The More They Sneer, the Closer She Gets

As Morrissey once sung, “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get”. The legacy media can’t ignore One Nation any more, so they default to their stock-in-trade. But the more they sneer, the closer One Nation gets to government. I am now a central part of your mind’s landscape, in Mozza’s prophetic words.

Finally, one of the legacy media has cottoned on: Guys, guys! Every time we attack her, her poll numbers go up! Because, in the words of Rick and Morty: “Your boos mean nothing: I’ve seen what makes you cheer.”

The legacy media’s problem is not just that they reflexively sneer at One Nation – it’s that they sneer at all of us. They inhabit a sealed bubble where ordinary Australians are assumed to be ignorant dupes who need elite guidance. A journalist who actually left the Canberra press gallery and spoke to voters in a Nationals seat on the NSW mid-north coast discovered something shocking: people know exactly what they are doing.

They have watched both major parties sell the same snake oil on the issues that matter. Immigration out of control. Energy policy that drives up bills while the lights flicker. Gender ideology rammed into schools and sports.

“Listen, the coalition are no better than Labor on these issues. Just look at renewables. John Howard introduced the RET in his last term and went to the Rudd election (in 2007) with an emissions trading scheme just like Rudd did,” the woman said.

“Tony Abbott ratified our commitment to the Paris agreement. Turnbull had us up for $40bn on Snowy 2.0, and Morrison committed to net zero by 2050. How are they better than (Climate Change Minister) Chris Bowen?”

She’s entirely correct. These are not ‘confused’ or ‘ignorant’ voters. They’re well-informed Australians furious at the bipartisan betrayal of the social contract.

The activist media class still does not get it. ABC’s Sarah Ferguson and Radio National’s Sally Sara railed against Hanson’s National Press Club speech on radical Islam, multiculturalism, English in the home, late-term abortion and biological reality. GetUp! helpfully unfurled an anti-Hanson poster mid-speech. Every time the establishment performs its ritual outrage, another tranche of working Australians concludes the media is not neutral. It is not reporting the news: it is an active participant in the culture war against them.

The Bondi Beach massacre in December crystallised what many had long sensed. Fifteen people murdered at a Hanukkah celebration. One Nation’s new ad leads with it. The implication is unavoidable: this is the bitter fruit of decades of multiculturalism and mass migration without assimilation. Yet ABC global affairs editor Laura Tingle assured listeners the attack had “nothing to do with religion”. Australians are expected to nod along to this nonsense while their cities change beyond recognition.

A third of Australians are now born overseas. In the United States, the figure is 14 per cent. Treasury uses migration to massage GDP numbers while per-capita living standards stagnate. Housing shortages worsen. Wages are suppressed. None of this may be discussed without the media reaching for the racism klaxon. Hanson simply says what millions think but have been trained to keep quiet about.

In the Australian on Thursday, former Treasury assistant secretary David Pearl wrote the best analysis of Hanson’s speech: She said that just as ‘every attempt has been made to silence me in Australia’ people have been frightened to speak up.

People have been ‘demeaned and condescended to’ and ‘civil debate has been paralysed’ Hanson said, with the media being complicit.

History offers a warning the legacy media refuses to learn. In the final week of the 1998 Queensland election, aggressive national interviews by Ray Martin and Maxine McKew produced two enormous bumps in One Nation support. Hanson even turned Martin’s ‘gotcha’ back on him, making it her own catchphrase: Please Explain. The more the establishment attacked, the stronger Hanson became.

The same dynamic is repeating. One Nation’s latest two-minute ad has better production values and cut-through than anything the majors have managed. The Bondi footage is devastating. Voters see the connection between policy failure and real-world consequences. The media sees only an opportunity to perform moral superiority.

Scrutiny is indeed fair. The problem is that the legacy media can no longer tell the difference. They cannot even utter the words “One Nation” or “Pauline Hanson” without sneering.