Cyclone Hanson: Queensland is One Nation’s heartland

Queensland is the One Nation heartland for unhappy voters.

‘We’re going to shake them up’: Sam Cox, One Nation candidate for the Queensland seat of Burdekin, which reaches from Townsville’s southern suburbs to Ayr. Picture: Cameron Laird

They’re talking about horse racing and the Cowboys’ chances in the coming NRL season. On a hot, lazy afternoon in Ayr, the front bar of the Kalamia Hotel is where you’ll find out what matters to voters.

Sam Cox is doing the rounds. He shakes a drinker’s outstretched hand, promises to catch up with another, and moves into the bistro where they are setting up for a party. He has spent the morning chatting and downing coffee with the crowd in a deli down the road.

In between, One Nation’s ­candidate for the state seat of Burdekin is either on the phone or checking his messages. He is explaining what he would do about jobs, water, power prices and those dills in Brisbane who couldn’t run a chook raffle. You would think an election was brewing in the heavy north Queensland air.

“You watch, mate. We’re going to shake them up,” Cox said.

There’s a storm coming, all right. Call it cyclone Hanson. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her LNP rival, Tim Nicholls, are all too aware it is bad news for the big established parties in what promise to be a momentous year in Queensland politics, with a ­confounding draft redistribution of electoral boundaries adding to the volatility as all sides gear up for a state election tipped for the ­second half of the year.

This will be the acid test of Pauline Hanson’s comeback to national politics — and of the pulling power of the scrappy insurgency that has coalesced around her. The Hansonites seem more certain of what they stand against than what they stand for. They profess to ­despise elites, take pride in defying political correctness, dispute the benefits of free trade and insist the party’s deeply-disputed positions on Islam merely reflect what’s on the minds of many Australians.

Sound familiar? The movement, such that it is, has taken heart from the rise of Donald Trump and his polarising impact as US President. As a budding third force, One Nation traverses well-hoed ground in the Queensland regions. Think Hanson in her first iteration as a federal MP, the Katter party and Clive Palmer’s defunct vanity project. Cox, 53, brings something else to the table for One Nation: parliamentary ­experience. He is a former state MP who held the Townsville-based seat of Thuringowa for the Liberal Nationals from 2012-15.

If he can return to the state parliament, it will be a coup for Team Hanson. “This is a little sprinkle of Australia,” he said Burdekin, a seat that reaches from Townsville’s southern suburbs to Ayr, a prosperous sugar town of 9000, and to the coalfields that are serviced by the Abbot Point export port near Bowen. Not for much longer, though. If the redistribution unveiled last Friday stands, the electorate will be abolished. Its successor, McMaster, will lose the Townsville rump and take in more cattle and coal country southwest of Bowen. Cox said the shake-up wouldn’t affect where he stands or his message to voters. “In a way it simplifies things,” he said. “The seat was basically agriculture and coalmining, and this makes it more so. But I’m not saying it will be any easier to win.”

The perceived disparity in wealth and opportunity between the city and the regions of Australia underpin the message One Nation is sending to a seething, disaffected constituency fed up with the status quo in politics. Postcodes tell part of this story, but not all of it. In Queensland, the beltway starts at 4000 amid the gleaming apartment and office towers of downtown Brisbane, abutted by dress-circle suburbs such as Hamilton, postcode 4007. Here, the mean taxable income is $99,788, nearly double the state average. Homes on the hill at Hamilton command views commensurate with a seven-figure price tag. In Ayr, postcode 4807, the mean average income is $47,855. The town is set back from the northern lip of the Burdekin River in a swaying sea of sugar cane fields. When sugar prices are good — as they are now, nudging $58 a tonne — it is supposed to prosper. Yet there’s a disconnect between expectations and people’s lived experience in Ayr, just as there is between the lives of fast lane inner-city dwellers and those in the struggling regions.

The number of people on the dole in Ayr rose by 37 per cent in the three years to 2016, according to social security data broken down by The Australian. An hour’s drive away in Townsville, postcode 4810, 2017 was ushered in with unemployment of 10 per cent, four points higher than the national average. This reflects the economic hits the city took from the collapse of Palmer’s Queensland Nickel refinery and a slowdown in mining investment. In inner-Brisbane, Hamilton, by ­contrast, the growth in Newstart take-up was statistically insignificant at 2.56 per cent from 2013. The number of people with a government healthcare card — a pointer to welfare dependency — rose by nearly a fifth in Ayr, against a slight net fall in Hamilton.

