Hanson is 72 years old. She wasn’t a particularly effective politician or leader even when she was younger. The collapse of the Liberal party has created an opportunity and the opportunists are climbing onboard a party with some momentum and billionaire backing that lacks the discipline or structure to enforce it’s identity and aims, such that they are.
These people will do to ON what they did to the Liberal party, destroy it from the inside. It is my opinion that similar dynamics is why the Libs got wiped out in SA. They turned their back on the broadly popular moderate politics of Marshall and opted instead for extremist Christian identity politics. Having their pick speed run Christian cosplayer to convicted drug supplier didn’t help.
In my opinion Hanson does not seem particularly religious (or perhaps at all) and I suspect opening the doors to the Christian fascist types is more a means to an end when it comes to re-establishing White Australia or grifting more money and power than anything to do with her personal convictions.
If Hanson retains any control of her party she might seek to dump the lot of them if they start tanking her popularity. This isn’t the US.
ShrimpCurler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The optimist in me hopes this will hurt one nation and be the start of their popularity decreasing. But the pessimist sees this as one more step towards replicating the hell hole that America has become.
SarahFromOz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yep. It could go either way I think.