The sincerity of the much-flaunted virtues in politics – empathy and kindness – don’t take much to expose. After the South Australian election, their chief advocates have fallen silent. They baulk at extending the tender caress of mutual humanity to a newly visible cohort of Australians: One Nation voters, who are no longer “shy” but happy to tell the world they voted for Pauline’s people.
The truth is, the major parties are in a rancid panic. More than one-fifth of voters around Australia are telling pollsters they plan to vote for One Nation. In South Australia, they actually did. Most voters there made a straight swap from the Liberal Party. But a few per cent of Labor voters also shifted to ON. As a result, neither of the venerable parties are feeling entirely secure.
In their fear, they are making a hat-trick of mistakes which only serve to illustrate to the voters leaving for One Nation that they were never really valued or understood in the first place. The first is trying to understand ON voters by talking among themselves. The second is patronising them. And the third is trying to fob them off with messaging rather than responding respectfully to their experiences.
The first is obvious and everywhere. Well-heeled or at least white-collar commentators and political types examine the concerns of One Nation voters with distaste. They suspect them of being bigots, troglodytes, or just downright stupid. Most have never lived in the areas where the One Nation vote is growing. If they have, they were in a protected enclave, or protected by selective vision, allowing them to overlook the experiences of their neighbours.
The Central Coast of NSW is an example of a split community. Sea-changers from Sydney have created a progressive corner, while others have been pushed out by affordability. Youth unemployment in the area is stubbornly high and some young families there say they feel like they’re competing with immigrants for rental properties, while home ownership has, for many, become entirely out of reach.
Other parts of Australia are simply invisible from the information superhighway. I had occasion to find myself in the Sydney suburb of Busby about 40 kilometres south-west of the CBD a little while back. (I confess – I was only there to pick up a Facebook Marketplace purchase.) Out of curiosity, I struck up a conversation with the seller, a man named Paul, who had some colourful and not especially politically correct paraphernalia on his veranda. He’s lived there for decades and, over the years, his house has, he says, been surrounded by immigrants who are trying to make life unpleasant for him so they can buy his land cheap when he gives up on living there. I can’t verify that’s the case, of course, but this is what immigration feels like to Paul.
And so politicians and their enablers in the commentariat try to debate One Nation voters using statistics on the net benefits of immigration and arguments meant to prove that their concerns are wrong or ill-founded.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh was a quick starter in the genre on Monday. The professorly assistant minister for productivity filmed his piece from the parliamentary courtyard. The video, explaining to One Nation-curious young men how they’re being duped, was then edited together with AI video and overlaid with sinister news bulletin-style stock music.
The video was hilariously off the mark. In it, Leigh warns that One Nation wants to scrap net zero, build three more coal-fired power stations, and pull out of global climate deals. Which is, as I found in recent research on the attitudes and values of 18- to 34-year-old Australians for the Centre for Independent Studies, precisely the things young right-leaning men want.
But the MP, whose hobby is triathlons, is not well acquainted with what most people would recognise as a good time. He presses on. One Nation, he says, also wants to massively slash immigration. After each revelation, Leigh adds a debating point, to demonstrate why young men who support those policies are wrong. Predictably, the video was “ratioed” on X – there were more negative comments than “likes”. More importantly, I dare say nobody felt differently after seeing the video than they did before it hit their social media feed.
Labor’s crack debating team kept at it all week. Richard Marles attacked One Nation in question time. West Australian MP Patrick Gorman risked channelling Hillary Clinton’s “basketful of deplorables” moment on Thursday in a column for the West Australian, in which he called One Nation “a growing band of rats and rejects”.
Perhaps the response to Labor’s “smartest guys in the room” approach has acted as a check on Liberal leader Angus Taylor. At the beginning of the week, Liberals had backgrounded this masthead’s Paul Sakkal that they were planning an assault on One Nation’s credibility. They haven’t followed through.
Instead, former prime minister Tony Abbott, campaigning with the Liberal candidate for Farrer on Thursday, tried to show he understood that One Nation voters “felt let down and ripped off”. The Liberal Party will need to convince voters that its new policies are “the product of conviction, not just circumstance”, he said. This suggests that he, at least, has heard One Nation voters’ refrain that the major parties can’t be trusted.
To my third point, that lack of trust is a key driver of switching to One Nation. The party’s new voters are disillusioned by politicians who they believe tell self-serving lies. As a One Nation voter pointed out, while Andrew Leigh boasts of closing down coal-fired power plants, his colleague Dan Repacholi is posting about securing jobs by keeping them open.
This is, of course, an example of the challenge that any major party has: governing for the city and the regions now means navigating vastly different visions of what is best for the nation, based on different experiences of living in Australia. There’s currently an empathy deficit between politicians and citizens, as well as between citizens of the same country.
A good start to drawing the nation back together would be for the interpretive classes – politicians and media alike – to spend more time with the people who feel unrepresented. And from a richer appreciation of their circumstances, build solutions that serve their needs, rather than political interests.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
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Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.From our partners
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