For decades, Pauline Hansen has been seen more as a comedic punchline than a serious political figure. Yet he is more in tune with the political spirit of our time than you might imagine.
In a new poll, the One Nation party is now the second most popular in the country, with 22 percent of the primary vote. How did we get here?
Pauline Hanson was elected in the QLD federal seat of Oxley at the 1996 federal election. Hansen predicted for the Liberals, but was soon discredited after a letter to a local newspaper.
In it, he wrote of Indigenous Australians, “How will we help this generation when governments pamper them with money, facilities and opportunities?… This is what causes apartheid.”
Despite being disliked by the Liberals, as she was still officially a Liberal candidate when the election was called, she was elected with the Liberal vote and entered Parliament as an Independent.
In his first speech he warned that Australia was being “swamped by Asians” and said, “I and most Australians want a fundamental review of our immigration policy.” He founded the One Nation Party and in the 1998 election, won 36% of the primary vote.
Although it was defeated by the unified preferences of the other parties and replaced by the Liberals, 1996 nevertheless represented a watershed. Oxley, a suburb between Brisbane and Ipswich, was seen as one of Labour’s safest seats.
Yet after the Mambo and Wickland rights decisions and Keating’s pivot to Asia, areas like Oxley abandoned Labor for populist conservatism and never looked back.
Thirty years later, the parallels to our current situation are clear. The progressive bloc—doing well in the inner city, public-sector employees, the Gen Y and Z middle classes—are locked out of home ownership, and the new immigrants—in government and in ascendancy. Yet the results of the voice referendum showed that the bloc’s preferences were hardly assured of winning the day.
There is no doubt that millions of people have shared Hanson’s sentiments since 1996. They are also often on the wrong side of costs, as they were at Oxley in 1996 when Keating and Hawke were to abandon privatization and industrial subsidies.
A nation has also been surprisingly receptive to new grievances, essentially becoming a community of grievances. They have brought anti-vaccine and anti-renewable refrigerator concerns, positioning themselves as the home of anyone who feels on the wrong side of the cultural and political consensus.
In 1996, it was John Howard, with a handful of One Nation policies on his platform, who broke the progressive consensus. This time, with tail candidates in the inner city, Hanson could end up breaking the Liberal Party.
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