Pauline Hanson’s voice welcome in stirring up convention

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

What’s troubling the people of Glenore Grove who used the election to raise a bipartisan finger to the political establishment?

In 2007 almost half of voters in this southeast Queensland community gave their first preference to Kevin Rudd’s Labor. Four out of 10 stuck with John Howard. Nine years later the indisputable winner in Glenore Grove, and hundreds of other booths across the country, was None of the Above. Pauline Hanson’s One ­Nation secured 615 primary votes in Glenore Grove, or 40.4 per cent of the total. The Liberal National Party (375 votes) and Labor (343) trailed in the ­distance.

The Lockyer Valley, barely an hour’s drive from central Brisbane, was the epicentre of the One ­Nation quake that gave Hanson between one and three Senate seats from which to torment the political class.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, like other members of the intelligentsia, found the democratic outcome disturbing. He warned ABC lis­teners of the “great potential for harm” from Hanson’s inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric.

This kind of over-reaction is a gift for Hanson, who used her 1996 maiden speech to mock the taxpayer-funded “industries” that serviced multiculturalism and the “fat cats, bureaucrats and the do-­gooders” who criticised on the ­public purse.

If there is a threat to responsible government in the next parliament it is not from One Nation’s particular brand of populism but from the rise of populism in general. The self-approving Greens and self-canonised independents such as Nick Xenophon may try to distance themselves from Hanson but they are riding the same ­populist wave.

Like Hanson, they play the politics of protest rather than participation; they provide one-­dimensional answers to complex political questions; they are quick to oppose and slow to propose.

The greatest achievement of the crossbench in the past government, in alliance with an increasingly populist Labor Party, was to make rational economic policy unfashionable. It falls to Hanson — the arch-enemy of political correctness — to buck the trend.

The importance of Hanson’s contribution to public life in the 1990s was not the little she brought to the debate but her challenge to the accepted wisdom. She ­exposed the moral vanity of the political class and revealed their ­illiberal tendencies.

The reaction to her election to the Senate suggests she is capable of doing the same again but this time with the confidence that comes from 20 years more life ­experience and the benefit of ­social media. Facebook has ­become the new bush telegraph, a powerful force for rallying ­regional discontent and the ­expression of alternative world views that are overlooked or belittled in metropolitan media.

One Nation’s strongest support comes to the west of her former constituency of Oxley in the semirural flat lands between Ipswich and the Toowoomba Range. Electoral analysts like to talk of “swinging voters” but in reality it is communities that swing; 18 of the 25 booths in which One Nation ­secured 30 per cent or more of lower house seats are in the lower Lockyer Valley that was devastated by a flood in January 2011 that was the subject of two judicial commissions.

The flood and its aftermath apart, the concerns of people in the Lockyer Valley seldom hit the news. At the time of the 2011 census there were a mere 108 journa­lists living in the entire seat of Wright in which the Lockyer Valley sits. In Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth there are more than 1000; hacks outnumber plumbers by three to one.

Other census measures confirm that this is an area of out­siders; the proportion of university graduates per head of population is low; the ratio of formal mar­riages to de facto couples is high; those who declare themselves to have “no religion” is lower than the state average.

One can only guess which way Lockyer Valley voters might swing in a plebiscite on same-sex marriage, but it is likely to be low on their list of priorities. The electorate of Wright was home to 130 same-sex couples in 2011; in Wentworth there were 2666.

One Nation polled strongly in the southern half of Queensland outside metropolitan Brisbane and away from the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast. There were strong pockets of support in booths ­between Gympie and Bundaberg with enthusiasm for Hanson ­noticeably weakening north of Rockhampton. Inland, Hanson’s support was strong along the NSW border and in the challenging farming country west of Dalby. One Nation did well in NSW in the Hunter and the central coast; the party picked up 12.9 per cent of the lower house vote in Paterson and 8.5 per cent in Dobell, in both cases pushing the Greens into fourth place.

They are areas where unemployment is above average and ­incomes, broadly speaking, are below average. There is a degree of welfare dependency. In other words they are areas where the Coalition’s promise of jobs and growth should resonate. The reason it did not should be the subject of a rigorous post mortem.

That there is prejudice among One Nation’s supporters is hardly surprising; the intelligentsia too can be intolerant in its own peculiar way. It would be a mistake, however, to see prejudice as the party’s defining characteristic. A worse miscalculation would be to try to silence its voice, as many journalists and some editors took it upon themselves to do in 1996.

Discordant voices in Canberra are to be welcomed. The conventional wisdom deserves to be challenged, not least because it so frequently is wrong.

The real test for Hanson, then, is not whether she offends the cultural sensitivities of the sophisticates. She only has to take her seat in the Senate to do that. The test is whether she is prepared to take on the populist forces of economic ­irrationalism and contribute to the urgent task of lowering the debt, reducing the deficit, fighting the dependency culture and promoting economic growth.

The last thing we need is ­another crossbencher who sits on the veranda bickering about who broke the fence. Hanson should be in the paddock fixing it.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.