The seat of Burdekin was one of the 11 in Queensland that went to One Nation in 1998, putting the party on the map before it imploded. The Hansonites’ flame-haired leader had to wait 18 years ­before returning to federal parliament at the federal election last July at the head of a team of four senators. One Nation pulled 14 per cent of the Senate vote cast in Ayr, surpassing a strong result statewide.

Next month’s West Australian election will test whether the Hanson revival has legs. But the real action will be when Queenslanders go to the polls this year or in early 2018. The sunshine state is home turf and the key to Hanson’s plan to build a powerbase that can sustain her growing ambition to exercise power in government.

A Galaxy poll a fortnight ago gave One Nation 23 per cent of the state vote, up seven points in a quarter and in line with the 1998 result. The mood in the regions is especially ugly. Further Galaxy research in The Courier-Mail last Friday showed that only one-in-three voters outside of Brisbane believed the state was on track, against 48 per cent in the city who thought the direction was right. If these trends are sustained to the election, One Nation will be in a strong proposition to win seats and exercise the balance of power in the next state parliament in the likely event that the numbers on the floor remain tight. Labor can be expected to hold to its pledge to do no deals with Hanson, either for preferences or power-sharing. But Nicholls will come under intense pressure if the LNP falls short of winning in its own right. He has ruled out entering a coalition with One Nation. But why would One Nation support him in minority government if ministerial leather wasn’t attached?

Cox, for his part, shouldn’t be measuring up the curtains of an office in Brisbane just yet. The existing seat of Burdekin is held by LNP frontbencher Dale Last by 2.8 per cent, a gettable margin. Assuming the ALP candidate runs third on primaries, Labor preferences could get the former policeman home. This scenario will apply to many of the seats targeted by One Nation. Much will depend on the pre-election horse trading on ­preferences between One Nation, the LNP — which says it will deal on a seat-by-seat basis — and ­Katter’s Australian Party, the other minority party in the frame.

KAP will be desperate to preserve its two sitting state MPs, Rob Katter and Shane Knuth, whose seats of Mt Isa and Dalrymple respectively have been folded into the new electorate of Traeger under the proposed redistribution of electoral boundaries. When the music stopped, Shane Knuth missed out. His brother, Jeff, was the short-lived One Nation member for Burdekin, elected in 1998, and the notional division of McMaster takes in solid KAP territory in the coal fields at the foot of the electorate. Knuth, however, lives in Charters Towers, west of Townsville, in the heartland staked out by the party’s mercurial founder, federal independent MP Bob Katter. The fadeout of KAP captures the volatility of the protest vote on the political Right: statewide at the 2015 Queensland election, it secured barely 1.9 per cent of the primary vote, twice the tally of a then moribund One ­Nation. Clive Palmer’s defunct outfit blossomed briefly in this space; Hanson’s reach, though, seems to be conspicuously greater.

Cox’s defection from the LNP came on the heels of the recruitment of former LNP government minister Steve Dickson, the first sitting MP to jump to One Nation, who is to head the state election team for Hanson. When Cox told his friend, Rosemary Menkens, the National Party and LNP stalwart who held Burdekin from 2004-15, that he was defecting, she shook her head and said: “Sam, what are we going to do with you?”

Cox denies he switched because he was turned down for preselection by the LNP. “The short version is the LNP hierarchy did not want to nominate me because I was speaking out for my community … while that’s exactly what Pauline wants, and what she has encouraged me to do,” he said. “It is not … sour grapes by any means. Absolutely not.” While he lives outside the existing electorate of Burdekin in pricey North Ward in Townsville, Cox points to his local connections: he was born and raised in Home Hill, across the river from Ayr, a scion of one of the district’s most prominent families. Townsville’s three state seats — Thuringowa, Mundingburra and Townsville — are held by the ALP, and are eyed by both the LNP and One Nation. Yet the federal government’s move to match state funding for a new football stadium for the North Queensland ­Cowboys couldn’t save entrenched federal Liberal MP Ewen Jones last July. The business community continues to complain that the city is overlooked for infrastructure projects to kick start an uncharacteristically sluggish local economy.

