Appeasement or aggression? It's time the major parties decided how to handle Hanson
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Version 0 of 1. If you care about Australian politics, you’ll be looking west this weekend. Readers in Western Australia will obviously be concerned to know whether the state government will be run by Colin Barnett or Mark McGowan after Saturday’s election – but the key point of interest for the rest of us will be the performance of One Nation. Since Pauline Hanson and her small Senate posse arrived back in Canberra courtesy of the double dissolution election in 2016, One Nation has enjoyed something of a dream run. While the One Nation folks are easily slighted and are fond of hollering Fake News™ at the first whiff of grapeshot, Hanson 2.0 hasn’t really faced intense media pressure in its opening phase. Malcolm Turnbull and his team have tip-toed cautiously around Hanson, affording her deference, respect, and, periodically, flattery. Labor’s tone has been significantly less deferential, some senior ALP figures (Penny Wong most notably) have been overtly critical, but as a general observation, Labor hasn’t gone in hard either. Pressure is sporadic rather than sustained. The reasons for this are pretty obvious. One Nation is a critical swing vote in the federal parliament in 2017. Everyone needs those numbers at one time or another – the government to pass legislation, and Labor to thwart it. That reality buys Hanson some peace, love and harmony in Canberra. But there are factors beyond basic functionality in the parliament that are also relevant to her cautious treatment. The major parties are acutely conscious that she is talking to their people, that she is recruiting actively in their territory. She’s courting disaffected voters – some alienated for economic reasons, some for cultural reasons. I’m not rushing to a conclusion about the Hanson shambles. Trump’s campaign was a shambles and he is now president Hanson is an avid collector. She hoovers up small coalitions of disaffection, and the major parties are conscious that the most egregious Establishment™ sin in contemporary politics is to tell angry voters what to think and who to like. It is genuinely tricky, managing this phenomenon. But Hanson’s dream run came to an end this past week. On any conventional analysis, she’s had a shocker. The week started badly, with an appearance on Insiders on Sunday which was untidy on a couple of fronts, most notably on childhood vaccinations. Interestingly, Turnbull didn’t avert his gaze delicately when Hanson attempted to give some comfort to the anti-vaxers during her chat with Barrie Cassidy, no-one attempted to flatter and argue that this was fine, that she was more sophisticated than she used to be, Turnbull said she was wrong. Dead wrong. The prime ministerial rebuttal pushed the story into the next news cycle, which coincided with Hanson’s arrival in Perth for a week of campaigning. Normally Hanson can dart around the country without much of a media entourage, she can broadcast in the unfiltered comfort zone of Facebook live, deal with local papers, and yarn companionably over the back fence – but not during a state election. The vaccination story roiled all week, right through to when she apologised for her comments on Thursday. On the ground in WA there was more trouble – a controversy about whether she’d said Queensland could give up some of its GST revenue to help WA. Hanson denied that she had ever said any such thing. “At no time have I ever, ever said that it must come out of Queensland.” But unfortunately for her, she had, during a live radio interview. Hanson was asked in January: “Will you, Senator Hanson, help us in Western Australia in this fight, and would you be willing to see the GST share of your home state Queensland reduced so that WA can get a better deal?” The reply? “Of course I will — no problem.” There was also controversy with personnel, and a rolling backlash against the preference deal the Liberal party had struck with One Nation, which made her political insurgency look a little bit hollow, a little bit conformist, a little bit Part Of The Problem. So, a bad week, on any conventional measure. But I’m not rushing to any premature conclusion about the impact of the shambles. Donald Trump’s campaign was a rollicking shambles on any conventional measure, and he is now president of the United States. One of the more fascinating phenomenons in contemporary politics is voters are using different yardsticks to measure politics and politicians. If you possess the magic of being able to convince your supporters you are somehow outside the rules of the game, that you are something different, that you are agent of transformation, then it seems you can get away with being judged by a different standard. I was really struck by this during a field trip I did in South Australia at the end of last year. I spent several days talking to Xenophon supporters, and it was clear people warmed to him because he validated their concerns, and he had a go at trying to help people. Results really weren’t that important. In an environment where collective expectations in voter land are low – empathy, plain speaking, appearing authentic, having a crack, sticking it up the status quo, seems to count for a lot. So let’s wait and see how the WA contest comes together, and consider the national implications. But quite apart from that, the major parties have an important decision to make. The WA election is an important milestone. Let’s call it the end of the opening phase of Hanson 2.0. The basic getting-to-know-you dynamic in Canberra has been established. Now the major parties need to make a decision about whether appeasement or aggression is the best approach. It’s pretty clear the Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce wants to be sharp. In his own inimitable fashion, he’s been trialling different language over the past month or so. In the middle of the month, Joyce told Guardian Australia’s Australian Politics Live podcast anti-Islamic statements could harm Australian trade deals, and he declared that he would give instructions not to preference One Nation before the Liberal party in federal seats. By this week he’d really warmed to the theme. Joyce told reporters he knew where the country would end up if One Nation ended up running the country. “I will tell you exactly where it is going to go. “It is going to go down the toilet.” Turnbull had two explicit slaps at Hanson over the course of the week, one in relation to vaccinations, the other in relation to her comments about Islam. But the finest wisdom of the week emerged from Ron Boswell. If you aren’t old and battle scarred enough to know who Boswell is, he was a Nationals senator for Queensland from 1983 to 2014, and led the party in the Senate from 1990 to 2007. He led the Nationals fightback against One Nation when Hanson was last in the parliament. Boswell has been stewing on the Hanson comeback for some months, politely holding his tongue. But this week, he gave his colleagues both barrels. He said if the Coalition continued to normalise Hanson, it was organising its own funeral. “Because all you are doing is legitimising people voting for her. Making it safe for people to vote for her,” Boswell told my colleague Gabrielle Chan. Boswell said if you want to know how it looks and feels to have a permanent fracture in your base, just look at Labor, who have lost 10% of progressive people to the Greens. “I don’t want to be in the same position as the Labor party where they get dragged to the left all the time. If we don’t fight her back that’s where we’ll end up.” “We will be dragged to the right.” Boswell is exactly right. He’s not a pipe smoker, or an arm chair general, or a bobble head on Sky or ABC News 24 banging on about optics and the narrative and other mumbo jumbo – he’s speaking from lived experience – dusty hands, bruised knees, the lot. What remains to be seen is whether the current generation have the clarity and the courage of the old fighter’s convictions. |