Wow! Here we are again, bedazzled by the extraordinary Pauline Hanson.
During the 1998 federal election campaign, she told reporters many times that she looked forward to winning the seat of Blair, walking back into Parliament, and yelling, “I’m Back!”
She had to wait a long time, but she’s certainly back now to add spice and fear to what will be a wild election year.
Since I wrote the story of Pauline Hanson’s 1998 federal election campaign in “Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip”, Hanson has refused to speak to me, and I gratefully moved on from the wreckage. This is my first take on the weekend’s events.
HOW SHE DID IT
Last year Pauline Hanson publicly divorced David Oldfield when she locked herself in the NSW One Nation office while he banged on the door outside. She’s now removed the two Davids from the One Nation executive and taken total control. Last week she brought back her first Svengali, John Pasquerelli, the man who wrote her maiden speech and whom she had ejected from her office in 1997 by a security guard. He’s a big, vulgar, politically astute bloke who’s been critiquing the two Davids and Pauline from the sidelines ever since.
At the time of the Hanson/Oldfield denouement I suggested she might rise again, at least to win a Senate seat in Queensland. The perception in her heartland that she was a mere puppet of Oldfield had hurt her vote – she admitted as much to me during the 1998 campaign – and Oldfield’s drive for control of One Nation split the party into warring factions. Now he’s gone, she has returned to her core instincts and returned One Nation to a vehicle for the cult of Pauline Hanson.
Hanson is an anarchist force in Australian politics. She combines an incredible sex appeal to middle-aged, threatened men with plain speaking and intense listening to society’s losers. What she learned in 1998 was that she is a lightning rod for protest, not a purveyor of alternative policies. She has no policy answers, and her disastrous Easytax policy and plans to replace the Family Court with people’s tribunals comprised of the divorced couples’ neighbours proved the point. Her “policies” turned voters away, not brought them in.
She is now pure protest, no policy. She has learned that those attracted her believe she is asking all the right questions, but has no answers. She is anti-establishment – political, media, academic and business. People who vote for her want her to give the establishment curry and MAKE them notice Pauline’s people. .
During the 1998 election she announced to the travelling media that she would put all sitting members last. Oldfield overruled her then, and now that he’s gone she’s returned to her anarchic instincts, designed to ensure her personal stardom. She and her people are willing to churn governments – to dump Labor or Liberal governments after one term until they get satisfaction. She said on Saturday night that people were sick of
Richard Court and John Howard. She has her first scalp and is gunning for her second.
Unless, of course, the Nationals swap preferences with One Nation. If they do that, she’ll take the risk of reelecting them for the chance that they’ll elect her people instead.
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
WA’s One Nation is different. Some Western Australian Liberals sick of the machinations of Right wing power broker Noel Crichton-Browne defected to the new party, and it does not have the crazed edge of branches in some other states. A One Nation candidate in 1998 told me Pauline saw One Nation as an association of independents, and that he’d have no qualms supporting gun law reform, whereas in Queensland and NSW, candidates passionately opposed it. One Nation in WA has dropped its racist immigration policy and predicted the same will occur at a national level. ,
Western Australia’s One Nation feeds on the endemic perception in the State that it is trodden on by the Eastern States – that WA produces the wealth and gets none of the benefits. This was exemplified by the recent farmers’ protest when National Party leader John Anderson toured the WA regions – that their pleas for flood and other relief got stuck in the bottom drawer while NSW farmers only had to make a phone call to get results.
QUEENSLAND
WA and Queensland are frontier States. WA citizens hate Easterners, and Queenslanders hate Southerners. But unlike WA, in Queensland One Nation’s 11 sitting members have splintered into the Country Alliance and independents. One Nation’s first foray into the State parliament was, quite simply, disastrous.
There is another factor that I believe will help Peter Beattie retain government. In 1998 Labor lost 5 regional seats to One Nation, but picked up five liberal seats in Brisbane, partly due to the Coalition’s decision to preference One Nation. After the WA result, many Liberal voters will be seriously considering voting Labor, perhaps for the first time, to ensure stable government.
The Nationals have humiliated their leader, Rob Borbidge, by preferencing One Nation against his wishes, while the Libs will put One Nation last. But the Liberals would be a junior partner in a Coalition government that could easily depend on One Nation or other far right independents to hold power. That’s bad for business. The WA election result – which comes despite a massive injection of funds and other resources into the bush since the 1998 federal election – shows that the discontented remain that way. In a way, it is now war between the winners under a stable political system in which both major parties share common core beliefs and those who perceive themselves as losers. In such an us-and-them atmosphere, I think Labor could pick up some unexpected Liberal seats on Saturday night.
THE FEDERAL ELECTION
John Howard and Kim Beazley won’t change their decisions to put One Nation last. That means that the many Liberals in regional seats will be scared out of their brains today. It also means that some Labor seats considered safe before Saturday night are now not safe at all. One Nation polled more than 7 percent in the city of Perth, and there’s no reason to think she won’t pull in at least that in western Sydney seats.
Labor numbers man Senator Steve Conroy says that Labor won four federal Perth seats in 1998 on the back of One Nation preferences. If those preferences go Liberal this time because Hanson puts sitting members last the Liberals would win those seats.
Everything is up for grabs. No one is safe. Anarchy rules.
Independents and minor parties polled 30 percent of the first preference votes in WA. That means it’s not only One-Nation preferences that will influence the election result. The Greens had a say in WA through Liberals for Forest, a breakaway group from the Liberal Party. A Liberals for Forests candidate appears to have toppled Liberal Minister Doug Shave in his seat. I think there will be a multitude of independent candidates, on the right and left, whose preference swirls will be impossible to predict.
As for the Nationals, John Anderson is already on his knees after the road-funding debacle last week. The WA result will trigger screams from a party that got out of jail free in 1998 only to face another test of its survival this year to make preference deals with One Nation.
After the Queensland election in June 1998, where One Nation polled a whopping 23 percent, private polling showed that in Anderson’s own seat of Gwydir in regional NSW One Nation was polling 49 percent. He had to stay home to campaign to save himself.
Country independent Tony Windsor, who won a NSW state seat in Anderson’s electorate, has threatened to stand against him in the federal election. If he does, I doubt whether Anderson has the personal and political strength to withstand the push to preference One Nation. If he loses that battle, John Howard will fear that some Liberal voters will abandon him and vote Labor for stability.
It will take a while to fully digest the ramifications of the WA result. The Queensland election on Saturday will give us more information on the nature of the one Nation threat, but even then there’ll have to be a lot of micro-analysis of who is voting One Nation and where they live before we can construct an informed scenario of the political year ahead.
But let me make one policy prediction. One Nation’s resurgence means that the government will block the takeover of Australian resources company Woodside by Dutch predator Shell. John Howard can’t risk igniting the Hanson mantra of economic nationalism by letting Shell get Woodside. And that will be only one of several policy turnarounds in the run up to the election.