Pauline Hanson’s biggest test is coming
ANALYSIS: She’s had a strong run since sweeping back into the Senate. But is Australia really ready to embrace Pauline Hanson? We’re about to find out.
National
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PAULINE Hanson, whose party collapsed due to hopeless candidates and a surgical exorcism by John Howard, has come from the wilderness, renewed. The tremor has dissipated from her voice; she mangles fewer sentences and has swapped her distaste of Asians and Aborigines for Muslims.
Hanson’s second coming is very real but it is Hanson, and only Hanson, that matters. In WA, she has massed a mess of single-issue malcontents, angry unknowns, young hopefuls and last-ditch retirees, all who hate politics so much that they have decided to contest the March 11 election in her name.
MORE: Abbott says Hanson ‘a voice of responsibility’
LIBERALS BREAK PRECEDENT TO PREFERENCE HANSON
It will be the most telling test of Hanson’s popularity since she was rebirthed as a senator seven months ago and will give the first insight into how the election of Donald Trump, who shares the same anti-politics of Hanson, has infiltrated the Australian mindset.
The candidates standing in WA for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, PHON, do not matter. No one is voting for them — they are voting for Hanson. A weekend poll showing her surging to 23 per cent of the primary vote in Queensland, for an election not yet called, is purely about the cult of Hanson.
The Liberals, facing defeat under Premier Colin Barnett in the West and teetering under Malcolm Turnbull, have broken a long-held precedent set by John Howard of preferencing One Nation last on how-to-vote cars.
In an acknowledgment of Turnbull’s unpopularity, Howard was sent ahead of the Prime Minister to Perth to lend Barnett a hand this week. The nimble former PM, recognised even by passing teenagers at a shopping centre, agreed there was an element of gamble to the PHON deal but said times had moved on.
“Trying to draw parallels between that decision and decisions of various iterations of the Liberal Party 15, 16 years ago is ridiculous,” he said.
Asked if Hanson had changed, he said: “Everybody changes in 16 years, mate. One thing though that hasn’t changed, there’s only one extremist party in Australian politics now and that’s the Greens. And who’s playing footsie with the Greens? The Australian Labor Party.”
In a sense, the contentious preference deal the WA Liberals have cooked up with PHON does not matter, because Hanson candidates say they will not be told by anyone how they should order preferences on their how-to-vote cards.
HANSON’S CURSE
The fingerprints of powerful WA senators Mathias Cormann and Michaelia Cash — both who have close relations with Hanson — are all over the deal, which may prove reckless.
The Liberals have achieved three bad outcomes by putting PHON above Nationals in regional WA upper house seats: they have angered Nationals, everywhere; they have conflated Liberal politics with the anti-politics of Hanson, in ways that will confound their political base; and they have got nothing from it.
The idea was that in return for the upper house favours, PHON would preference the Liberals ahead of Labor in the lower house, but as soon as the deal was reported, some PHON candidates savagely rejected it.
Furious emails flew as candidates told PHON’s WA boss Colin Tincknell to shove the deal. As more PHON dissenters came forward, it was too late: the WA Liberals had already formally lodged upper house voting tickets, preferencing PHON. It could all be for nothing.
It also tells of Hanson’s curse: trying to hold her party together. As it became clear a number of her WA candidates would not comply, Hanson went on 7.30 and said: “If they’re not happy with it, don’t stand. Everyone has a choice. Don’t stand under my name. Don’t stand for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.”
History shows her people fall apart when told to fall behind party lines, because of the irresolvable paradox that they are politicians who hate politics. And so, as seen before in WA, Queensland and Canberra, begins the death-spiral.
WA candidates have already rebelled over demands from Hanson’s Queensland base to cough up $250,000 if they win and defect, confirming Hanson’s justified paranoia that people use her name to get elected. She overruled it after realising it was unworkable and probably illegal.
Turnbull’s claim that PHON is “not a single-personality party” is wrong. It is all about Hanson. But his argument that his government must respect the voters who elected four PHON senators to Canberra, and deal with them on the crossbench, is correct.
Yet this is being achieved in the national capital without the kind of deal seen in WA.
First for Hanson is WA, then the Queensland state election, which must be held by 2018.
HANSON SMARTER SECOND TIME AROUND
Stereotypes about people from certain states holding certain intolerant views are being undone. The Hanson story is about the nation, where her vote is estimated to run at eight per cent. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” says her adviser, James Ashby.
But it’s early days yet for Hanson’s emerging Third Force. Labor could take 12 to 14 seats from the Liberals, giving it power in WA. At the same time, Newspoll estimates that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will gather 13 per cent of the WA primary vote.
The surges are mostly coming off the Liberal base, with strong signs voters have had enough of Barnett after two terms.
