A war against Pauline is the wrong war. Angus Taylor should not let Andrew Hastie's feud with One Nation become the Coalition's main event while Anthony Albanese is the one holding the Lodge. That instruction only makes sense if you still think the Liberals are in opposition to Labor. Watch what they actually do when Hanson rises, and the other reading is simpler: there is a uniparty of the respectable, and it would rather lose to Labor than let One Nation become the vehicle that beats Labor.
A uniparty is not a secret handshake in a Canberra basement. It is a shared list of things that may not be said if you want to remain house-trained. High and rapid immigration as a moral default. Multiculturalism as an identity rather than a policy with numbers attached. Net zero as liturgy. The idea that the people who object are a hygiene problem to be managed, not a constituency to be represented. Labor writes the statutes. The Liberal Party writes press releases about competence and then, when the public walks toward Hanson, writes press releases about her. Hastie's "personal beef" is the tell. Personal beefs are what you indulge when the other party is not the enemy. The enemy, in that frame, is the woman who says out loud what a slice of the Liberal base has been muttering since the party stopped saying it.
Preference mathematics makes the arrangement look like competition. Labor can win government on a mid-thirties primary because the Coalition and One Nation split the rest and then spend their energy explaining why they cannot sit in the same room. Add Liberal, National and One Nation primaries and you often have a centre-right majority that never becomes a ministry. That is not a law of nature. It is a choice about who is beyond the pale. Teals and Greens are treated as the price of modernity. Hanson is treated as contamination. The press, Left and "conservative," slaps her with the same glove. Establishment attacks are bipartisan because the establishment is.
Albanese understands the arrangement even when he attacks her. Scorched-earth rhetoric against Hanson costs him nothing among people who would never vote for her and helps him keep the Liberal Party aimed at the orange banner instead of at housing, migration intake and energy prices. A Liberal leader who took the column's advice: ignore the beef, attack the government, would have to decide whether One Nation voters are recoverable or radioactive. Recoverable means preferences, overlapping bills, and an end to the ritual denunciation. Radioactive means another cycle of Labor government and a Coalition that exists to lose respectably.
"Would rather lose to Labor than to One Nation" is the sharp version. The accurate version is: would rather lose to Labor than win with One Nation, or win by becoming what One Nation already is on the issues that are moving the numbers. That is uniparty behaviour. Two teams, one forbidden list, and a third team that grows every time the first two police the list. Taylor can take the column's advice and still lose if the party's first instinct, when Hanson speaks, is to start a war on the Right. The public can tell who the real opponent is. It is the government. A party that cannot remember that is not an opposition. It is a second aisle of the same shop.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/war-against-pauline-its-blundering-albo-who-libs-should-attack/news-story/40576522738fe1898b0cc8754c9f6e00