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My, my, how the tables have turned. For 30 years, every election has been a Dance of the Seven Preferences for the coalition silvertails: will they or won’t they deign to direct preferences to those awful One Nation oiks? Almost every time, terrified of the legacy media, they’ve chickened out and put One Nation last.
One Nation is the poor cousin no longer: buoyed by a year of one win after another, One Nation is telling the few remaining coalition MPs in Canberra that it’s their turn to beg for the electoral scraps.
An emboldened Pauline Hanson has extended her hand to Angus Taylor and Nationals leader Matt Canavan to create a conservative plan to get rid of Anthony Albanese, as she demanded the coalition guarantee support for a One Nation-led government if her party wins more seats than it does at the next election.
On a high after voters for the first time elected a One Nation MP to the House of Representatives at Saturday’s Farrer by-election, taking the party’s lower-house representation to two, the One Nation leader declared the coalition had to realise “I’m not the enemy” as she looked to pick up more electorates than the Liberals and Nationals in one term.
One can almost palpably sense Hanson’s relish as she gets the chance to dictate terms.
One Nation’s string of strong poll results, by-election surges and outright wins has transformed the party from protest footnote to genuine political force. Working-class battlers, regional voters and the disillusioned are flocking to Hanson in numbers that have the majors rattled. In effect, One Nation has become the real opposition in Australia – the only party consistently hammering Labor on cost-of-living, borders, energy and the endless cultural insanity while the coalition dithers and splinters.
The power shift is delicious. Only recently, pundits – including yours truly – whispered about a future ‘grand coalition’ where a humbled Liberal-National alliance might deign to let One Nation tag along. Now the script has flipped. Hanson is offering the coalition a seat at her table – as junior partners. No ministries and no veto power over her agenda. Supply and confidence on her terms, or nothing.
“If they get the numbers and they require our numbers to give them government, then I will give them supply and confidence,” Senator Hanson told the Australian. “I don’t want a ministerial position because that means they will be able to shut me down, dictate to me, and I have to pass bad legislation, support them on it. I’m not going to do that.
“But I also want to know: if we get more members than what they do, and we require their numbers (to form government), will they give me the same deal? We don’t know what the future holds. The people are angry. The people have had enough.”
Hanson has recent precedent, from the left, no less, to back her case. She watched what happened to the Greens when they propped up Julia Gillard’s minority government. The tail wagged the dog for a while, then the dog bit back. Hanson has learned the lesson: real leverage comes from staying outside the tent, pissing in.
This isn’t unprecedented in other ways, too. In the early years after Federation, before the rigid two-party system calcified, Australian politics was fluid. Minority governments, shifting alliances and independent king-makers were the norm. The major parties like to pretend that only Labor-Greens deals are legitimate. History says otherwise. When the people reject the duopoly, deals get done – or governments fall.
Senator Canavan said he had no interest in creating a formal coalition with One Nation and wanted to win government without Senator Hanson’s support, adamant that no more Nationals MPs would follow Barnaby Joyce and defect to the minor party.
The coalition can talk tough all they like: Farrer was a shot straight to their heart, and everyone knows it.
The Liberals gained just 12.38 per cent of the first preference vote in the Farrer by-election, representing a swing of 31 per cent against the party, compared with 39.46 per cent for One Nation’s David Farley and 28.39 per cent for independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe, who was backed by Climate 200.
The Nationals picked up 9.72 per cent of the first preference vote, the first time the party had been able to field a candidate since losing the seat to the Liberals in 2001.
So, One Nation didn’t just absorb the disaffected coalition voters – it picked up votes from the left as well.
The coalition’s panic is as palpable as Labor’s growing sheen of sweat. Barnaby Joyce, now with company in the lower house, is blunt: the Liberals face “soul searching” and the result is “almost a signal that things might be over”. Even Anthony Albanese, never one to miss a chance to sneer, admits the coalition can’t form government without Hanson’s numbers.
Yet some Liberals still recoil in horror. Andrew Hastie also ruled out any coalition agreement days after the result. Others clutch pearls about ‘extremism’ while their own party bleeds votes to teals, independents and One Nation. The base is done with the uniparty’s net-zero zeal, open borders, wage-crushing migration and weakness on crime. They want results, not more focus-group pablum.
Hanson is right: if the coalition are serious conservatives who want to turf out Albanese’s circus, they should work with her, not against her. The alternative is another term of Labor-Greens dominance, more debt, more taxes, more cultural self-harm. Farrer proved the protest vote is hardening into a permanent realignment.
With two years until the next federal election, momentum is building. Regional seats are falling. Western Sydney is stirring. The majors’ condescension, treating Hanson voters as deplorables who must be managed rather than heard, is exactly why they’re bleeding support.
The increasingly media-savvy Hanson turned ABC sneerer Patricia Karvelas’s sniffing about One Nation being ‘illegitimate’ right back at her, calling the Farrer win “breaking the ceiling”. Farrer has shown voters that it’s OK, no matter what the legacy media and social media left say, to vote One Nation. The people are angry. They’ve had enough. And this time, they’ve got a party that’s listening.
The ‘shy Tories’ are shy no longer: people are happily, brazenly declaring, ‘Onya, Pauline!’
