Opinion
No need to listen to the experts and commentators theorising about the reasons for One Nation’s recent surge. David Farley is qualified to tell us authoritatively. He is the personification of the party’s advance from the fringe to the centre of Australian politics.
He nominates three changes accounting for the party’s success but one imperative – desperation.
“People are operating out of desperation,” he tells me. That’s a strong word. It means despair leading to risk-taking. In this case, despair at the cost of living, leading to risky political choices. It is, he says, for many voters, a struggle for “survival”, another strong word.
Farley was sworn into federal parliament this week, formally occupying a seat held by the Coalition without interruption since 1949.
The three changes, he says, are generational, media and economic, “and then I think the most important thing that’s happening is we’ve actually got change in the economics of just basic living”.
The younger generation is struggling to afford a home, but even home-owning families are in a weekly scramble.
“Here’s a classic,” he volunteers. He has three daughters, all now established, as he puts it, and one of them rang him recently: “‘Dad, this is a first – filled up the Toyota Prado, the fuel bill was bigger than the weekly grocery shop’, and I asked her what she’s going to do about it. She said, ‘I’ll make sure I shop before I fill up the car’. It’s defining their lifestyle, and it’s defining the opportunities that they can give their children.”
Wages, he says, are relatively stable but costs are accelerating. This is inflation, an underestimated political phenomenon. It was identified by historian David Hackett Fischer as the convulsive force that drives human history.
It not only corrodes living standards and kills governments, it leads to revolutions, he explained in his brilliant 800-year history of inflation, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, published in 1996.
When Fischer wrote the book, inflation in the developed world was quiescent but he cautioned that “a major war in the Middle East or Eastern Europe or elsewhere could reignite inflation”.
He’s vindicated. Now we have Donald Trump’s Middle East war and Vladimir Putin’s Eastern Europe war and inflation is, once more, on the march. One Nation is marching with it. All major polls now have the party ranking first or second in voting intentions; on these numbers, Pauline Hanson would be prime minister or opposition leader.
Her support is no longer limited to embittered old men in the regions. As research by this masthead demonstrated this week, “One Nation has significantly expanded its reach and appeal across all demographics, ages, income and education levels”. Most of its supporters are women.
As Hanson posed to my colleague Paul Sakkal this week: “Have I really changed? No, because the rest of the country’s caught up with me.”
Not exactly. But much of the rest of the country is growing desperate enough to vote for her. Two out of three voters say that the country is heading in the wrong direction, according to an SEC Newgate poll taken after the budget, a record high.
The Coalition has taken itself out of contention. The government’s budget aims to redistribute real estate buying opportunity away from investors and to first home buyers, and while Farley doesn’t criticise the intent, he points out that much detail remains unsettled.
All Australia knows the risk of voting for One Nation. Hanson is a firebrand provocateur who specialises in grievances without solutions and turns to scapegoats instead – first Asians, then Aboriginal people and lately, Muslims.
Hanson says she’s no racist but this week she demonstrated that she’s unreconstructed. “I’ve been consistent with what I’ve been saying over years, and although it was looked at as politically incorrect to say those things at that time by saying ‘swamped by Asians’.”
But the most extraordinary One Nation revelation this week was Hanson’s answer to Sakkal. Could she think of any error that Trump might have made since taking power, he asked? No, she couldn’t. What of the tariffs Trump has imposed on Australia, punitive and unjustified? Her blind devotion to a foreign political leader, even as he injures her own country, is evidence that she’s not fit to lead.
No wonder even Hanson herself is equivocating over whether she wants to be prime minister. “I haven’t made that final decision at all,” she told Sakkal, while maintaining that “I’m not backing away at all. I am the leader of this party.” It’s a delicate moment for One Nation.
The party is enjoying an unearned surge. Hanson’s ultimate fantasy is, for the first time, capable of crystallising into reality. But, without an imminent election to capitalise on this new popularity, Hanson faces two years of sustained scrutiny. Can she convert opportunity into achievement? Grievance-mongering is easy. Proving fitness for office is daunting. Ability to wield real power is hard.
David Farley, 69 years old, does not seem like a risky choice. The former chief executive of a publicly listed farming business, the Australian Agricultural Company with nearly half a million head of cattle, is smart, articulate and well briefed. Politically, he’s more centrist and reasonable than his leader. Parliament’s newest MP has said that while he expects he won’t have many disagreements with Hanson, he’s sensibly reserved the option.
He defends the role of immigrants – 86 per cent of workers in Farrer’s meat industry and 68 per cent in the health sector are immigrants, he points out. He’s no Muslim-baiter: “Of course there are good Muslims,” he says. This contrasts with Hanson’s “no good Muslims” comments and her burqa-wearing antics in the Senate.
“Australia has a large Muslim population who are respecting and integrating into Australian culture, community and law,” Farley tells me. But: “If an Australian Muslim is called upon for participation in a jihad/intifada against Australian citizens of different faith and culture and elects to consider, promote or participate, this is when they elect [to go] from being a good Australian Muslim to dangerous, undesirable Muslim and need to leave Australia immediately.
“I don’t think we tell enough people to go home.”
Similarly, he says Melbourne’s problems with machete violence are related to “interfamily and intertribal relationships” incompatible with Australian law and culture and offenders need to be told to leave the country.
“We want to remove that threat to society. Please go home, or we will send you home.” There was a time when such a comment would have been considered cruel or unfair; Australia is well past that time. But Farley doesn’t only demand good citizenship from immigrants; he demands that all families, all citizens meet standards of effort and self-reliance. He points out that while Australia relies on immigrant workers, almost 700,000 people are unemployed.
People used to move cities or towns to look for work, he says, “but suddenly, you’re surrounded by a Rubik’s Cube of options around people that says, well, you can stay on benefits because you don’t want to move”.
Is this an argument for cutting welfare? “It’s an argument for parenting and straight-shooting discussions with kids about getting a career – your family can’t carry you any more and the government can’t carry you any more.” Quaintly old-fashioned? Perhaps, but likely to be increasingly fashionable as working people find themselves under growing pressure.
However, Farley ranks his first priority as the new member for Farrer as neither immigrants nor welfare but water: “Circa 40 per cent of our productive food water has been retired into environmental objectives,” he says. “With a growing population, why aren’t we growing the water assets instead of retiring the water assets?”
Australia has lost self-sufficiency in food. In droughts, Australia imports grain and dairy and rice production because of dwindling access to water, he says. Water should be considered a sovereign as well as an environmental asset, he maintains. This was the subject of his first parliamentary question this week.
“The Murrumbidgee Valley, which is Farrer, and the Murray Valley, which is Albury, and right along the river, next season has zero per cent allocations for general security. You go up to the dams, the dams have a lot of water in them, it’s all environmental water. It’s not water that’s going to be used to produce food. It’s not water that’s going to be used to produce jobs.”
But to make change, he knows that he has to carry the argument in a whole complex of government reviews and inquiries. He might have doubled One Nation’s numbers in the House, but he needs a weight of numbers to achieve change. If One Nation can find another hundred candidates of Farley’s quality, his odds will improve.
In a speech on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “We can choose whether the social and economic dislocation we see overseas is a warning that we act on or a preview of what is to come.”
The onus is largely on Albanese himself, and on the once-mighty Liberal Party, to give hope to an increasingly desperate electorate. Farley says that voters under 40 “are searching for a future, they’re searching for confidence”.
Labor and Liberal have two years to try to provide it.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. He writes a world column each Tuesday.
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