One Nation under Pauline
Every unhappy country is unhappy in its own way
All your life you've never seen
Woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?
—Stevie Nicks
We should be less surprised by the current surge in support for One Nation than by the fact that such support has taken so long to consolidate. Honestly, you can’t overstate the extent to which mainstream politics has failed a significant proportion of the population and you can hardly blame people for looking for alternatives. The One Nation alternative has been plying its grievances for decades now and the times currently suit it very well.1
Those most shocked by the current polling are those who have been in denial about the collapse of the Liberal Party and the two-party system of which it is part. But that process has been unfolding gradually for decades, and in earnest since at least 2022. In a podcast in February 2023, I said of the Liberals, “I think they’re dead. I don’t think they’re ever coming back,” and what seemed radical at the time now seems mundane. I still hold to that proposition, by the way, though with the caveat of who the f*ck knows?
The point I’ve made many times since 2022 is that there is now a floating third of Australian voters no longer strongly tied to any particular party and that this floating third will land differently and unpredictably from election to election. Until now, the chances of a significant portion of them landing with One Nation (ON) has seemed slim, but the ongoing collapse of the Coalition has made it all but inevitable.
Where else would such voters go?
Once you factor in that voters have been abandoning the two-party system for some time—once you take that idea seriously—there is really nothing to be surprised about in One Nation’s surge.
From there, a number of questions arise, beginning with: how stable is this surge likely to be and will it actually translate into seats at the next election? I’ll leave the latter part of that question to the psephologists, though you don’t have to think too hard to see that ON could have relative success. Antony Green looked at this the other day and produced a table of the 25 seats most vulnerable to ON:
The three-candidate preferred (3CP) percentages for Labor, the Liberal or National Party and for One Nation are shown in final three columns.
The percentages in bold are the 3CP% counts for the winning candidate in each seat.
The table has been sorted in ascending percentage vote order of winning candidates. So the electorates at the top of the table would be most at risk of being lost to One Nation as the seats have the lowest 3CP vote for the winning candidate.
If a significant number of these converted, the most damage done would be to the Coalition, meaning Labor would likely retain a pretty decent governing majority. It would nonetheless represent a major shift to the right and I can’t see any upside with that. It puts more pressure on Labor to go even further to the right themselves, which has been their trajectory since 1975.2
As to the question of how stable One Nation is likely to be….
I think we need to be really careful in how we consider that question. One one level, the party has an extraordinary history of internal turmoil, with more line-up changes than King Crimson and more personal animosity emanating from it than from Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. But stability isn’t really a key issue in today’s politics. In fact, right wing populism works best in environments of turmoil and that turmoil actually empowers politicians like Hanson and Trump.
The problem is, so much damage has been done to people’s faith in the democratic system by the Lib-Labor duopoly that a significant number of people no long believe that much can be done about it. A reasonable cohort consider—with justification—that the “centre” of Australian politics is captured by vested interests and they feel powerless to change things. Once people cross that mental line, the politics of grievance sets in and they will vote for an alternative just to spite the ruling class.
We’ve seen this process writ large in America, but as Max Chandler-Mather wrote the other day, a similar mindset is developing here: “65% of people who indicated they were ‘struggling to pay the bills’ or ‘poor’, said that the political system needs ‘major change’ or ‘should be replaced’.”
Among One Nation voters today, 75% think the political system is completely broken. Unsurprisingly, One Nation voters are consistently found to report some of the highest rates of financial stress. In a November poll, One Nation outpolled everyone else among Gen X and Baby Boomers experiencing a great deal of financial stress.
He makes the excellent point that “[w]hat One Nation offers is a break with the status quo; a rejection of the political establishment.” Such people are not voting against their own interests, as a lot of clever analysis often insists. They are, rather, taking aim at forces they feel they have little control over, inflicting whatever discomfort upon them that they can. And again, who can blame them?3
Of course, One Nation is led by an out-and-racist and she attracts the likeminded to her cause, but we are kidding ourselves if we think racism alone is driving all this. There are non-racist reasons—even amongst the racists—for wanting to have a say in the sort of country we are, including a view on immigration levels, and any politics has to accommodate such views.
