3 months ago
22
Senator Pauline Hanson has habitually relied on being a joke to sustain her career as a populist politician. Her latest stunt was taking the wrong cosplay costume from her Senate office wardrobe and wearing a burqa into the chamber, instead of a KKK robe and hood.
Either garb would have done. Courting the publicity that follows her stunts is her main game. She outrages most, amuses some and reflects the feelings of a few – but that group is growing.
Things are looking up for Pauline Hanson, with One Nation riding high in the polls.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Hanson’s One Nation received 6.4 per cent of first preference votes at the federal election, yet a scant seven months later, The Australian Financial Review/ Redbridge/Accent Research poll showed the party had surged to a record 18 per cent. The most recent Resolve Political Monitor, published in the Herald in September, had it at 12 per cent – the first time it hit double figures.
Populist politicians like Hanson, Bob Katter, Mark Latham and Barnaby Joyce – who appears One Nation-bound after resigning from the National Party on Thursday – portray themselves as the voice of ordinary people who rage against elites. But the one constant is how little they have achieved for their electorates and constituents.
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Whoever they claim to represent, the reality is risible and/or reprehensible: whether it’s exhorting people to take part in March for Australia rallies protesting against immigration intakes; calling for the slaughter of crocodiles; baiting LGBT advocates; or lying down on a Canberra footpath after a drinking session at parliament, the resultant publicity on news programs and TikTok generates recognition among voters who prefer celebrity to policy when ticking preference boxes.
These populist politicians only flourish thanks to the preferential voting system and, except for Katter, who runs a sort of intergenerational family political business in Far North Queensland, they are by and large relegated to the upper houses of Australian parliaments. One Nation has had a peripatetic history winning and losing a few regional seats, but has never managed to come within a bull’s roar of widespread support in major urban centres.
Hanson was a practitioner of political stunts long before Donald Trump perfected the trade. But the success of the US president’s inexhaustible bag of tricks has encouraged Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK party, and Hanson.
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Hanson distracts with stunts while promoting repugnant politics: she endorsed the March for Australia rallies in full knowledge the organisers have ties to neo-Nazi and white nationalists/supremacists. Her parliamentary colleagues threw her out of the Senate this week for seven days.
She’s been stopped before: John Howard ripped the ground from beneath her in 2001 when One Nation threatened the Coalition by promising to get tough on immigration and border control.
This time, the bush is their habitat, their natural quarry of disaffected Coalition voters, not Labor supporters. The Coalition, and the Liberal Party in particular, have no alternative but to return to the moderate centre to recapture their lost heartland. Chasing Hanson and her disgruntled right-wing fringe down the rabbit hole is a ride to political oblivion.
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