Pauline Hanson and the Political Value of Keeping Your Word

You do not have to like Pauline Hanson to understand why she is prospering. You do not have to agree with all her policies, admire her political style or believe that One Nation is ready to govern Australia. You merely have to compare Hanson with the political class that has governed the country for the past several decades.

One quality stands out: people know what Pauline Hanson thinks.

That sounds like an absurdly modest qualification for political leadership, yet in modern politics it has become almost revolutionary. Politicians campaign against taxes and introduce them. They promise spending restraint and produce greater expenditure. They promise lower immigration and preside over population surges. They promise cheaper energy while electricity bills rise. They announce reviews whose conclusions seem predetermined, establish inquiries designed not to inquire too deeply and discover after elections that promises made before polling day have become inconvenient.

Against this background, Hanson's great political asset is authenticity.

The Australian's latest analysis acknowledges precisely this quality even while arguing that Hanson's rise may ultimately help Labor remain in power. Her policies can be attacked as inadequately developed or impractical. One Nation still faces legitimate questions about organisational depth, candidate quality and whether it has the machinery necessary to transform protest into government. But Hanson herself possesses something increasingly scarce in Australian politics: after three decades, voters broadly know what she stands for.

She entered federal politics in the 1990s warning about immigration, multiculturalism, national identity and sovereignty. Australia has changed enormously since then, but the remarkable feature of Hanson is how recognisable her basic political message remains. Her language has sometimes changed, individual policies have evolved and One Nation itself has endured upheavals, but nobody can seriously claim that Hanson discovered concern about mass immigration last Tuesday because her polling company told her it was popular.

She held these positions when holding them carried substantial political costs. That matters because authenticity becomes credible when maintaining a position hurts. It is easy for politicians to become courageous defenders of an issue once opinion polls tell them that most voters agree. The real test comes when newspapers denounce them, respectable society treats them as beyond the pale and political opponents regard association with them as electoral poison. Hanson survived all of that.

She was ridiculed, condemned, prosecuted and even imprisoned before her conviction was overturned. She lost her parliamentary seat and spent years outside federal politics. She became an almost permanent object of hostility within sections of the media and political establishment. Yet she returned to the Senate and continued arguing substantially the same case on many of the issues that had made her notorious in the first place.

One can believe those positions are wrong and still recognise the political significance of that history. Indeed, this helps explain why attacks that once damaged Hanson may now reinforce her appeal. Every denunciation reminds her supporters that she has endured decades of denunciation without surrendering her fundamental political identity.

The contrast with mainstream politics could hardly be greater. Modern political parties are professionalised organisations whose leaders frequently sound as though every sentence has passed through six advisers before reaching a microphone. Questions are answered without being answered. Mistakes become "learnings." Spending becomes "investment." Tax increases become "revenue measures." Broken promises become responses to "changed circumstances." Voters understand what is happening.

The result is a growing authenticity premium. A politician who occasionally says something clumsy can appear more trustworthy than one who delivers perfectly polished sentences containing no discernible proposition. A politician whose policy is imperfect but whose intention is obvious can seem preferable to one whose policy has been professionally costed but whose commitments change whenever electoral advantage requires it. Hanson has accumulated that authenticity over thirty years.

That does not mean authenticity is the same thing as competence. Being sincere does not make every policy workable. Consistency does not establish that every factual claim is correct. One Nation's economic proposals deserve scrutiny, its candidates deserve scrutiny, and the party needs to demonstrate that it can develop the organisational and intellectual depth necessary to handle a much larger parliamentary presence.

Indeed, Hanson's personal dominance creates a genuine problem. A political movement built substantially around one unusually durable politician must eventually answer the question of what happens without her. One Nation is now trying to professionalise its operation and expand its candidate base, but even favourable accounts acknowledge the enormous challenge involved in turning Hanson's personal political appeal into a mature national organisation.

But none of this eliminates Hanson's authenticity advantage. It also explains the paradox identified by The Australian. One Nation is drawing heavily upon voters who might otherwise support the Coalition. Australia's preferential voting system complicates the consequences, but a sufficiently large transfer of conservative votes from the Liberals and Nationals to One Nation could destroy Coalition seats and leave Labor governing even with a historically unimpressive primary vote.

There is genuine evidence of the danger. Recent polling has repeatedly placed One Nation around or above the Coalition on primary support. A late-July Roy Morgan poll had Labor on 27.5 per cent, One Nation on 25.5 per cent and the Coalition on 22 per cent. Other polls have produced still stronger One Nation results.

On the conventional analysis, therefore, Hanson could become Labor's accidental best friend. The stronger One Nation becomes, the more it fractures the non-Labor electorate, leaving Anthony Albanese and his successors governing while their opponents fight among themselves.

But that argument contains an important weakness. It assumes that the only political outcome that matters is which party occupies the government benches.

Suppose The Australian is correct and One Nation's rise contributes to another Labor victory. What happens if that same election also produces twenty, thirty, forty or more One Nation members of parliament? One May polling model went considerably further, projecting 59 lower-house seats and One Nation becoming the official opposition if an election had been held at that time. Nobody should treat such modelling as a prediction of what will happen in 2028, but it demonstrates that the scale of the political realignment being contemplated is no longer trivial.

