Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The minor parties have pulled off a major coup. In an era of anti-­establishment politics, they have done the impossible and made the traditional parties look good.

One Nation officials were caught on camera flirting with the prospect of weakening gun laws and taking donations from the National Rifle Association. The Greens are gunning to kill off the coal export industry, weaken sovereign borders and wreck the US-Australia alliance.

The minor parties are setting up camp on the political fringe, leaving the centre field wide open.

Scott Morrison responded to the Al Jazeera expose of One Nation by announcing the Liberals would put the minor party below Labor on how-to-vote cards. Like former PM John Howard, Morrison is drawing a clear distinction between One Nation and the Liberals ahead of the federal election.

This enables him to position the Liberals as the party of the sensible centre against the hard Left and Right. It gives him the moral high ground for as long as Labor persists in preferencing the Greens over the Liberals.

Bill Shorten is on notice. If he fails to preference the Liberal Party before the Greens, Labor will be framed as a party beholden to the hard Left. Greens leader Richard Di Natale is not helping matters. He announced the party’s policy platform last week. The Greens plan to weaken Australia’s alliance with the US, redistribute military funding to foreign countries (via aid) and kill off coal exports — an industry worth about $25 billion a year.

The Greens are an extreme Left party with a communist faction, but media opprobrium is frequently reserved for the political Right. However, One Nation has brought the past week’s barrage of criticism on itself. Its staff were foolish to fall for Al Jazeera’s set-up and more foolish still to boast about power they do not possess. On hidden camera, they mulled over taking donations from the NRA to win more seats and weaken Australia’s gun laws. Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff James Ashby and Queensland party leader Steve Dickson later blamed whisky for their loose lips.

Hanson is standing by her men, but it is an unsustainable position. She looks like an incompetent leader who cannot make tough decisions when needed. She should man up and sacrifice the soaks to save the party.

The PM won support for his repudiation of One Nation. However, his appeal to the party’s base was compromised by his reluctance to come down hard on Al Jazeera. The trashing of journalistic standards by the Qatar-funded media group should be subjected to public scrutiny.

On the available information, Al Jazeera engaged in gross duplicity during a three-year operation targeting One Nation. Why didn’t it target the Greens or Hizb ut-Tahrir? Should we have a three-year ABC investigation into Al Jazeera’s state funder, Qatar? It might delve into the Islamist state’s treatment of women, gay men and people with HIV. How about a three-year investigation into how the richest country in the world came to earn its global reputation for rank corruption. The next time Al Jazeera approaches the ABC with a virtue-signalling hit piece on Australians, ask about the human rights record of its dishonourable patron, Qatar.

In the wake of the Al Jazeera scandal, One Nation faces the momentous task of restoring belief in its brand among the party faithful. It trades on being a party of the people in contrast to other parties that it routinely depicts as servants of special interests.

Being caught in the act of flirting with foreign donations from the NRA and weakening federal gun laws makes party officials look hypocritical.

The very name of the party embodies its most fundamental principle: nationalism. In the Al Jazeera footage aired by the ABC, Ashby indicates $20 million from the NRA could translate into more parliamentary seats for One Nation. In turn, those numbers could fuel a push to reform gun laws. Obviously, toying with the idea of taking foreign funds and diluting Australian laws is not behaviour generally associated with upholding the national interest.

To be clear, Hanson has said the Al Jazeera footage shown on the ABC was selectively edited for political purposes. She believes the unedited version would effectively exonerate One Nation officials. At the time of writing, Al Jazeera had refused to release the full footage. Withholding the evidence makes the news network vulnerable to the charge of political interference ahead of the Australian election.

While many have taken the Al Jazeera expose as proof of One Nation’s shambolic nature, party loyalists are trying to turn the ­tables. By their reckoning, the main story is that for three years Islamist state-funded media worked with a former ABC staffer to bring down a shared enemy: a political party that rejects Islamism, political correctness and porous borders.

One Nation is trying to shore up its base ahead of the election. Hanson is playing victim to an international media sting. Party leaders are reframing the Al Jazeera expose in terms of the deep state v the people, Islamists v the West, the ABC v conservatives.

There is a reasonable chance that the expose will backfire. It could entrench the belief that the ABC is a left-leaning political unit that targets and takes down dissenters by any means necessary.

One Nation voters are Australia’s “deplorables”. They have deserted the major parties because they believe the political-media class is corrupted by political correctness, globalism, elitism and greed. And they perceive, correctly, that they are mocked as the poor white trash of Australia.

But it is wrong to read One Nation’s base as mere protest voters who swing with the wind. Hanson attracts Australians seeking a conviction politician willing to crusade for the nationalist cause against the high tide of globalist arrogance. I disagree with many aspects of the party, but the media’s continual condescension towards One Nation supporters fuels the fire of their cause.