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As Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) triumphantly announces, when he mind-probes the “brainbug” in Starship Troopers (1997): “It’s afraid!” The Victorian Liberals might be a disgusting slimy alien creature, but there their semblance to a brainbug ends. Anyone mind-probing the party room meeting of the Vic Libs will only find a cold, empty void.
But plenty of fear. The brainless bugs of the Victorian Liberals are not just afraid, they’re in full panic mode. And they’re going cap-in-hand to One Nation.
Former Victorian deputy premier Pat McNamara has backed calls for the Coalition and One Nation to exchange preferences at the November state election, saying Pauline Hanson’s party was now firmly entrenched in the political mainstream and should be part of a united effort to defeat the Allan government.
Mr McNamara, who led the Nationals and served as Jeff Kennett’s deputy when One Nation first disrupted the political landscape in the late 1990s, said while the Coalition must claw back primary votes lost to the minor party, it could no longer afford to treat it as a fringe operator.
If anyone is the fringe operator in Victoria, as in most of Australia, today, it’s the Liberals. Their polling is fast scraping down to around the sort of numbers you’d normally associate with the Greens or the Monster Raving Loony Party. And that’s against one of the worst governments in the state’s history, with multiple, simultaneous corruption scandals and record debt that makes the crisis of the early 1990s look like a mere blip by comparison.
Back then, McNamara was part of the Liberal government that restored the state’s fortunes. Back when the Liberals could afford to sneer at One Nation.
They’re not sneering any more. They’re begging.
Any party that is topping the opinion polls – they’ve got to deal with them.
And there it is. The quiet admission from one of the old guard that the blue bloods are terrified. One Nation isn’t some fringe protest any more. They’re polling ahead of Labor in key seats and reducing the Liberals to a third force. Working-class battlers who once reliably backed Labor are flocking to Pauline Hanson in droves, sick of being lectured about emissions while their power bills explode and African gang crime turns suburban streets into no-go zones. They’re not buying the ‘moderate’ wilted lettuce-leaf stuff, either.
His comments come amid fierce debate within the Victorian coalition over whether to strike a formal preference deal with One Nation ahead of the state election, as polls point to a surge in support for Senator Hanson’s party.
The Liberals and Nationals are yet to decide whether to pursue a preference deal, with the coalition focused in the short term on reclaiming conservative voters who have drifted to One Nation since the start of the year.
Here’s the delicious reality the Libs don’t want to admit out loud: in November, it’s far more likely that One Nation will be the ones deciding whether the coalition gets a shot at forming government, not the other way around. The power dynamic has flipped. The coalition isn’t magnanimously “dealing with” One Nation, they’re the ones who’ll be begging for preferences to avoid another term of Jacinta Allan’s debt-ridden catastrophe.
That the Liberals are only just outpolling the Allan government is a damning indictment of the grotesque failure of the moderates. Even McNamara is admitting it.
Mr McNamara said One Nation’s rise reflected rising dissatisfaction in conservative voters with what he called a succession of “wishy-washy” Liberal leaders, singling out former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and some of Ms Wilson’s predecessors.
“I just thought Turnbull’s comments saying that the Liberals need to move further to the left to be the part of the middle – well, the people leaving the Liberal Party and the National Party aren’t going to the left, they’re going even further right,” he said.
Turnbull is an idiot: if the Liberals moved any further left, they’d be wearing keffiyehs and waving red flags in the May Day parade.
Suburban and regional Victorians are fed up with net-zero zealotry, soft-on-crime nonsense, ballooning debt and identity politics while their power bills explode and the basics of life get harder. They want secure borders, cheap reliable energy, law and order and a government that puts Victorians first.
The coalition’s short-term response has been a flurry of policy announcements from Liberal leader Jess Wilson: public sector hiring freezes, executive salary caps and a pledge to return the budget to surplus by 2032. All worthy enough, but they smack of desperate catch-up after years of betrayal. Does anyone believe they’ll actually stick to their guns?
McNamara gives Wilson some faint praise, saying she’s shown “a bit of steel” and performed better than he expected. He also welcomes the appointments of battle-hardened Brian Loughnane as state president and Tony Abbott federally as positive signs the grown-ups are reasserting some control, which is thick with irony, given how the moderates, led by Turnbull himself, conspired to knife Abbott in the back for the crime of actually being conservative.
So the blunt truth remains: without a proper preference arrangement with One Nation, the coalition risks splitting the conservative vote yet again and handing Jacinta Allan another term to continue her socialist destruction of Victoria.
The days of treating One Nation as untouchable are over. In November, it may well be One Nation deciding whether the coalition gets to form government, not the other way around.
The question is whether the Victorian Liberals still have enough spine left to do what is necessary before the voters bury them for good.
