Pauline dives One Nation into Australia’s mainstream political merde

So let us get this right.

We have a profoundly despised mainstream left and right in Australian politics. They can both lay claim to, inter alia, insane house prices, energy policy failure, exporting the Australian manufacturing sector, blowing the once-in-a-lifetime mining boom proceeds on the already affluent, trashing Australian education, and the population ponzi.

Set apart from them are the Greens supporting open borders, higher energy bills, sanctimonious blame apportionment on gender and ethnicity, and pure hypocrisy as a basis for economic planning, represented by some high-profile property speculators.

The above explains quite clearly and overtly why more Australians have started at least toying with the idea of looking at One Nation and their leadership. They have risen in the polls to the point where they are obviously more ‘the opposition’ than the gag-a-minute Liberal Party, and some polls have of late had them potentially giving the ALP a run for their money next time there is a federal poll (nearly 2 years away) and a good chance of rustling up seats in various state polls between now and then.

Their starting strong suit is a generation-long campaign against higher immigration volumes, consistent with a large majority of Australians. But everything beyond that is terra incognita.

Reservations about what, if any, economic policies they stand for have mounted ever since they started getting more attention a year or so ago. So, in recent weeks, the messaging from One Nation has been a lesson in how to blow apart a reservoir of political goodwill in the electorate, ensuring that they will never get closer to actual power.

First came Pauline Hanson’s comments about ‘Monoculture’ and multiculturalism. She started off strong in her speech to the National Press Club. focussing on the one issue most of Australia knows has got out of hand – Immigration – and the numbers surrounding that. That line, and the sheer obviousness of it, is what has a sizeable chunk of the electorate at least looking at the party she has fronted for a generation.

Alas, the very next point she came to was one where many Australians will have switched off. To make it worse, she could have made points most Australians would agree with without bringing monoculture or multiculturalism into it.

Most Australians don’t give two hoots about where immigrants come from, what colour they are, what religious views they may have, or what wars have blighted their homelands to the point coming here was a viable option.

They just want them, when they get here, to be intelligible in a communications sense; reasonable in a living-nearby sense; respectful enough about whatever their trauma experience has been not to bring it here; and generally understanding the view that there are laws which are respected by the people here. From there, if they can get jobs and not be a long-term burden on the state, then so much the better.

For the most part that means:-

• Half decent English – bearing in mind that Australians have world-leading tolerance for bad English, and do give points for making the attempt – and an understanding that it is the primary language of the country (preferably the Australian version).
• Understanding that the locals have food and beverage choices, quietness expectations later in the eve, traditions about driving and parking, an occasional abruptness about getting their points across in person or on the phone, an Anglo-Saxon style disinclination for public touching (especially of wives or daughters), and an acceptance of both sartorial casualness and occasionally skimpy clothing. On top of that they will likely be very sceptical when it comes to any form of proselytising, and religion in general.
• Understanding that there are local laws about such things as theft, violence, machete usage, breaches of administration, consumer protections, freedom of expression, and the rights of all regarding these (and that the society they have come to is in fact amongst the most law-abiding on the planet).

Most migrants don’t have much of an issue with any of that. Many come from backgrounds where quite similar issues, traits, attitudes, and legal niceties are as important in their cultures as the one they have come to.

That is about as much ‘monoculture’ as anyone is really after.

Then came Hanson’s comments about the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism. Maybe it is the trait of an era in which every last media piece presents someone as a winner or loser, but why she had to come out with that is anyone’s guess, and it will probably cost her more votes than it gains.

A quick look at the most recent census outcomes (from 2021, there is another later this year) tells us that Australians see their ancestry and background as:-

• 33% English
• 29.9% Australian
• 9.5% Irish
• 8.6% Scottish

When you consider that the next cabs off the rank include the Italians, Greeks, Serbians, Germans, Dutch and Poles – as well as the Chinese and Indians – and that indigenous Australians are a separate classification (about 3%) the above is telling us that about 80% of us descend from either the British Isles or across the water in Western Europe.

Given that these have been exchanging their cultures with one another for a couple of thousand years – often via crusades, pogroms and religious disputes, royal family marriages; and a very large number of wars – the net outcome is that Australia’s multiculturalism, is to about 4.5 out of every 5 contemporary Australians not that traumatically multicultural.

To a very large degree it explains why Australians would like contemporary migrants to speak some English, respect Australia’s version of English common law, and not freak the locals out with ethnic-based machete outings and the like.

So for Pauline Hanson to bemoan the failure of multiculturalism begs the question of why or how. For most Australians multiculturalism has worked just fine. We are amongst the most law-abiding, tolerant, prosperous, and educated peoples on the planet. For most of us bumping into someone from a different ethnicity or religion isn’t that much of an issue.

Hanson could have simply stuck with numbers by noting the surge in post-2006 immigration volumes, where the numbers of themselves have been disconcerting for a nation which has been deindustrialising and getting out of export-facing economic sectors to become more reliant on directly and indirectly funded government employment. But she didn’t.

What Australians want to know is why the Immigration afterburners went on after 2006 when our economic complexity substance has been evaporating.

Her comments simply

…shape an economic issue of

why are we importing to people to become government funded employees, when the competitive export facing economy we achieved through the Hawke Keating years is being ditched?

into

….a culture and values issue of

what are all these non Europeans backgrounds doing here? 

When at that point the key issue is that everyone wants a better economic future, regardless of their race or ethnicity, and all we need to is get some effective economic policy happening.

Alas, it appears that at this very point Pauline Hanson and One Nation have little to offer. The same speech to the National Press Club slagged off the Albanese government’s changes to negative gearing, which plenty have noted (including ex-Treasurer Joe Hockey on the way out the door) and Macrobusiness has regularly noted mean large Budget outlays to support speculative positions in housing by those with the capital substance to carry the negative gear, who crowd out less pecunious home aspirants and hammer renters. Pauline Hanson doesn’t get it.

Hanson has made solid points about Australia monumentally shooting itself in the foot with its energy policy, but she hasn’t explained what she would actually do about it – whether to reserve gas here, tax it on the way to export destinations, or tax the internal movement of gas to liquefaction.

On top of all that, this week’s development is that she is off visiting Europe as a guest of Gina Rinehart. Rinehart has espoused a range of economic policy causes, from Africans working for $2 a day to gifting islands to the worlds richest man, which potentially aren’t in the interests of working Australians and presumably made great discussion topics for her and Hanson in Sicily.

A journey to the One Nation website is informative of the central issue. They have no economic policy.

One Nation has no sense of ‘Economic Policy’ and provides no sense of how their grab bag of financial and economic positions and motherhood statements come together as an economic policy.

No sense of whether they are or aren’t for government intervention to achieve economic ends, no sense of big or small government being better or worse, and no sense of marrying up whether the private sector efficiency provides better outcomes for the community at large.

No sense of whether they want Australia to be a technologically advanced nation earning its position in the world through the efforts of its people or whether they are comfortable with Australia simply digging and growing its economic future, which would at least fit with their stance on immigration.

They have a range of positions which, while potentially popular – starting with the idea of re underwriting the entire mortgage market with lower cost mortgages, which Leith tore to shreds – appear unsustainable. And it all has a Clive Palmer sense of grab bag of populist positions which seems to be about dismantling any administrative sense of being able to resist Australian oligarch whims of the $2 labourer or gifts to the world’s richest mankind.

Australians are right to be looking beyond Labor and Liberal, but a casual glimpse at One Nation will tell them straight away they should keep looking.