(It’s best if you start with part 1, here, and part 2, here.)
Commentary on the threat to the Liberal and National parties posed by One Nation continues unabated. Writing today in the Conversation, Kurt Sengul and Jordan McSwiney adopt a deflationary approach:
There are many reasons to treat One Nation’s surge with caution. We should be circumspect about prematurely declaring the death of the Coalition parties or a realignment of Australian conservative politics. Infighting and dysfunction have been constant features of One Nation since its inception. There is little evidence to expect this will change.
Wise words. My rule of thumb is that opinion polls in the first half of a government’s term are meaningless, at least in electoral terms. Of course they tell you something about what people are thinking, but their predictive power is negligible. It is not impossible that One Nation will top 20% at the next election, but that’s more than two years away – its current poll numbers don’t amount to much in the way of evidence.
And of course we’ve been here before. The leadup to the 1998 federal election saw much the same sort of speculation; my own predictions then mentioned four seats as possible One Nation gains, but none of them materialised. More than a decade before that we had the “Joh for Canberra” movement, which exhibited many of the same features but also fell flat in the end.
Nonetheless, Antony Green is quite correct to say that “If come the next election One Nation polls 25%, it will be sweeping up seats all across rural and regional Australia.” One can hardly blame the Liberal and National parties for being distracted by the bare possibility of such an occurrence. But if they really wanted to spike One Nation’s guns, they could easily do so: they could simply announce a firm decision that under no circumstances will they be recommending preferences to One Nation.
The electoral arithmetic is simple. One Nation is taking votes primarily from the (ex-)Coalition parties; its prospects of winning seats depend almost entirely on getting ahead of those parties and then beating Labor on their preferences. Liberal and National preferences usually follow the how-to-vote card pretty well: if it tells the voters to preference Labor ahead of One Nation not all will do so, but enough will to make it almost impossible for a One Nation candidate to win.
There will be a few seats where One Nation has a chance of getting ahead of Labor, but that’s no help to it either, since in that case Labor preferences will flow to the Liberals or Nationals – as they did last year in Maranoa, the one seat in which they were distributed, 57.9% to 42.1%. And with the chance of winning a swag of seats removed, the One Nation balloon would most probably deflate quickly, as it did in 1988 when John Howard did exactly this.
But the chance of it happening this time around seems remote. The Liberal and National parties are now honeycombed with branch members and officials who see One Nation as a natural ally; their views are philosophically much closer to it than to the Liberal mainstream even of Howard’s day. For Sussan Ley to try to cut off the far right would ignite a firestorm in her party.
The relationship between ideology and tactics, though, is complex. Here’s how I tried to explain it a few months ago, in connection with the rise to prominence of Andrew Hastie:
Politicians, though, are mostly uncomfortable talking about ideas, so they will wrap a philosophical argument in terms of strategy. … [T]he Liberal Party’s right wants to emulate One Nation’s policies because they’re what it believes in – but afraid to openly avow that belief, it instead claims it’s an electoral necessity. …
Even if you accept that One Nation is a serious electoral threat, that on its own won’t tell you how to deal with it: it won’t help you decide between the opposing strategies of stealing its policy clothes on the one hand, or sharpening the differentiation and having a good stand-up fight on the other. That choice requires actually thinking about ideas and deciding what you want the party to stand for.
Hastie has now apparently been told by his faction that it’s not his turn yet, and that he should support shadow defence minister Angus Taylor for the leadership instead. But it’s hard to imagine Taylor lasting for long; Hastie is much more intelligent and articulate, and also has the advantage (as Bernard Keane pointed out recently) of having expertise in the sort of foreign policy issues that loom large in the Trump era. Sooner or later, it seems likely that he will be the one making the decisions on how to respond to Pauline Hanson and her crew.
Deep philosophical differences don’t always make for the most divisive contests; often it’s people whose views are quite similar to their rivals’ who feel the strongest need to differentiate themselves. Thus you find rural, right-wing members of the Liberal Party who can be among the most hostile to the National Party, because it’s their turf that it’s fighting on. And in the Howard era it was Tony Abbott, very much on his party’s right, who led the charge against One Nation.
Partly this is another phenomenon we’ve mentioned before: only Nixon can go to China. In 2022 I considered the argument that for that reason Peter Dutton was the one best placed to turn the Liberal Party towards the centre, although I concluded (correctly, as it turned out) that he had neither the ability nor the inclination for it. But Victorian leader Ted Baillieu managed a similar trick in 2010 when, despite himself coming from the party’s left, he made the decision to direct preferences against the Greens, stemming their growth and winning support for looking strong and principled.
So while it would be suicidal for Ley to make a stand against One Nation, a leader from the right would be less constrained. They could attack the Hansonites without admitting (or pretending) that there was any philosophical point at stake, just portraying them as the ignorant and bigoted clown show that they are. I don’t know if Hastie has any such intention, but if he does I think it’s quite possible he could pull it off, and it’s unlikely that anyone else could.
In part four we’ll have more of a look at how a fight with One Nation might play out, including the latest instalment in the remarkable story of Cory Bernardi.
The World is Not Enough 