Funny old thing, polls: one week they’re the only thing that matters; the next they’re totally irrelevant. This, of course, depends on whether they’re saying something you like or not.
As I wrote last week, what was clearly no more than poll noise – a two per cent drop in One Nation’s polling – had the legacy media and their uniparty overlords all in a tizz. It’s all over for the bad orange lady! they whooped as they turned cartwheels. Well, as I wrote, a single poll swallow does not a uniparty springtime make.
Now that ray of hope has vanished. And suddenly polls don’t matter at all. Funny about that.
Emergency Services Minister Kristy McBain has dismissed One Nation’s recovery in the latest Newspoll, claiming the party had nothing “meaningful” to offer Australian voters.
Now, the ‘recovery’ is still very much in the poll noise category. After dropping two points from a record high of 31 per cent, One Nation has regained a single point. This is nothing: just the needle wobbling entirely within the bounds of the margin of error.
What’s just outside the margin of error, and is almost certainly keeping Labor’s bean-counters up at night, is a collapse of Labor’s already record-low primary vote. Labor’s vote dropped from 33 per cent at the last election (one of the five lowest primary votes in the party’s history) to 30 per cent, which is nudging the party’s record low in the polls, of between 26 and 30 per cent, under Julia Gillard.
Dear, oh, dear... What are Labor to do? Lie and smear, of course.
Facing his own One Nation problems ahead of a state election early next year, NSW Premier Chris Minns went even further and claimed any alliance between Senator Hanson’s populist party and the coalition would be bad for people without white skin.
“What will that policy view and this leader mean for the state of NSW? If (a coalition-One Nation alliance) has significant power in our political institutions, inside our government … I think that would be bad for our economy, bad for community cohesion, and bad for young people who may not have white pigmentation.”
Community cohesion, eh? Tell, me, how has ‘community cohesion’ been under Minns’ watch? Which includes the relentless antisemitism that culminated in the murder of 15 Jewish Australians at Bondi. How bad was it, under Minns, for young Jewish people? Not just those murdered at Bondi, but harassed and attacked every day on the campus of Sydney University?
Remember, it was Minns who did nothing when a Muslim mob stormed the Sydney Opera House, chanting “Gas the Jews”. Well, not quite nothing: Minns’ police force did arrest one man: for the crime of being visibly Jewish near Muslims.
So, no, I’m not going to take unctuous lectures from the likes of Chris Minns.
Nor am I interested in cheap hatchet jobs from the dying, lying legacy media. Rubbish like this, for example:
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce says the right-wing minor party does not support revisiting the White Australia policy, departing from comments made by his leader Pauline Hanson on a podcast with far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
Leaving aside the standard legacy media ‘far-right’ slur, where, exactly does Joyce “depart” from Hanson?
“It’s a statement of fact that, and Pauline herself said, it started from (Harold) Holt actually, the wind down of the White Australia policy, a very good thing, and at the start there was really no issues with it,” he told Sunrise.
“But over time, we got a section of people who didn’t want to really assimilate with Australia, who didn’t work within the guardrails of Australia, and therefore we started moving away from Australian culture to having to encompass a whole range of views, some of which are just not conducive to an egalitarian, easygoing society.”
Certainly, Hanson never suggested “revisiting the White Australia policy” (which was itself a creature entirely of the Labor Party). But that’s the media’s modus operandi: make shit up and throw it, hoping it sticks.
Pauline Hanson seems more anxious about her European holiday than she cares to admit. And she has just revealed an incredible sensitivity about the questions from the media about how she ended up at a luxury fashion show in Sicily.
It’s not her, legacy media: it’s you. You’re irrelevant and vile, and everyone knows it. Pauline just isn’t playing your game any more and you can’t handle it.