This is why the arguments of contemporary politics are often less about economics than about national identity.
The left in Australia—and everywhere else for that matter—has never really figured out how to acknowledge the racism and fight it without using it as an excuse to dismiss such people’s concerns out of hand. They have never figured out a convincing form of patriotism that can garner wide support. The closest they’ve come is an obsession with processes like compulsory and preferential voting or even multiculturalism itself. These systems attract enormous praise from progressives (me included) because they have become the only way the left can express national pride without feeling like they are lining up with settler colonialism.4
The point is, One Nation is a party of grievance, the black heart and obsessions of its founder made manifest. There is a whole genre of journalism—that I associate most strongly with the New York Times—that wrings its hands about all this and insists that “we” need to “understand” these disaffected members of the grievance class, but such pleas miss the point. They simply concede ground to the worst elements of the far right and play into the hands of grifters like Hanson who exploit legitimate concerns to press their own prejudiced agenda.
The issue isn’t just whether ON can convert the current polling surge into seats in the next parliament. It is that the political class—the mainstream, the centre, the elites, the status quo, call them what you will—has created a situation in which vast sections of society—from the middle out to the flanks—are completely pissed off with what the country—the world—has become and they are convinced that those same elites have no interest in fixing things.
The ongoing moral collapse of Labor as led by Anthony Albanese is a symptom of this bigger problem and also proof of concept. More than any other party in the world, Australian Labor were handed an opportunity after 2022 to take a different path and they have completely squandered it.5
And here we are.
The breakdown we are seeing here and abroad is the death throes of a system no longer fit for purpose and people—ordinary voters—are desperately trying to find ways to respond. Around the world, including in Australia, they are using the tools available to them—from social media to community gatherings to the voting system itself—to work around this dead centre and some are landing with the independents, some are going to One Nation, some to the Greens, while others cling to the status quo.
Many have just given up, and if you force that cohort to vote, as we do through compulsory voting, it is hardly surprising they will favour someone like Hanson who they know pisses off the people they see as elites. And when the little Aussie battler is caught taking gifts from mining magnates, the disaffection is such that her grift can be rationalised as some sort of legitimate aspirationalism.
That’s the tragedy here: people like Hanson pass themselves off as “ordinary” Australians, but in fact, they are little more than stalking horses for one or another strata of economic elites to which she herself is desperate to belong. Hanson isn’t patriotic; she is entitled.
One Nation is part of a post-rational world emerging from massive inequality and the sense of hopelessness that accompanies the realisation that the people we elect to represent us are doing no such thing. This discontent has been building for decades and it’s not as if we haven’t been warned. But yeah, let’s be surprised that One Nation is “suddenly” surging in the polls.
See the previous newsletter for an account of how Hanson idolises Trump and all he stands for.
This is why it is right to see a lot of what is happening as part of the culture wars and why my forthcoming book deals with this sort of discussion. Chandler-Mather offers a really strong analysis of what is happening (though he is wrong to cast the culture wars as a distraction).
This is a huge part of why Labor continue to drift to the right and why their leaders, especially from Kevin Rudd onwards, have been happy to play small-target politics and assume policies and positions put forward by their opponents. This is how you become what you hate.
When you have a government that can't recognise that a visit by the Prime Minister of Israel isn't totally and utterly divisive, run from capital gains reform in total terror, continue in the face of all reality with Aukus (and therefore wasting billions that could be spent locally), fawning in front of Trump.......how can it be taken seriously?
On fn 2: Seriously, this is unfair to Rudd, Gillard and Shorten. They all did, or proposed, some bold stuff, more so than their predecessors going back to Beazley. And while Keating did lots, most of it was bad.
Albanese isn't a continuation of a trend, he made a sharp break with the willingness of Shorten to propose serious policy. He was positioning himself for this before the 2019 election and took Labor's narrow defeat there as justification.