Derailing the Pauline bandwagon

This morning's Sydney Morning Herald website featured six separate articles about Pauline Hanson. It's impossible these days to pick up a newspaper or open an online news site without seeing articles, many of them from renowned and respected political journalists and commentators, analysing and discussing Hanson's every utterance and speculating on how many seats One Nation will gain in the next election.

Last year's burqua stunt that resulted in her suspension

The commercial mainstream media loves Pauline. They fawn over her. She's a walking headline. The right-wing Murdochracy, of course, is championing her cause, but the others also know that she is a novelty who will sell papers. The old media adage, "if it bleeds, it leads", can be applied metaphorically to political reporting. She's loud, makes outrageous and controversial statements, engages in political stunts that no one in their right mind would touch, is openly corrupt and doesn't care who knows it and, like her hero, Donald Trump, appeals to a broad base of people who distrust the "political class".

She thrives on being perceived as an outsider: the fish'n'chips shop lady who is standing up for everyone else who's ever felt locked out of the political process; the battler who's not afraid to speak out on behalf of all battlers; the ordinary Aussie afraid of what societal and environmental changes might mean and clinging on to an outdated and overtly patriarchal vision on what the country should be.

Cartoon credit: Mark Knight

A few weeks ago Hanson declared that she's "ready to be PM". The media, predictably, went into overdrive. Successive polls indicate that One Nation is out-polling the Liberal-National coalition (not surprising - the proverbial drover's dog would be out-polling that lot at the moment) and one poll* has her ahead of PM Albanese as preferred PM. 

Despite the breathless headlines and media speculation, Pauline Hanson is not going to be the next PM. 

 

 Hanson's chances?

Let's break it down logically.

1. Hanson is a senator. The leader of government must be a member of the House of Representatives, therefore, as a senator she's can't be PM. It is, of course, highly likely that Hanson will stand for a lower house seat at the next election and will most likely win. Her party machine will ensure that whichever seat she stands for is a marginal and winnable seat, probably outer suburban with a significant population of anglo-Australians who want to be told that they've been left behind by the "elite political class," climate change is a hoax and immigrants are to blame for everything that's wrong in their lives.

2. One Nation currently holds two lower house seats - defector Barnaby Joyce's seat of New England and former Liberal leader Sussan Ley's rural seat of Farrer, now held by David Farley. Assuming both of those members are re-elected and Hanson also wins a seat, One Nation will still need to win a further 73 seats in the House of Representatives to form government.

3.  One Nation has a candidate problem. Their candidates are typically opportunists with little or no knowledge of the political system and who find themselves completely out of their depth. In this year's South Australian state election, one of the four One Nation candidates to win a seat didn't realise she needed to go to Adelaide to sit in parliament, telling one newspaper that she couldn't do that as she has a salon to run. She thought she'd be able to attend parliamentary sittings remotely. It stands to reason that a party pitching itself to people who feel alienated from politics and who lack education will draw candidates from a very shallow pool. There also seems to be no credible candidate vetting process. 

 

4. History tells us that ON members don’t remain in the party for long. In the 1998 Qld state election, ON won 23% of the vote and picked up 11 seats. Three years later at the next election, they held zero seats. That’s right. They lost all 11 seats between elections. Their elected members either defected to other parties, quit the party and remained as independents, or quit parliament all together, triggering by-elections which ON didn’t subsequently win.

5. Trump. Australians are, overall, fervently anti-Trump**. Sure, some of the outer suburban white Aussie battler electorates might have pockets of Trumpettes, but Hanson's support and admiration for the corrupt, sex offending, war-mongering, increasingly incoherent US president*** isn't going to help her. At the last federal election then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and several of his shadow ministers promised Trump-style policies if elected to government. Dutton subsequently lost his own seat and his party descended into a state of abject chaos - a state from which they have yet to emerge and are really showing no signs of doing so.

 

6. Hanson is the current flavour of the month with the commercial media. Every newspaper and online media platform is spruiking her as the Next Big Thing (even though she’s been around for decades). She is, essentially a cult leader. She is also in her 70s and is quite openly creating a succession plan for when she decides to retire. It has been widely reported that she is grooming her daughter, Lee Hanson, to take over. Hanson has said that she won't retire until "the right people are in place," but cults seldom survive the departure of a charismatic leader. Once Pauline retires, One Nation is over. 

