The legacy media still haven’t learned: the more they sneer, the higher One Nation’s poll numbers go.
That’s because at the core of One Nation’s, and especially leader Pauline Hanson’s, appeal is authenticity. When viewers see or read bourgeois, university-educated, inner-city lefty ‘progressive’ journalists sneering at Pauline Hanson, they see the same people sneering at them. Funnily enough, deriding people doesn’t tend to win them to your cause.
And if anybody from the right belittled a disabled politician from the left in this way, the outrage would be nuclear.
John Barnes struggles to do simple things. He cannot bathe unattended, cook or drive himself to work. His memory is poor and cognitive capacity severely diminished, his doctors believe, from permanent brain injury caused by repeatedly being knocked unconscious while playing football […]
He is now One Nation’s candidate for the seat of Essendon in November.
Would they dare similarly scoff at, say, the Greens’ Jordon Steele-John? Or Kelly Vincent or Paul Collier of the Dignity Party?
Certainly, many on the right sneered at the Democrats’ John Fetterman, when he ran for the US Senate after a stroke. Conservative pundits mocked his inability to process verbal speech, causing him to rely on a prompter. Yet, Fetterman has proved to be not just an able and popular representative for his district, but one of the last sane Democrats standing.
The Age has spent the best part of a week performing the same predictable ritual over One Nation’s Victorian campaign. Former Essendon ruckman John Barnes is the latest target. A man whose brain was scrambled by the very game the state worships is suddenly unfit for public life the moment he lines up under the orange banner. The sneering is pure class warfare dressed as concern. Barnes is a local councillor who has already done the hard yards of community service. That is more real-world experience than half the professional political class will ever accumulate.
The broader charge is that One Nation is not serious. We might ask the same of the legacy media and their obvious lies.
Other than a standing promise to tear up Victoria’s historic treaty with its First Peoples, the party has released no state-based policies. If you go to the One Nation website and try to click onto a policy, you are greeted with a generic message: “update in progress”.
The Parliamentary Budget Office, an independent, taxpayer-funded advisory established 10 years ago to inform public debate in Victoria, publishes an “election tracker” with details of every commitment made by the various parties. As of Wednesday, more than 150 election promises were listed and none were from One Nation.
That sounds very much, then, as if the PBO aren’t doing their job, because, by the Age’s own admission, there’s at least one policy: repealing the ridiculous ‘treaty’. The treaty repeal is not some afterthought: it is a core commitment that predates the current campaign and aligns with everything Hanson has said for years.
The PBO, along with the Age hack, also apparently didn’t visit the same One Nation Victoria website I did. Because that one had a number of Victoria-specific policies, from scrapping ‘Net Zero’ projects and fines for farmers who try to block them on their land to redeveloping the Rosebud Hospital.
In any case, as usual the legacy media wilfully miss the point by a country mile.
One Nation has never operated like the major parties. In South Australia it left its leadership announcement until seven weeks out and still walked away with a record primary vote and a bloc of MPs. That is not incompetence: it is deliberate economy of effort. Delay the formal rollout, limit the weeks of media ambush, and maximise the public funding that comes with a strong primary. A 23 per cent share of the Victorian vote would deliver roughly $10 million. That is not chaos – it is arithmetic.
You may or may not approve, but it’s hard to deny it’s a strategy that is going gangbusters for the party.