The federal Liberals know the WA result will reflect on them, and are trying to stop the bleeding. But hurting the Nationals by favouring Hanson, whose policies have been likened to the racist and protectionist Labor Party of the 1950s, risks driving Liberals from the party.
Hanson has only briefly appeared in WA and Ashby says she probably won’t be back until just before the election. She doesn’t need to do more than offer herself up as saviour to the disaffected. She knows, with unerring certainty, they exist in big numbers in the heartlands.
Even detractors say she is smarter this time, avoiding direct policy issues and going for the bigger picture protecting the sell-off of government assets, tapping anti-Islam feeling and most of all, offering an anti-political alternative.
And yes, Hanson — who long before Clive Palmer detected the great national vacuum of discontent that could be won over with minimal investment — has flown high and crashed early once before.
But in the age of terror, and the age of Trump, everything is different. Hanson went too soon in the late 90s: her time is now. If she can hold her people together, she will occupy valuable political real estate in every state and territory.
WA Labor leader Mark McGowan’s team is relaxed, because the Liberals-PHON deal gives them a clear point of difference in the election. Privately, several sitting Labor members say they feel certain they will win government, because on current numbers they can’t see how they could lose.
But all guess the Hanson primary vote in WA will be higher than 13 per cent.
HANSON’S SUPPORTERS
Polling has become a less certain science in an age of mobile phones where getting people from known demographics to answer questions on landlines is harder. And Hanson supporters don’t much like co-operating with pollsters, seeing them as part of the government-media machine that oppresses them.
Throwing together a bunch of DIY political greenhorns will always produce rabble, like the PHON bloke with links to porn sites on his Facebook, the predictable homophobes and racists. But most are what they say they are: ordinary people who believe the two major parties have failed.
Irish-born Joe Darcy, 65, standing in Wanneroo, calls himself a “frustrated individual” from Perth’s north. “I’m looking for a party that’ll give the kids and grandkids something to look forward to,” he says. “Average people regard Pauline as more honest than the rest and the hardest working politician. They’re sick of promises and lies and bullshit and it’s time for a change.”
Hanson’s views on Islam are his own. “We don’t want radical Islamics in our country. Why would you want them? We have to protect what we have. They’ve destroyed half of Europe and she’s not afraid to tell it how it is.”
At 20, John Zurakowski, standing in Baldivis, in Perth’s south, is the youngest PHON candidate. He studies physical and analytical chemistry at Murdoch University and cops no campus grief.
“I see a lot of people my age supporting Pauline Hanson. A lot like how she says what she thinks, and how she doesn’t believe in political correctness.” He says it won’t all be about battling Muslims. “We’re not as far-right and extreme as people think,” he says. “We’re far more balanced.”
He describes fast-growing Baldivis as a young and working class, home to many eastern-staters who came for the good times and got trapped.
“A lot of them worked in the mining boom and invested in housing,” he says. “Now they’re left with massive mortgages they’re struggling to pay off and been made redundant.” The idea is that if PHON gets the balance of power, it will use its numbers to protect them.
Zurakowski says Hanson told WA candidates when she met them recently for the first time that once they’re established, here and elsewhere, “Pauline Hanson” will disappear from the brand and it will become simply “One Nation”.
He and Darcy admire Hanson for never changing, but she is changing. She now considers individual issues on merit and does deals with big politics. It is as though Hanson wants respect — and she is getting it.
PHON TO GROW LIFE OF ITS OWN
Ashby will not comment on reports that the WA deal involved Cormann and Cash, who dined Hanson in Perth late last year and even drove her to the airport, but says: “The Senate is different to the lower house, they all get along pretty well.” So they do, judging by the photo last year of Cash hugging Hanson after she gave her (second) first speech.
The argument, prosecuted by Herald-Sun political editor James Campbell, is that the federal Liberals, looking for help in the Senate, have legitimised and mainstreamed an anti-political party they should, by rights, reject.
Senator Arthur Sinodinos says One Nation is “a very different beast to what it was 20 years ago. They are a lot more sophisticated.” Yet Sinodinos would struggle to name three PHON candidates in WA.
Labor’s member for the inner-east seat of Victoria Park, Ben Wyatt (cousin to federal WA Liberal member Ken Wyatt) is regarded by many as a possible first WA indigenous premier, not because he’s indigenous but because he’s educated and personable. Of the PHON deal, he says: “Colin (Barnett) knows there will be a big cost to this transaction.”
Liberal strategists Australia-wide must wonder as well. They are selling the line that Hanson is different, this time, but they know this will soon be bigger than Pauline as PHON candidates who lack her hard-won discipline risk dragging her — and her political allies — down.
Originally published as Pauline Hanson’s biggest test is coming
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