Less work, more crime in Pauline Hanson’s One Nation heartlands

Economic and social indicators in One Nation heartland in rural Australia paint a bleak picture .

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

Economic and social indicators in One Nation heartland in rural Australia paint a bleak picture of falling or stagnating wage growth, rising welfare dependence, spikes in crime and plummeting house prices.

The Australian examined federal government tax and welfare data, crime statistics and housing figures for the suburbs around 50 polling booths that recorded the highest One Nation first-preference Senate votes in the three states that last year elected a senator for the party.

In booths in Queensland and NSW, wage growth since the global financial crisis has largely been well below inflation and in some cases has gone backwards.

Of the top 10 booths for One Nation in Queensland and NSW, only one — Mackay’s pre-poll voting centre — was in a postcode that saw wage growth match or exceed inflation from 2008-14. In central Queensland in Kingaroy, wages have fallen 3.67 per cent to $43,737 since the GFC and in Inverell in NSW’s New England, they are down 2.7 per cent to $39,838 since 2007-08.

Where wages have grown since the GFC, the increases have been modest, with former manufacturing power­houses like Kurri Kurri in the NSW Hunter, which was home to a major smelter until 2012, seeing rises of 4.91 per cent.

In the west, the resources bust is seen in Western Australia’s One Nation heartland, with the housing market in those towns collapsing in the past five years and the levels of people receiving the dole rising. House prices in South Hedland have collapsed by 16.4 per cent over the past five years.

The end of the boom has coincided with a significant rise in crime, including a spike of more than 200 per cent in Kalgoorlie and a 100 per cent lift in Byford, south of Perth, where there has been a 114 per cent increase in those on the dole in the past three years.

GRAPHIC: One Nation in the Senate

The heart of One Nation territory is in the rural Lockyer Valley, down the road from party leader Pauline Hanson’s old home in Ipswich, west of Brisbane. The party’s four strongest above-the-line votes in the nation were recorded in its towns. Gatton, the largest, represents the most extreme example of the economic crisis within — and possibly creating — One Nation’s support base. Nearly one in three people — 28 per cent — who cast their ballots at the town’s primary school gave One Nation or Sen­ator Hanson their first-preference vote.

According to Australian Taxation Office data, the mean income listed for its 4343 postcode actually fell 6.56 per cent since the GFC, from $41,432 in 2007-08 to $38,713 in 2013-14. Welfare data shows a 14.48 per cent jump in Newstart recipients in three years, from 359 in September 2013 to 411 in September 2016. There was a 10.48 per cent increase in the 12 months to last September alone.

At the same time, an analysis of the state’s crime figures shows a 188 per cent increase in assaults, robberies, and drug and unlawful entry offences between 2009 and 2016. “You’d go and leave your door open,” GP Peter Bevan said, recalling life in Gatton when he started his practice there in 1983. “No one would lock up anything.”

Now the town has grown bigger, and poorer. Farms have been carved into 2ha and 4ha plots on its outskirts, attracting those priced out of Brisbane.

Dr Bevan said there had been “a lot of people moving out here because there’s cheap land, but they’ll be living off it in very poor circumstances, in a caravan or in a bit of a humpy on five acres of clay.

“The statistics are that 75 per cent of our patients have got some kind of healthcare card or pension card or entitlement card from the government — which means they’ve been assessed to have a very low income. The patients have become younger, but they’ve also become poorer.”