Opinion: Liberals need a Hanson whisperer

MASSES of conservatives are now cleaving the Coalition’s base, winning over thousands of voters. Yes, the factional plague has infected the Australian right.

EXACTLY 80 years ago this week the Spanish Civil War broke out like an ominous overture to World War II.

The raw courage of International Brigades of western democrats – putting their lives on the line with liberals and leftists to fight against Franco’s Phalangist fascism – frames the 1936-39 Spanish conflict as tragically noble.

That’s why I’m again reading English novelist George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a battlefield account of a well-meaning Englishman whose initial naivety is quickly lost in the horrors of war.

ALY: Hanson’s worst nightmare

Soon after joining a ragtag militia inside the Trotskyist communist party POUM, Orwell learns his enemies are not just Franco’s forces but also the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain.

The special brutality Soviet leader Josef Stalin reserved for rival members of the left inspired Orwell to write 1984 and Animal Farm – two of the greatest English language novels.

The enduring theme of Orwell’s account is how any bloc of political interest, no matter how initially strong,– can easily splinter, crumble and turn to dust.

As Liberal South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi points out, more than 700,000 Australians voted for conservative outfits outside the Liberal-National coalition.

The shattering of the political left in the 20th century became something of a grim joke from the moment Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks parted ways in 1904. The huge number of leftist organisations, from labour parties to revolutionary cells – all purporting worker liberation – was never better mocked than in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The People’s Front of Judea; the Judean People’s Front; the Judean Popular People’s Front. Splitters!

And the phenomenon continues. The Greens on July 2 scored almost 10 per cent of the Lower House vote. Had the Greens not contested, Labor’s primary vote would have been well in the 40s.

But the 2016 election added another dimension. As Liberal South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi points out, more than 700,000 Australians voted for conservative outfits outside the Liberal-National coalition.

Yes, the factional plague has infected the Australian right. For any number of reasons, masses of conservatives are now cleaving the Coalition’s base.

And it’s that fear of turning over Australian Conservatism to the likes of One Nation that sees Bernardi, Dawson MP George Christensen and others countenance a right wing pressure group to rival GetUp. But that’s a slippery slope. From there, how long will it be before the Liberals’ arch-right splits from the Coalition to form a new party?

Soft-left Malcolm Turnbull in an invidious position: either join Labor and the Greens in attacking Hanson or offer a more conciliatory approach.

Just as left wing romantics once longed (perhaps they still do) for a genuinely socialist party to emerge from Labor’s ashes, many on the right will regard a new arch-conservative outfit as their own light on the hill.

But, should that occur, the Liberals will be facing their biggest challenge – and possibly worst disaster – in their 72-year history. Worse than the leadership vacuum after Menzies’ retirement, more divisive than the Howard-Peacock feud in the 1980s, even scarier than One Nation’s first appearance in 1998.

Former Liberal prime minister John Howard put it best when he warned Bernardi against splitting.

“Stay in, fight and argue your case,” he said.

“Don’t start wandering off the reservation.”

Sound advice, but that doesn’t automatically return conservative voters to the fold. For that, the Liberals want a Hanson whisperer, someone who knows that denigrating Hanson is actually ridiculing hundreds of thousands of Australians who obey the law, pay their taxes and who are merely perplexed by modern politics. Immigration and Islam do not concern most of these people.

Howard in 1998 knew that talking down to these people, by painting them as political jokes, would never bring them back. That’s why he refused to engage in the more bitter recriminations against One Nation. By 2001, One Nation’s vote had halved.

That places the soft-left Turnbull in an invidious position: either join Labor and the Greens and attack Hanson personally at every turn (which is probably his natural inclination), or offer a more conciliatory approach and at least appear to acknowledge One Nation’s presence.

The major parties must learn that personal attacks on Hanson only look like an anti-Pauline conspiracy. But conciliation and rational argument will show her voters – just as they saw in 2001 and after – that One Nation has plenty of complaints but no rational solutions.

Strangely, the Liberals’ conservative right will assess Turnbull’s fitness for office not so much on how the PM faces off against Labor, Xenophon and the Greens but how he engages Hanson.

Ultimately, the arch-right will ask: “Is Turnbull a friend or enemy of conservatism?”

The first lesson political neophytes learn is “disunity is death”. Ironically, it’s usually also the last.

Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer at Griffith University School of Humanities

Originally published as Opinion: Liberals need a Hanson whisperer