A Parliament containing a large One Nation bloc would be a very different Parliament. Political power is not exhausted by controlling the Treasury benches. Opposition parties scrutinise legislation, dominate parliamentary debate, participate in committees and, above all, can exercise enormous influence where governments lack control of the Senate. The precise parliamentary arithmetic after a future election cannot be known, but a substantially enlarged One Nation presence could make it considerably more difficult for Labor to implement parts of its agenda without serious resistance or negotiation.

For conservative voters, that could itself be a worthwhile outcome. Many such voters have become frustrated not simply because the Coalition loses elections, but because even when supposedly conservative parties constitute the opposition they too often accept the basic direction of Labor policy. They argue about degree, timing and administrative detail while leaving the underlying policy architecture intact.

Net zero provides an obvious example. So does immigration. Similar arguments arise over censorship and free speech, taxation, firearms regulation and the continuing expansion of bureaucratic government. One Nation's positions on these matters can certainly be disputed, but nobody has much difficulty determining that it intends to oppose them.

This changes the meaning of the familiar warning that voting One Nation merely helps Labor.

Perhaps in some electorates it will. But a voter might reasonably respond that returning another conventional Coalition MP who subsequently compromises on policies the voter regards as destructive is not necessarily preferable to electing a One Nation representative who actually fights those policies.

The calculation becomes particularly interesting if One Nation emerges with a substantial Senate presence. Australian governments frequently confront Senates they do not control. A sizeable One Nation bloc could therefore become important to whether legislation passes, fails or must be substantially amended.

That would hardly make One Nation omnipotent. Labor could negotiate with the Greens or other crossbenchers on many issues, while One Nation itself would sometimes lack the numbers to stop anything. Parliamentary arithmetic is more complicated than simply counting One Nation seats. But neither would such a parliamentary presence be meaningless.

This is the part of the current argument about Hanson's rise that is too easily overlooked. Even if One Nation cannot form government, and even if its growth helps Labor retain office, it could still alter the ideological balance of Australian politics. A large parliamentary party explicitly opposing policies that have enjoyed years of bipartisan protection would force arguments into Parliament that the major parties have often preferred to keep within narrow boundaries. That is democratic politics doing what it is supposed to do.

The Coalition therefore faces a much deeper problem than vote splitting. Complaining that Hanson will re-elect Labor may no longer frighten voters who have concluded that the Coalition itself does not provide sufficient opposition to Labor.

Those voters may answer: perhaps voting One Nation does increase the risk of another Labor government. But if it simultaneously creates a powerful parliamentary force capable of resisting Labor's worst policies, that is not necessarily a wasted vote. Indeed, from their perspective it may be preferable to the existing arrangement.

The challenge for the Coalition is consequently not to devise cleverer preference strategies or more frightening advertisements about Pauline Hanson. It is to ask why people who once reliably voted Liberal or National no longer trust those parties to represent them. Hanson did not force those voters to leave. The Coalition lost them.

Immigration illustrates the problem particularly well. Hanson has argued for restriction for decades. Mainstream politicians repeatedly assure Australians that migration must be carefully managed, yet population growth and housing pressures have made the issue increasingly politically potent. When public concern rises sufficiently, politicians suddenly discover the need for a national "conversation" about migration. Hanson does not need to discover the conversation. She has been having it for thirty years.

The same applies to national identity, political correctness, free speech and several other issues on which positions once treated as beyond respectable debate have subsequently entered mainstream politics. This does not prove Hanson was right about everything. It demonstrates something different: voters can see that she did not adopt these causes because consultants identified a favourable demographic.

Therein lies the real political danger to the major parties. Australian politics has spent decades treating credibility primarily as a matter of expertise, presentation and institutional respectability. Yet there is an older and simpler conception of political credibility: say what you believe, tell voters what you intend to do, and then try to do what you said.

That should be an extraordinarily unremarkable proposition. Instead, it has become one of Pauline Hanson's most distinctive political assets. Her opponents have spent thirty years telling Australians why they should not trust her judgement. Increasing numbers of Australians appear willing to consider a different proposition. They may not believe Hanson has every answer, but they believe they know where she stands.

The Australian may ultimately prove correct that Hanson's rise will damage the Coalition sufficiently to help Labor remain in government. If that happens, however, the story does not necessarily end with another Labor victory.

A large One Nation parliamentary presence could be the other half of the political revolution. Labor might retain government but find itself confronting a much larger and more determined opposition to policies that previously passed with relatively little resistance. The Coalition might suffer an electoral disaster, but Australian conservatism would not necessarily disappear with it. It might simply have migrated to another party.

That possibility should worry Labor almost as much as it worries the Coalition. For years, dissatisfied conservative voters were told they had nowhere else to go. Hanson is demonstrating that they do.

And if enough of them go there, the eventual result may not merely be another Labor government. It may be another Labor government facing an opposition that actually intends to oppose it. Call that democracy.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/authenticity-of-pauline-hanson-to-keep-labor-in-power/news-story/708ccbe37af09311aa2203208ca831ed