Opinion
Until now, most commentary on the One Nation surge has been about the effect this would have on the Coalition. That’s fair enough given it’s overwhelmingly a story of Coalition voter flight, and it is therefore the Coalition that must respond. But we’ve thought less about the effect this might have on One Nation. It’s never been here before. And we’ve never seen how a pitched battle for conservative major party status might look.
This week, we might have had our first glimpse. It began on Monday night when Pauline Hanson asked rhetorically, incredulously, “I’m sorry, how can you tell me there are good Muslims?” She wasn’t sorry, of course. At least not until a couple of days later when – having previously dug in – she conceded she didn’t “genuinely believe” what she said. She cited at least one good Muslim: the non-practising Muslim woman who stood as a One Nation candidate. She apologised to certain kinds of good Muslims “if” they were “out there”, but somehow still did it defiantly: it’s the only apology I’ve encountered that includes the words “and I am not going to apologise”.
It’s true, this wasn’t a huge departure from what Hanson has always said. Going into the 2016 election, she’d called for a royal commission into Islam. A year later, she declared “Islam is a disease, we need to vaccinate ourselves against that.” Her maiden Senate speech dismissed the idea of embracing “good Muslims”: “How should we tell the difference? … How many lives will be lost or destroyed trying to determine who is good and who is bad?” With this in mind, she’s consistently called for an end to Muslim migration, though in 2007 she said she didn’t have a problem with “Christian Muslims”.
But note the (very) subtle difference. Until this point, Hanson hasn’t disputed the existence of “good Muslims” in theory. She’s argued they’re too hard to identify in practice, or reduced them to a literal contradiction in terms. But this week she just came out and said it: they don’t exist; every Muslim you see, hear from, hear about, is an enemy of Australia. She’s taken the fig leaf and mulched it.
Perhaps this was an accident. Perhaps Hanson suddenly found herself in the middle of a sentence she hadn’t intended to say, but was then committed. More likely, though, she felt perfectly ready to make this statement; to expand the frontiers of a sordid debate.
When Angus Taylor deposed Sussan Ley as Liberal leader last week, two things happened. A poll showed a bump in the Coalition vote at the expense of One Nation. And Taylor framed his leadership around stopping “bad migration”, which he would do by discriminating against applicants “based on values”. “No one will ever be as strong as One Nation on immigration,” retorted Hanson in a flash, challenging him to restrict immigration from “fundamentalist Islamic countries”. Then, on Monday, came a leaked Liberal immigration policy, ostensibly developed under Sussan Ley’s leadership, which sounded very much like a Trumpian version of doing exactly that: banning entry to anyone coming from nominated regions within 13 nations, including Palestine and Somalia, and instituting phone searches at the border to inspect people’s views.
Senior Liberals disowned it, and Taylor dismissed it. But in this sequence of events lurks the ghost of a bidding war. Taylor, clearly worried about One Nation as most Coalition members are, signals he’ll be tough on the politics of culture. Hanson goads the new Coalition leader to put up and declares herself tougher. Then, with the first sign of a modest Coalition recovery, she goes and proves it. If that’s close to the truth, the story is not merely about the possibility of the Coalition moving to the right. It’s about One Nation moving even further that way, too.
That is why what came next is so significant. “It’s just wrong and it’s insulting,” boomed Nationals senator for Queensland Matt Canavan, who will be competing directly with Hanson on the ballot. “There are 800,000 Muslims – most of them are great people. It’s a ridiculous statement; Pauline should just say sorry. Just own it and admit it.” Elsewhere, he called it “totally un-Australian”. “These remarks from One Nation are absolutely disgusting and outrageous,” echoed Liberal senator Andrew Bragg.
Then came the true thrust of the response. “It is these kinds of ill-disciplined comments that make people worry that Pauline just doesn’t have what it takes to lead a major party,” added Canavan. And then Bragg: “Leadership is not about bashing up on diverse groups in our community.” That is, they decided to draw a line. Then they used that line to sketch Hanson as a pretender, incapable of anything serious. In doing that, they got some version of a backdown.
That approach might just work. An intriguing survey this week showed that of those supporting One Nation, only 17 per cent nominated border control and reduced immigration as their motivation. The dominant reason, accounting for 36 per cent, is a “desire for an alternative” and a “rejection of the major parties”. That sketches more a protest vote than an affirmation of anything particular One Nation is selling. You might even say the appeal is aesthetic.
The Coalition can’t disrupt that aesthetic by being a facsimile of it. The disruption is to redraw Hanson as unserious, and to explain how that shows up in the policy that those flirting with One Nation aren’t focusing on. Not so much to disrespect her, as to respect yourself enough to know you shouldn’t be following her down burrows. That in doing so, you’ll eventually find one of them is dug all the way to the edge of a cliff. And if you’re not careful, the whole country might fall through it.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic.
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