The normalisation of One Nation as part of the political furniture of Australian elections is an impressive achievement amid the coarsening of politics over the past quarter century.
The placing of Pauline Hanson and her party last on how-to-vote cards was one of the great moral issues of the late 1990s, and roiled the Liberal Party, dividing it between moderates like Peter Costello, who knew ugly xenophobia when he saw it, and pragmatists like John Howard, who wondered how Hanson could be used against Labor. Eventually, the anti-racists within the Liberals won, and loyal lieutenants like Tony Abbott embraced the task of Hanson’s political destruction.
How times change. As Christopher Warren accurately explained recently, the ugliness of One Nation is now embraced by the Coalition — indeed, has been embraced for some time, with preference deals with the once-untouchable Hanson now routine. In contrast to the 1990s, this has received minimal attention from the media — and remember that Kerry Stokes’ Seven Network platformed and enabled Hanson and other racists in a way that has directly threatened national security and social cohesion.
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One Nation is the talk of the last days of the campaign. It is currently polling nationally 7.5% according to Morgan polling, well up on the 4%+ it has managed nationwide in previous elections. William Bowe’s BludgerTrack poll aggregation tool has the party on 9% in its Queensland stronghold, where 10-point font reactionary Malcolm Roberts is looking for another Senate term, but it’s also over 9% in WA and 10% in South Australia. In NSW, the party is on nearly 8%. Even in Victoria, it’s on 5.7%, which, if delivered, would be a considerable increase since 2022.
Five One Nation senators looks possible in the next Senate; half a dozen isn’t out of the question. That would mean the next two terms of Parliament will be heavily laden with major risks to social cohesion, with the inflammatory targeting of Muslim Australians, in particular, set to explode, undermining national security and making the task of our intelligence and security agencies much harder.
What will likely also explode is One Nation itself, which has a rich history of enjoying electoral success as a prelude to newly elected MPs and senators turning on Hanson and defecting to form ever more lurid far-right groupings. To use a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyOne Nation goes to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.
But it’s the party’s impact in the lower house that is exercising the minds of journalists, with particular excitement over the possibility that stronger-than-normal preference flows from One Nation to the Coalition might enable Peter Dutton to snatch some Labor seats, at least pushing the government into minority.
Some experts are rightly sceptical of this — what’s better for the Coalition, a primary vote for them, or a primary vote for a One Nation candidate that has to flow back to them via a decision the voter makes in the polling booth, possibly following a One Nation how-to-vote card, or possibly not?
Therein lies the problem for Peter Dutton, one that’s really a mirror image of the problem One Nation poses for Labor. The “Labor” problem, according to some commentators, is that the party has drifted off into a woke reverie of identity politics, abandoning blue-collar workers, and especially young men, who are turning to the right — to political figures like Hanson who talk about the things that matter to them.
There are a couple of things wrong with that argument: the first is that it’s just the latest version of the claim that Labor is no longer the cream of the working class, and is instead the dregs of the middle class, which has been around since at least the 1970s. It’s also predicated on an overwhelmingly male view of what being working class means — the low-paid aged care and childcare workers who have had major increases in pay for their labour thanks to the Albanese government don’t seem to feature in this picture of working-class alienation. It also ignores both the persistent role of trade unions within Labor, and the fetish of the current Labor generation for a nostalgic factory-floor vision of the Australian economy in its idiotic “Future Made In Australia” protectionism.
But at its core, that picture is about a party trying to appeal to a diverse electorate: educated, affluent voters sympathetic to a socially progressive agenda, and lower-income voters in outer suburbs more focused on economic opportunity and cost of living.
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Dutton faces the same problem. A rising One Nation vote has coincided with a decline in the Coalition’s primary vote. Correlation isn’t causation, but at least part of that must be a shift in voters disgruntled with the Coalition moving to Hanson. Why are they disgruntled? Dutton enthusiastically embraced Trump and MAGA Republicanism back in January and continues to peddle many similar policies, but has since repeatedly tried to distance himself from Trump as it became clear the association with the Mad King was harming him with centrist voters.
Dutton has thus been left with a similar dilemma to Labor: how to retain alienated voters tempted by the populist urgings and angry politics offered by the far right, while appealing to more educated and affluent voters, especially those who abandoned the Liberals in 2022. His attempt to keep both groups onside appears to have failed: some Coalition voters have shifted to One Nation and Cli e Palmer, who are unapologetic about their adoration for and mimicry of the Mad King, while educated voters find Dutton’s lingering Trump connections unpleasant.
Dutton (and his media cheerleaders) are thus left hoping that the preferences of those unhappy former Coalition voters all roll back home to him and get him over the line in enough seats to prevent a Labor majority.
Hope isn’t a strategy, but it could work. That’s the new era of post-major party politics we’re in, in which the national two-party-preferred outcome doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as it used to. No-one’s uttered the great cliché of “150 byelections” from yesteryear, but as the major party vote share declines, the importance of preference allocation grows and grows, and more and more seats will become dependent on who gets numbers 2, 3, 4 and beyond on ballot papers.
Whatever the nature of the government in the lower house, it looks like it will have to deal with a resurgent Hanson in the senate. And that’s bad news for our cohesion and security.
Is One Nation a force to be reckoned with this election?
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