Opinion
The most dramatic moment of the campaign in the Farrer byelection is also its emblem. A Liberal member of parliament tries to recover his phone snatched away by an angry One Nation Boomer in an orange T-shirt. It’s a metaphor for Australian politics, where the Liberals are desperate to retrieve what was once theirs – about a third of their voters who’ve left to support One Nation.
But the metaphor breaks down today. Because while Senator James Paterson did get his phone back after a tussle at a polling booth, the Liberals are not about to recover their vote at the ballot box.
The Liberals are being humiliated. For the second time in two months, One Nation is relegating to third place the party that ruled Australia for two-thirds of the postwar era.
Pauline Hanson’s scrappy protest party is displacing the once-grand party of Menzies and Howard. First it was in the South Australian state election in March, where Labor won, One Nation ranked second and the Liberals third. And today in a rural NSW seat, according to all indications, One Nation appears set to win with an independent second and the Liberals third.
The seat of Farrer has only ever been held by the Liberals or Nationals since its creation in 1949. Liberal Sussan Ley won it last year with a primary vote of 43 per cent. Today, senior Liberals say they’ll consider themselves lucky if they can win 20.
“Dull lights don’t even attract moths,” scoffs Barnaby Joyce, who defected from the Coalition to One Nation last year.
But it won’t affect Labor’s dominance of the House of Representatives in Canberra and nor will it change the balance of power, so why does it matter?
“If One Nation wins this,” says psephologist Antony Green, “there are another two dozen seats they can win in rural and regional Australia” at a future general election.
And they would come at the expense of the Liberals and Nationals, who currently hold a combined 41 seats. “The Coalition can’t possibly get into government in their own right” in this case, says Green. They’d be forced to work with Pauline Hanson.
But the next general election isn’t due for two years, plenty of time for the Coalition to recover. Why get frantic about a byelection today? Because, as a Liberal frontbencher puts it: “I do think this is a historical moment, not part of the usual ebb and flow. We are in a totally new era.”
Two phenomena support this contention. One is the “burn it down” syndrome that powers Hanson’s support. This is an angry rejectionism that does not submit to conventional rules of politics.
In a normal electoral contest, damage inflicted on a candidate’s reputation will translate into damage to their poll support. But it doesn’t seem to work against Hanson lately.
In recent weeks, several developments, any one of which traditionally would hurt a political party, hit One Nation. Hanson sacked a staff member of her party headquarters when it emerged that he was a convicted rapist. Her candidate for Farrer, David Farley, was revealed by this masthead to have sought preselection as a candidate for the Labor Party three years ago. Hanson, champion of battlers, announced that billionaire Gina Rinehart had given her an aeroplane.
These events might have harmed the party’s share of the vote at today’s byelection, but there was no clear evidence of that. According to Joyce, One Nation voters received these pieces of information with the attitude that “what you’re telling me is interesting but not relevant”.
“The things that made people angry enough to go to One Nation came along well before this byelection,” Joyce says. “Is my cost of living going to be fixed because you’ve pointed out the candidate wanted to join another political party?”
Jim Reed of Resolve Strategic, pollster for this masthead, has found the same thing: “One Nation voters in our focus groups often tell us that they are voting against one or both of the major parties for a change, either to force a change in direction from them or simply to vote them out. It’s a protest, in other words.”
Highlighting problems with Hanson, her party or her candidates “really doesn’t work on One Nation because people aren’t voting for them. They’re using them to vote against someone else.”
Redbridge’s Kos Samaras says One Nation is impervious “because the people voting for them aren’t going to turn around and say, ‘Well, that’s it then’ – they want to overthrow the system.” This is the same “burn it down” syndrome that drove support for Donald Trump’s two election wins.
Polling by the Redbridge Group found that 70 per cent of One Nation voters agreed with the statement that: “I’m voting One Nation as a tactic to make the major parties listen to ordinary Australians.” Still, that suggests that the other 30 per cent could switch their vote away from One Nation in the face of revelations.
The second phenomenon is what I’ll call a ventriloquist effect. It was unearthed by new Liberal internal research. This is where the Liberals may make a winning argument but the credit goes to One Nation. For instance, the Liberals successfully campaigned to pressure the Albanese government into calling a royal commission into antisemitism after the Bondi massacre. The Libs won the argument but “our vote went down and One Nation’s vote went up”, says a senior Liberal.
Like a ventriloquist’s act, the Liberals do the talking but the dummy gets the applause. “Traditional binary politics isn’t working,” he says. “Perversely, our attacks on the government fuel One Nation’s support, not ours.”
This is a diabolical political cul-de-sac that the Liberals have put themselves in. It makes sense. The Liberals have behaved like a protest party. But if that’s what you want, you’d support the more authentic protest party, One Nation.
The way out for the Liberals is to build a strong edifice of their own beliefs and policies, to create an attractive electoral persona, rather than trying to be a feeble imitation of One Nation like a second-hand Hanson.
Green suggests the Liberals solve their problem by dumping their current leader, the anodyne and ineffectual Angus Taylor, and turning to Andrew Hastie: “Hastie offers an alternative to both Labor and to One Nation.”
But, while Hastie is the Liberal leader in waiting, the party won’t move to him soon, regardless of how poorly Taylor performs. Why not? The right of the party has embraced decorated soldier and alleged war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith as a part of politico-cultural identification. Hastie, a former SAS captain who served with Roberts-Smith, has not. Indeed, Hastie gave evidence against him in the defamation case that Roberts-Smith brought against this masthead. This has damaged Hastie among the Liberal right and it will give Taylor temporary protection. Hastie will use the intervening months to build a manifesto.
Hanson has inflicted awful damage on the Coalition in the past eight months but eventually she will turn on Labor, too. As the very definition of the status quo, the Albanese government will be ripe for targeting. Elevated inflation, alone, will be enormously damaging to the government, generating a deep and far-reaching grievance as it erodes relentlessly the value of incomes.
Labor’s best defence is to address the underlying causes of Australian electoral disenchantment. Which it will attempt to do with Tuesday’s budget. Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry sets out three essential priorities for the budget, and the inflation problem needs to be its first.
“The budget must achieve some measure of fiscal consolidation,” says Henry. In other words, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has to cut spending. There’s not a great deal that Canberra can do about inflation, but it can avoid making things worse. The government has to ensure that “fiscal policy is working in the same direction as monetary policy, thereby limiting further increases in interest rates,” Henry tells me.
In other words, the Reserve Bank is stepping on the economic brakes to curb inflation. The last thing it needs is the government stepping on the accelerator with more spending. Chalmers needs to help the anti-inflation effort by cutting spending.
Chalmers has sworn the government to the cause. He’s said that the budget will, indeed, make more cuts to spending than it will make spending increases. But the quantum is crucial; we await Tuesday’s net saving number.
Second, says Henry, is to address what he’s previously called the “intergenerational bastardry” of a tax system that works against the younger generations, anyone under the age of about 45. The budget must “improve the bargaining position of first home owners relative to investors”. Albanese has found religion on this; he will attempt exactly that by reducing the generosity of capital gains and negative gearing tax concessions for investors.
Third, Henry wants the budget to “do something to lift both productivity and domestic economic resilience”, reviving living standards and bestowing economic security. Based on Chalmers’ rhetoric, he agrees. We await the detail.
Australia teeters on the brink of a populist uprising led by a longtime racist. That’s the message from today’s byelection. The government is on the brink of trying to do something about it. The Coalition is on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. He writes a world column each Tuesday.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.