It’s not the time for PM to let Hanson ride shotgun

One Nation’s Queensland campaign leader Steve Dickson, left, and Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff James Ashby field questions about the Al Jazeera sting.Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison should have seized the opportunity on Tuesday to say that unless there are even more patently unacceptable alternatives, One Nation will go last on Coalition ballot papers. Morally as well as politically it is the right thing for him to do.

No good will come from being seen to play footsie with Pauline Hanson or her creation in electoral contests. None. That was true before the Al Jazeera sting and it is truer now.

The documentary was a gift because it fully exposed the dark side of One Nation. The Prime Minister should have used it to force recalcitrant government MPs into line. It’s called leadership. The longer he allows the preference issue to drag on, the longer he allows a small corner of the Coalition to drag everybody else into a quagmire, the more damage will be done. It will plague the government from here until polling day, smothering every other message. It will cost more votes than it will ever win and lose more seats than it will save.

It has been a miserable week for politicians on matters of race. Few have emerged without splatter. Take a bow, Gladys.

Former NSW Labor leader Mich­ael Daley showed how costly it can be to dabble in racial politics.

Sections of the media might have gone easy on Daley, much easier than if a conservative politician had said the same thing, but the voters did not. They did not miss, including in his own electorate where he suffered a double-digit swing on primaries, and they will not miss the Morrison government either if it fails the integrity test. John Howard learned it — after prodding and pushing beginning with the initially unwelcome declaration by Peter Costello to Laurie Oakes that he would put One Nation last in his seat of Higgins. One Nation is the enemy, not the people who vote for it, and the way to deal with it is to explain the harm Hanson’s policies and her words can cause.

Morrison missed an opportunity to do this in Melbourne last week when he dodged questions about Hanson and whether she was a racist.

It was bad enough when in the lead-up to his interview with broadcaster Neil Mitchell, Morrison had begun his dance of the seven veils around the preference issue. It was inexcusable when Mitchell asked him on Friday morning if he thought she was a racist, only for Morrison to say limply she had not said racist things in her dealings with him. So what? Who cares if she hasn’t said anything inappropriate to his face, she has been in our faces now for 20 years saying truly awful things about Australians.

It may be her right in a free country to make racist and bigoted remarks inside and outside parliament, as she has done in her long and undistinguished career, but it is Morrison’s duty as the country’s leader to disavow them, wherever or to whomever they are made, not provide succour in any shape of form for her views, or to leave anyone with the impression that it’s OK to express racist views in Australia. Not now, not ever, and especially not from someone with the privilege of powerful platforms who aspires to elected office.

Morrison was ignoring pleas from colleagues to say the magic words even before the Al Jazeera story broke. The exposure of the dangerous buffoonery of One Nation’s strategic brains was an opportunity to recast. Morrison’s strong condemnation of the guns-for-money pitch by One Nation was a welcome advance but didn’t go far enough.

Words count, actions matter more. Unfortunately Morrison was not the only leader who fell short. Bill Shorten did too.

Daley deserved to be drummed out of the election campaign after footage emerged of him saying young people were “fleeing” parts of Sydney because educated Asians were taking their jobs.

Despite the federal Opposition Leader’s initial dismissive response to a couple of token questions that Daley had apologised, Daley had not really apologised immediately, only saying he was sorry if he had offended people. Weasel words followed the dog whistle. Daley eroded Labor’s moral authority, blunted Shorten’s attacks against the government on the placement of One Nation preferences and became symbolic of Labor’s hypocrisy. He had to go. The idea he could stay as leader until after the federal election was madness.

Without overstating the federal implications, stemming from the NSW result is greater hope among Liberals of regaining Wentworth, possibly winning Lindsay and holding on to other seats such as Reid and Robertson. Warringah is the big worry. So is Cowper, where Luke Hartsuyker’s retirement could herald the return of independent Rob Oakeshott.

The result also showed the fabled NSW machine fell well short on the macro as well as the micro level. One Liberal reported arriving pre-dawn at a polling booth in the seat of Heathcote to find Labor workers had secured every metre of space with their bunting featuring Peter Dutton, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. Now there are definitely places that will work, but not in that area, which is solid Morrison territory and where he is a major plus for the Liberals.

The NSW result showed the importance of leadership. At the moment it mattered most, Gladys Berejiklian showed she had what it takes. She has governed from the centre, avoided pointless culture wars, and throughout her career always presented as sensible, hardworking and decent. She oozes competence with a capital C. She has never shown nastiness to people on her own side or to those on the other side, although friends say she never forgets a slight.

She is therefore both disciplined and human. If there is any female leader Berejiklian resembles, it is the early Angela Merkel, another no-nonsense, just-get-on-with-it type who avoids trading on gender, and she could last as long if all goes well. Or she could move to federal politics and go from first Liberal woman elected premier to … well, who knows?

NSW reminded everyone how much campaigns matter. Morrison cannot erase what happened last year, which has proved so costly for the Liberals, making a decent campaign — and decent in every sense, including on preferences — that much more important.