Liberals need to make a federal election deal with One Nation
THE Queensland election result sends one screaming message to the federal Liberals: sack Malcolm Turnbull and get a leader who can win Pauline Hanson’s followers, or you’ll lose too, writes Andrew Bolt.
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THE Queensland election result sends one screaming message to the federal Liberals: sack Malcolm Turnbull or you’ll lose, too.
It you don’t get yourselves a leader who can win Pauline Hanson’s followers, you are gone.
Don’t buy the media gloating that Hanson’s One Nation crashed on Saturday, proving that moving to the Right is poison.
True, One Nation will be very lucky to win even two seats, which is humiliating for Hanson, its federal leader.
A month ago, she told me the Queensland result would actually be “bigger than 1998”, when One Nation won 11 seats.
“I think the feeling now is a lot stronger ... (One Nation Queensland leader) Steve Dickson, he will be the most influential man on the floor of parliament after the election.”
Instead, Dickson lost his seat and Labor looks like winning an absolute majority, needing no other party’s support.
So, plenty of reason to jeer at Hanson’s crushed hopes, but the Liberals will be kidding themselves if they join the horse-laughing.
One Nation still won 14 per cent of the vote, more than half of that stolen from the Liberal National Party, whose support dived 8 per cent.
Worse for the LNP, it didn’t get all that vote back in second preferences. One Nation destroyed the LNP without much helping itself, a trick it could repeat in the federal election.
One Nation would actually have done better on Saturday if it hadn’t refused a preference deal with the LNP and then spent the campaign acting like the rabble it too often is.
New One Nation senator Fraser Anning even quit the party within an hour of being sworn in to replace the dumped Malcolm Roberts.
STATE’S WARNING SIGN FOR MALCOLM
ELECTION OUTCOME A TALE OF TWO STATES
The party’s poll support during the campaign fell by as much as a quarter, suggesting voters are more concerned with its professionalism than its ideology.
Yet it still did better than the Greens, who were heavily promoted by the media but won just 10 per cent of the vote and, at best, one seat.
And here is where federal Liberal MPs must stop and study the difference between how Queensland Labor dealt with the Greens and how the LNP mishandled One Nation.
The Greens actually are to Labor what One Nation is to the Liberals.
They are the all-care-no-responsibility critics who preach purity and attack the big parties as corrupt.
In this election, the holy-rolling Greens attacked the giant Adani coal project, which Queensland needs to help pay for Labor’s massive spending spree.
Their campaign was backed by activist groups such as GetUp! and much of the media Left but in the end, just one in 10 Queenslanders voted for the only party that promised to scrap the Adani mine, and most gave their second preferences to Labor anyway.
Annastacia Palaszczuk took the sting out of the Greens’ campaign by acting green herself — to a point.
She started Labor’s campaign by spectacularly reversing her support for a federal loan for a rail line to the Adani mine.
She appealed to the Greens-inclined, without actually opposing the mine itself — which would have been economic idiocy.
This is the kind of strategy the Liberals must take with One Nation — and was when they were led by John Howard.
Appeal to One Nation supporters by taking up their reasonable concerns, while junking the unreasonable.
But what did Nicholls do to appeal to them? More importantly now, what does Turnbull?
So often, Turnbull seems to despise them. “Pauline Hanson is not a welcome presence on the Australian political scene,” he sniffed last year — an insult Hanson has not forgotten.
The Liberals could do so much to attract One Nation voters that would not mean selling their soul but tackling genuine concerns.
Why not campaign on our dangerously high rates of immigration, for instance?
Yes, the Turnbull Government has muttered about needing tougher citizenship rules, but its changes have been blocked in parliament and Turnbull is an unlikely salesman anyway.
Turnbull simply isn’t the man to convince One Nation voters. Nor is he the man to convince anyone else that a preference swap with One Nation — which he’ll need to survive — isn’t just a dirty deal with the devil. The very urban Nicholls wasn’t the man to do it in Queensland, and Turnbull isn’t in Canberra.
So, Queensland is a huge warning to the Liberals. You want to win? Get a leader who can talk to One Nation voters without seeming fake or a fool.
That person is not Turnbull, and you know it.
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