Cartoon credit: Matt Golding

 

7.  Policies? What policies? Hanson's Press Club address last week was a litany of grievances. And we've heard them all before. Her racist bile, her hatred of unions, her dismissal of minorities, her disbelief in science. Hanson's policies, such as they are, exist in a negative space: things she'll stop and discontinue rather than positive things she'll do to improve the lives of all. 

Joh for PM" 1985-87

It's 40 years since former Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, then 74, decided the Australian people were calling him to lead them [Spoiler: they weren't]. Bjelke-Petersen had, by then, been premier of Queensland for 17 years and would be ousted by his own party by the end of 1987 in the wake of revelations of systemic corruption. 

However, in 1985 Joh, aided and abetted by a bunch of spivvy Gold Coast property developers dubbed the "white shoe brigade", and mining magnate, Lang Hancock (father of current Hanson puppet-master, Gina Rinehart), began a campaign for Joh to challenge incumbent PM Bob Hawke. The Hawke government was seriously on the nose. Inflation was high and the economy was tanking. John Howard was opposition leader and the polls were indicating a Liberal-National win at the next election. But when Joh threw his Akubra into the ring, the polls and the media went feral, with some polls giving him around 20-25% of the vote. 

Does any of this feel familiar?

The Joh campaign was insisting that the National Party split from the Libs and that all the federal National candidates support him to be leader once they were elected. 

The result? Hawke called a snap election, a double dissolution, in May 1987, Joh was wrong-footed and didn't contest a seat and the coalition, by then fragmented into factions, imploded on itself giving the Hawke government a thumping big win and another nine years in office (the final five with Keating as PM after a successful leadership challenge in 1991).

Yes, it was 40 years ago, but as the old saying goes, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it - and frankly, I don't believe One Nation has learnt anything from history. 

Finally

A week, as they say, is a long time in politics. I would suggest that 24 hours is a long time in politics. There is speculation that One Nation could join the current coalition to present a united front against the government at the next election. 

The Liberal-National coalition currently hold just 41 seats and One Nation holds two. Thus far, both Liberal leader, Angus Taylor, and Nationals leader, Matthew Canavan, have rejected any notion of a Lib-Nat-ON coalition, but Taylor is a weak opposition leader and newly appointed Liberal Party president, the onion-eating, budgie-smuggler-wearing former PM Tony Abbott**** is a hard right-wing operative who seems to think the only way to beat One Nation is to become more like them rather than move back to the centre-right roots of the Liberal Party. The Nationals have the most to lose as they hold only eight lower house seats and those may be the first to fall if One Nation gains traction federally, which, on current indications, it is doing.

A three-way coalition could result in picking up more seats, but for Hanson to be PM, the would still need 76 seats overall and the majority of those would need to be One Nation. It is more likely, however, that a three-way coalition wouldn't make it to the starting line. Neither Taylor nor Canavan would want to play second (or third) fiddle to Hanson and we would likely see a recurrence of the sort of split that occurred in the Joh for PM campaign.

Meanwhile, the saturation coverage of Hanson's every utterance is just feeding her publicity machine. She loves attention. She thrives on it. And after three decades in politics she knows there's no such thing as bad publicity. But the next election is still just a little under two years away and flavours of the month tend to go stale when exposed for too long. 

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*The poll in question was Resolve. This is part of the Resolve Strategic company owned by Jim Reed. Reed was formerly a director in Crosby Textor - a political strategy, polling and lobbying firm closely associated with right-wing and conservative political parties globally. Ahead of the 2025 Federal election, Resolve had the Coalition on 55% of the two-party preferred vote. Labor won with 55.2% of the two-party preferred - the highest 2PP vote any party has achieved since 1975.

**This is another Resolve poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald in April this year. The Australia Institute (politically centre-left), published a more comprehensive poll in March last year covering a wide range of issues.

***No, I don't like him. Why do you ask? 

****No, I don't like him either.