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There are some people who, whatever they advise, you should almost always do the opposite. Especially when it’s certain journalists finger-wagging conservative politicians. As I wrote last week, Troy Bramston is a case in point: exactly the sort of dripping-wet so-called ‘moderate’ blue-greens who have progressively – in every sense of the word – destroyed the Liberal Party’s brand and alienated almost its entire voter base.
Another such is Peter van Onselen. PvO is the typical lettuce-leaf legacy media ‘insider’ who seems to write everything looking over his shoulder, in perpetual terror of getting disinvited from the fashionable dinner parties.
Like the rest of the spineless legacy media ‘conservative’ establishment, PvO is clearly rattled by the stellar rise rise of One Nation. In poll after poll, One Nation have emerged as the real opposition. ON has easily surpassed the Liberal-National Coalition and is nipping at the heels of the Labor government. The latest poll has One Nation at 27 per cent, and rising, and Labor at 33 per cent (a near-historic low) and falling.
Make no mistake: at present, barring a grand coalition of One Nation/Liberal/National, Labor would still win an election in a system geared to two parties.
When a minor party is suddenly polling at levels that put it neck-and-neck with the majors, the status quo in Australian politics is suddenly under threat.
He says that like it’s a bad thing.
Before the finger-wagging, comes the faulty, left-skewed ‘history lesson’.
But Australians have been here before.
Except that we haven’t. One Nation’s ‘first surge’ in the late ’90s was mostly a legacy-media creation. Outside of Queensland, One Nation barely registered on the electoral stage. Mostly because, at that time, the coalition was still a genuinely centre-right party, which (within the normal bounds of political expedience) more-or-less stuck by its principles.
This time, One Nation are a genuine alternative to a coalition that has comprehensively betrayed its centre-right base. Consequently, its poll influence is ringing well outside Queensland. If the party performs even moderately well at the coming South Australian election, it will signal its arrival as a genuine third force in Australian politics.
Still, PvO is at least correct that One Nation needs to learn from the failures of the ’90s – the infighting and chaos – and it largely seems to have. Leader Pauline Hanson is making sure to be seen to be giving space to new recruits, seasoned political fighters like Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi, and preparing the next generation of leadership.
It gets really hilarious, though, when PvO tries to scare voters off One Nation.
But how much of the finer details of One Nation’s policy aims are the public really across?
On immigration, the party is explicit: a cap of 130,000 visas per year and a pledge to deport 75,000 ‘illegal migrants’.
Yes, and? This is, in fact, exactly what a growing majority of Australians have consistently told pollsters they want. Of course PvO tries the tired old ‘but the economy!’ argument, which fewer and fewer people are being bamboozled by. As for the ‘threat’ to the university sector – many Australians see anything that humbles greedy, ideologically captured universities as a positive.
On energy and climate, One Nation is equally blunt, arguing to abolish net zero policy settings and ‘back real Australian energy’, including coal, gas, hydro and nuclear […]
On cost of living, it proposes halving fuel excise for three years, changing the rules to enable cheaper coal and gas-fired baseload power and aiming to cut power bills by 20 per cent, alongside tax measures such as income splitting for families and lifting the tax-free threshold for self-funded retirees.
Stop threatening us all with a good time. All of this might cause an attack of the vapours at a Cottesloe dinner party but, in the pubs and living rooms of Australia, nearly one-third of us are raising a beer and cheering, ‘Onya, Pauline!’
