One Nation is unelectable, even in QLD:
Pauline Hanson’s claims of a One Nation “shockwave” appear to have crashed, with the right-wing protest party yet to pick up a single seat in the Queensland election and its two star candidates defeated.
“This has been a very bad night for the LNP but it has also been a very bad night for One Nation. They’ve really blown it,” former LNP premier Campbell Newman said.
In a mark of One Nation’s chaotic campaign, Senator Hanson was busy insisting Ipswich candidate Malcolm Roberts was still in with a chance while Mr Roberts himself was conceding defeat.
State party leader Steve Dickson also looks set to lose his seat of Buderim.
Mr Roberts was picked up to run in Ispwich the day after the High Court ejected him from the senate over his dual citizenship, but has polled just 28 per cent of the vote.
“I’m a bit disappointed with the figures, I really am…but there is still preferences,” Ms Hanson told reporters.
As said many times, ON is the worst thing to happen to Australian politics in a very long time. It’s racism and anti-science basis make it unelectable to middle Australia. Yet is dominates the protest vote in the national narrative, making it easy for major parties to pass off much-needed policy changes as ON lunacy. The irony of ON is that all it does is entrench the very thing it seeks to displace. Australia needs a new, rational, protest party.
That leaves us with the torture of nothing. From Phil Coorey:
In terms of bumping off Turnbull, there is nothing yet even approaching critical mass. Just speculation and grumbling but no appetite.
Yet, Cabinet is leaking, fingers are being pointed, contenders are posturing and preening, rumours such as an anonymous MP threatening to quit, or Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison forming a leadership ticket, or a meeting Sunday night to count numbers, take hold. Even if untrue, they are peddled, predominantly by third parties, with the aim of them becoming self-fulfilling.
Attempts to focus on policy are mocked as distractions, whether genuine or not. Like this week’s pledge by Turnbull to focus on tax cuts for middle-income earners in the run-up to the next election.
That was an attempt to throw a grappling hook across the Christmas break and convince voters the government would be talking about them next year, once all the mess with citizenship and so forth was cleaned up. It didn’t last a day.
Arbitrary deadlines are set. If Saturday’s Queensland election for proves a bonanza for One Nation in the Liberal-national Party heartland, it will be bad for Turnbull. If the Liberals lose the December 16 Bennelong byelection, it will be very bad.
And then there’s the arrival at that tipping point where individuals wilfully break with discipline because their concern is no longer the bigger picture of winning.
It is about holding their seat, reasserting their ideology in the party, indulging in payback or playing to a particular constituency.
Paul Kelly, feels the nothing terribly:
The Turnbull government now hovers near the valley of despair — as the leader’s authority erodes, the party has no alternative leader and no alternative strategy. It risks a lose-lose future.
Once panic, demoralisation and self-interested survival take control the ship is doomed.
The deepening crisis of centre-right politics is not just about poor polls. It is going to belief and identity and that risks a rupture that could last for many years.
Another leadership showdown — now being canvassed within the party — will render far more damage than merely losing office. If this event is unleashed it will license even deeper personal and ideological tensions that cannot be controlled.
The idea another leadership bloodbath and the replacement of Malcolm Turnbull will see the government recover and run full term belongs in dream world. The transactional cost would be huge. A change of leader almost certainly means a quick-fix election since a new leader could not stabilise the ship or stem the political violence unleashed.
…The stakes at the Bennelong by-election are high: defeat will deepen the crisis while victory will give Turnbull a mini-circuit breaker. But that won’t be enough; he will need more.
…As he negotiates the next month Turnbull needs to turn his mind to a circuit-breaking strategy. He cannot allow the current cycle to continue. He must beware the idea of keeping options open rather than plunging into decisive action and closing them off. This means either changes in personnel via a reshuffle — despite the risks — or changes in government policy.
For a PM dying of doing nothing, doing nothing is not the answer. But doing nothing is what Do-nothing Malcolm does. So the end is inevitable.
Peter van Onselen sees it clearly:
Irrespective of the result at today’s Queensland election, the campaign has highlighted several intractable issues the federal Liberal and National parties will need to confront.
First, there is the problem of One Nation. As a right-wing fringe party, its appeal to a sizeable cohort of Australians is disturbing. Partly fuelled by major party discontent, partly inspired by reactionary and sometimes downright xenophobic sentiments, there is no denying the populist appeal of the party and founder Pauline Hanson.
Even when One Nation underperforms, as it did in the West Australian election this year, it still causes headaches for the Coalition. That’s because it disproportionately draws on support from the Coalition’s right flank, but preference flows, even when directed by a party ticket, do not flow back to the conservative side of Australian politics.
One Nation voters not only won’t do as they are told when it comes to preferencing, they often actively seek to punish the major party they are more affiliated with. In Western Australia we saw the backlash One Nation received for trying to do a preference deal with the Liberals. Historically we’ve seen the impact of double-sided how-to-vote cards or, as occurred in Queensland, the party preferencing against sitting MPs.
ON is a contemporary version of what BA Santamaria and the LDP was to Labor in the Menzies years; a splinter group that fractures its side of politics. Thus ON delivers Labor power wherever it treads. Even if it can’t do anything for itself.
The answer is staring the Coalition in the face. John Howard knew it at the Millennium. That’s why he installed the immigration bait and switch of flamboyantly persecuting boat people while allowing a flood of migrants through the front door.
But that has run its course as a political (and economic) strategy. Now only an open cut to immigration will bring the ON vote back in. The Coalition needn’t and shouldn’t do it with racist overtones. It can mount an excellent economic argument about addressing crush-loaded cities, housing affordability, falling wages and the US Alliance. That will be plenty to kill ON.
If the Coalition doesn’t do it now then when it loses the next federal election and Labor sustains mass immigration levels, ON will become a permanent fracture in the conservative opposition, and Labor rule so long as it lasts.