A prolonged dry spell hasn’t helped, forcing the imposition of level-three water restrictions. If the rains don’t come soon, all garden watering will likely be banned. In Mueller Street, Wulguru, public servant Steve Wilson is fighting a losing battle to hand-water a yard full of wilting plants. “They wouldn’t put up with this in Brisbane,” he complained.

Power prices are a bugbear. Wilson, 54, runs seven split-system airconditioning units to cool the family’s five-bedroom home. Even with a rebate for solar panels, the bill hits $1154 a quarter. Energy regulator the Queensland Competition Authority approved a 2.8 per cent increase in power for regional areas, lifting the typical household outlay to $1498 for the year 2015-16.

Servicing northern centres is more expensive because the power comes up the line from generators in central Queensland, increasing distribution costs, though these are offset by government subsidies. Yet Townsville has an underused 414MW power plant on Mount Stuart, overlooking the city. It was designed to connect to the 392km gas pipeline from the Moranbah field. As photographs supplied by Townsville resident Chris Squelch show, a spur to the plant has never been hooked up. Instead, kerosene drives the three turbines which provide peaking power at times of high demand, not baseload electricity for the 240,000 homes it could service. Operator Origin Energy declined to comment. But The Australian understands there is a “constraint” issue with the pipeline: it can’t meet the demand for gas from Townsville’s heavy industries. “I think this is one of the most ludicrous things I have seen in my whole life,” said Squelch, 62.

While the city is crying out for water, the Burdekin Falls Dam upriver from Ayr and Home Hill is brimming with four times the volume of Sydney Harbour. Again, it’s an infrastructure issue. A pipeline to Townsville exists, but the water must be pumped via the Haughton River to the small Ross River Dam, and only then into the mains. The expense for ratepayers is daunting at $27,000 a day.

The standoff between cane farmers in the Burdekin and multinational commodity group Wilmar is another gift for One Nation, ticking the boxes for Hanson against globalisation and foreign investment. The Singapore-based conglomerate owns the four local mills and says a change to state law requires that growers also enter a cane supply agreement to sell the sugar. Most want the option to stay with existing marketer, Queensland Sugar. The dispute means an estimated 1000 growers cannot take advantage of the ­favourable sugar prices to lock in forward contracts.

Fifth-generation cane farmer Allan Parker, 54, was impressed when a crowd gathered in Ayr recently to hear Hanson slam the company as well as the federal and state governments for not intervening. “I have never in my life seen (Liberal) National Party supporters and Labor people turn up for something like that,” he said. “They are now following Pauline.” Former grower Ross Romeo runs a suicide prevention service which is in demand in Ayr. “People have been hanging on, waiting for years for the good prices to arrive. Now they’re here and they can’t … grab them. It’s very distressing,” he said.

Few locals have a bad word for sitting member Dale Last, who is generally thought of as hard working and decent.

The LNP man has history on his side: Labor held Burdekin only once after it was established in 1950. Ayr-based mayor Lynn McLaughlin, a committed independent, said she would not endorse anyone at the coming election. Having spent 23 years on the council, Treena List, 72, credited Cox for “doing some good things” while he was in state parliament with the LNP.

She suspects the Hanson crew will be hard to stop. “People here are definitely looking around,” she said. “They are very disenchanted with the major parties at the moment … whether they go for Sam, I don’t know. But there is a very strong sense that none of the others has much of an idea of what goes on in the country, how people live here. They have not lived the life we do.”

THE front bar of the Kalamia Hotel is emptying as the regulars head home for dinner. Some have been at work this Saturday in sweat-stained high-vis vests and heavy boots. Publican

Gus Dalle Cort, 50, said any serious politician would be advised to drop in to his front bar. “If you want to know what the average bloke is thinking, this is where they will tell you,” he said. Cox nods in agreement. Dalle Cort said his regulars liked that Trump was shaking things up in Washington and hated that no one had done much in Queensland since Joh Bjelke- Petersen’s time, a generation ago. “People are sick of promises and these bloody politicians with their snouts in the trough,” he said. “We need more water, we need more electricity and what we pay for water and power is phenomenal. They treat us like fools and expect us to put up with it.”