So the Coalition is back together, after Liberal leader Sussan Ley capitulated at the weekend to the National Party’s terms. Media reaction has been pretty uniformly negative, aided by another opinion poll at News Corp this morning that shows One Nation now nine points ahead of the Liberal and National total. Most pundits seem to think that as long as the Liberals were standing up to the Nationals Ley had some (albeit small) hope of recovery; having given in, she is now dead in the water.
But for what one might call the “old right” in the Liberal Party – the conservative tradition reaching from John Howard down to Angus Taylor – the Coalition is fundamental to their thinking. Determined to avoid making a decision between the rival positions of centre-right and far right, determined in fact to avoid admitting that such a distinction exists, they need the National Party as they always have, in order to consolidate their own power and keep the liberals shut out.
I explained the problem back in September, quoting political scientist Marija Taflaga: “the shared Coalition party room allows members of the Liberal Right to form policy coalitions across the party divide, placing additional pressure on the moderate faction.” And while that’s been the case for as long as anyone can remember, it’s become more central to the picture since 2008 with the merger of the two parties in Queensland.
Any plan for the Liberals to break permanently with the Nationals runs up against this problem, that in Queensland they are one party, not two. Although the state’s federal MPs are all identifiable as one or the other, there is just a single Liberal National Party organisation (as there is also in the Northern Territory, where it’s called the Country Liberal Party). And Queensland is no peripheral matter: it’s easily the Liberals’ best state, with ten of the party’s 28 lower house seats.
Even where the two parties are separate, they actually run against each other in only a handful of seats, making it all but impossible to assess their relative performance.* We can say that the Liberals won almost five times as many votes last time as the Nationals (26.2% to 5.6%), but in the absence of direct contests that figure isn’t very meaningful. And while the lack of competition has made life easier for both parties, it has left them badly out of practice in many parts of the country.
And all this makes it also difficult to figure how Coalition vs One Nation contests, which will happen in very much the same sort of places, might play out. It would certainly be unwise to assume that the Nationals will be the less anti-Hanson of the Coalition partners; precisely because they are in many respects so similar to One Nation (“more like a small-time criminal racket than a serious political party,” as I described them a few years ago), contests between them may take on the bitterness of fratricidal conflict.
The One Nation polling surge still looks to me like a bubble, or at least a large component of it does. Some will be genuine, driven by the same causes as the rise in the far-right vote elsewhere, but much of it is more an expression of frustration with the state of the Coalition parties. A portion of that is ideological in character, and will probably return once the relatively centrist Ley is disposed of, but I suspect the bulk of it is more performative, and would never translate into actual One Nation votes.
Far too many commentators, it seems to me, are letting their love of novelty run away with them rather than asking hard questions about how sustainable the One Nation boom might be. As Kevin Bonham remarked a few days ago, “it’s not so long ago that Nick Xenophon led in a three-way preferred Premier for South Australia and wound up winning zero seats.”
And mention of South Australia leads us naturally to former senator Cory Bernardi, the most recent high-profile recruit to One Nation, who plans to head its ticket for the South Australian state election to be held on 21 March. You can read the previous instalments of the Bernardi story here and here, but basically Bernardi left the Liberal Party in 2017 to found his own far-right party, and then retired from politics less than three years later after finding that the Liberals, then led by Scott Morrison, had themselves occupied that territory.
Bernardi’s brand of politics was once unusual in Australia, combining a notional allegiance to free markets with a heavily religious social conservatism as well as a generous share of bigotry and authoritarianism. Embracing the Hansonites involves some compromises, since they have always been strongly anti-market and their racism was considerably more explicit, but Bernardi seems happy to make the trade.
Not at all coincidently, the same adjustment was being made at the same time on a much larger scale by the conservative movement in America, which had once been Bernardi’s model. Some have dropped off along the way, but the majority have made their peace with the rising far-right synthesis that we now just know as Trumpism.
One Nation’s boosters have been keeping pretty quiet about Trump, but in reality he’s an essential part of the picture. We’ll have more to say about that in part 5.
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* There were just seven Liberal/National contests at last year’s election; four in Western Australia, two in South Australia and one in Victoria. The Liberals led in six to the Nationals’ one, with a median gap between them of about twenty points.
The World is Not Enough 