The nightmare for the uniparty never ends, which is only fair, given the endless nightmares they’ve inflicted on Australians. Across poll after poll, the result is conclusive: One Nation is now the most popular political party in the country.
Worse, for the Labor government, while PM Anthony Albanese grows steadily more detested by voters, none of his potential replacements are any more palatable to voters. Most of even the government’s most senior figures are virtual unknowns to the wider public, outside of political tragics. What little voters do know about them is almost entirely negative. Only one senior minister, Mark Butler, struggled into positive territory, at just +1 likeability. Deputy PM Richard Marles was the next-least-loathed, at -3. Penny Wong, Tony Burke and Chris Bowen all sunk lower in the voters’ eyes. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was the most hated, at -11.
What’s more dangerous for the government is that voters are in a bleak and ugly mood. They’re as mad as hell and they know who to blame: Nearly half of respondents to the national Resolve poll pegged responsibility purely on the government. Barely a quarter buy the ‘global factors’ excuse. Almost none are falling for the government’s attempt to shift blame onto the Reserve Bank.
New global polling by [political strategist Lynton Crosby’s] CT Group of 17,000 people in the US, Britain, Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, South Africa, Indonesia and Australia has found a widespread sense of economic gloom in the Western world.
In Australia, the CT political barometer found a net minus 18 per cent of Australians believe the country is on the right track, minus 24 believe they are worse off this year than 12 months ago, and minus 7 think things will improve in the year ahead.
A net minus 21 per cent of Australians think the economy is working for them, and that same number say they do not feel they have a say in decisions that affect their lives.
Showing exactly the tin ear that has them polling the lowest in their history, Crosby reckons he has the answer: keep voting for the same uniparty dunderheads who’ve brought us to this pass. Yes, seriously.
Sir Lynton – who masterminded legendary conservative election victories for former prime minister John Howard and British ex-Tory leaders David Cameron and Boris Johnson – said business leaders had an opportunity to win back populist-leaning voters by showing economic reform and pro-market policies work for ordinary people.
They’re seriously touting Crosby’s work for Cameron and Johnson as positives? These people are demented.
All Crosby is really showing is just how much of a panic the political establishment is in, as One Nation surge to the lead in the polls. Look! Over there! screeches Crosby. A far-right populist!!
To which voters are more and more responding: Tell us where, so we can vote for them.
The measure of just how much of a panic the establishment is in can be gauged in NSW, where the incumbent Labor government is throwing its lot in with what they’ve spent the last decade saying is the greatest threat to the planet: coal.
Labor has denied the threat of a One Nation wave in its traditional NSW heartland is behind their renewed focus on mining, after introducing legislation on Tuesday aimed at protecting hundreds of heavy-industry jobs. One Nation’s Stuart Bonds, who will head the NSW Upper House ticket for the party, accused Labor of being motivated by polling showing his party could sweep seats across the Hunter.
“The voters aren’t mugs. There’s a reason why we have a foothold on the Hunter, they know men in suits are going to come up from the city and shut our industry down,” he said.
Does the Minns government think blue-collar workers are so gullible that they’ll seriously buy the last-minute about-face on coal? After years of treating coal as the original sin of climate change, suddenly the jobs of 400 miners are sacred because One Nation is eating Labor’s lunch in the Hunter. One Nation’s focus on the region is headlined by its NSW leader, former trade envoy Mike Newman, who will run in the traditional Labor-stronghold of Cessnock, while Bonds is based in the Upper Hunter and has previously run for the federal seat of Hunter, most famously swiping 21 per cent of the vote from Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon in the 2019 election.
Unsurprisingly, then, Labor are resorting to their old favourite: screeching ‘racism’. Bonds had told the rally in Sydney “make no mistake, we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation”, with NSW Premier Chris Minns later claiming his comments were “frankly outrageous and racist”.
Minns can screech “frankly outrageous and racist” at the commonsense observation that Australians are being demographically replaced, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Between 1987 and 1999, the Anglo-Celtic population of Australia, for centuries the almost completely dominant demographic, had declined from 75 per cent to 70 per cent. By 2021, that figure had been reduced to 51.7 per cent. That was before the really turbocharged post-Covid migration surge. Singh is now the third-most-common surname in Melbourne and the most common for newborns.
The voters in the Hunter can see the pattern. Labor spent a decade telling them their industry was the enemy of the planet. Now, with One Nation surging, the same government is scrambling to keep the mine open and calling anyone who notices the fastest demographic change in human history ‘racist’.
The uniparty’s nightmares are only just beginning.
