch to promote his vision for South Australia ahead of the March 21 state election, Premier Peter Malinauskas said he was prepared to say something One Nation candidate Cory Bernardi and Liberal leader Ashton Hurn would not.
"My message to One Nation voters is: who's going to feed you and bathe you and wipe your bum when you're 90?," he said.
"Because it ain't going to be your kids, because if I get my way, they're going to be working on submarines with high-paying jobs."
At One Nation's SA campaign launch earlier this month, lots of people were "wrapping themselves around the flag", he said.
"I'm cool with that, because I like our flag too," the premier said.
But there needed to be "earnestness and frankness in the political discourse" on immigration policy, "rather than just trying to be on the defensive", he said.
He said physically demanding jobs in housing were traditionally performed by recent migrants.
"Right now we're taking people out of the housing construction industry to work on the submarines, because they're going to have to be Australian citizens," he said.
"We're going to need people to … work in aged care.
"I won't allow myself to become the politician who wraps myself in the flag, and then says, 'I don't want to let people come to South Australia, we're going to do the work that no one else wants to'."
He added: "And by the way, just like Malinauskas isn't a name that came out in the First Fleet, nor is Bernardi."
Mr Malinauskas earlier outlined his government's economic and business credentials, and its plan to capitalise on opportunities, to a room of business leaders at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia event.
The state had "unprecedented, consistently low unemployment", employment participation was at an all-time high, average weekly earnings growth was the highest in the nation, as was wages growth, he said.
He was "really struggling" to find ways to illustrate the size of the $30 billion AUKUS submarine construction yard, announced on Sunday.
"It's 15 Royal Adelaide Hospitals," he said, noting it would take 66 million working hours to complete and up to 5000 workers to build it.
SA also had 65 per cent of the nation's copper reserves at a time when global demand was escalating, and the magnetite reserves in the Middleback Ranges, at Whyalla, were crucial to the production of green steel.
Defence and mining would be a "huge source of growth in the next 15 years" and the government had the skills policy and the housing policy to deliver the workers and the homes needed, he said.
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