Opinion: LNP de-merger could help overcome One Nation appeal

OPINION: With One Nation support likely to skyrocket at the state election, it’s almost certain to hold the balance of power. Welcome to four years of chaos. George Brandis is right about an LNP demerger.

Senator George Brandis is right on the money when he conceded – privately, he thought – the LNP might well return to two separate parties. Picture: AAP

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THE scary thing about protest parties is that you never really know who’s attending.

Mainstream Queenslanders know this fear well.

Our decentralised state, agrarian economy and tolerance for authoritarian leaders have made us attractive to the fringe dweller.

Australia’s only communist party MP sat in the Queensland parliament in the 1940s, and the state since then has given birth to a range of right wing outfits from the Confederate Action Party to One Nation.

But what do protest voters want from these groups? More importantly, what do they get?

Many of these voters, tired of the major parties’ allegedly elite interests, want to strike a blow for the common man and woman drowning under the globalisation wave.

The blue collar worker in Rockhampton and the dairy farmer around Gympie are terrified they’ll soon lose their livelihoods.

These people are not racists but good, law-abiding people who pay their taxes and have every reason to worry.

When they vote for One Nation they think they’re signing up to a 1950s Country or Labor party and some old-fashioned trade protection.

It’s misguided – resisting globalisation is like swimming against the rip – but it’s understandable.

It’s therefore up to the rest of us to show these voters how free trade has given Australia countless thousands of jobs and countless billions in export dollars. We must also show how, according to new research, a protectionist Trump presidency will see Australia’s GDP fall by 5.6 per cent.

Under Trump, Australia is about to become very much poorer.

But how many of the 250,000 Queenslanders who supported One Nation for the Senate on July 2 also signed up for such crazy conspiracy theories as NASA rigging climate change data and governments using punctuation to control their people? Punctuation? Really?

The peril is that, too often, these altruistic protest parties are hijacked by those who hold very warped ideas of democracy.

Indeed, fascist thugs who hitch their wagon to these groups are so often the first to trumpet free speech, but then bully and threaten those with whom they disagree.

Is this where Australian politics are heading? Is the life of the common man or woman really improved by this crap?

Not when we see One Nation as any other self-interested political party which, this year alone, received $1.6 million from taxpayers and another $70,000 from a Melbourne property developer.

With One Nation support likely to be north of 20 per cent at the next state election, it’s almost certain the party will hold the balance of power, and – given LNP leader Tim Nicholls still dodges questions of supporting ONP via preferences or in government – may even see One Nation at the cabinet table.

If so, Queensland is headed for its most catastrophic four years – yes, that’s right, it will be four years thanks to the recent referendum – in our 160 year history. That’s why I think Senator George Brandis is right on the money when he conceded – privately, he thought – the LNP might well return to two separate parties.

It’s happened before: the Country and Progressive Nationalist Party (merged from the Country Party and Nationalist Party in 1925) returned to separate Country and Liberal parties in 1936, and found enormous success between 1957 and 1983.

A Coalition was successful because it allowed two heads of power to service two (potentially competitive) sectional interests, and relatively harmoniously, at least until Joh Bjelke-Petersen knifed the Liberals in the 1980s.

Put simply, a separate National party would allow the Coalition’s regional wing to be as rhetorically populist and socialistically agrarian as it liked. Meanwhile, an urban Liberal wing can speak to a globalised Brisbane.

The result would be a blunted, but not eliminated, One Nation appeal.

Two things must take place before late 2017 when a state poll is most likely. First, and at the very least, the LNP – the party likely to enjoy the most seats in the next parliament – must rule out preferencing One Nation ahead of Labor, and must rule out accepting that party’s support to govern.

Second, the LNP should convene an emergency conference to debate and, ideally, execute a demerger to allow a separate National party to speak to Queensland’s disgruntled regional voters alone.

LNP President Gary Spence and leaders Tim Nicholls and Deb Frecklington, you can make this happen. Your own future, as well as Queensland’s, depends on it.

Dr Paul Williams is a Griffith University School of Humanities lecturer