Even as the poll-topping Pauline Hanson graced the National Press Club (finally), her “north stars” in the Anglosphere seemed to be topping out, revealing themselves as incapable of constructive thought and not even that popular.
Buoyed by good polls, Hanson cumbersomely attacked the very battler base required for securing majority power. Wage and salary earners were insulted as lazy but protected by employment law.
Women were told they did not need paid maternity leave nor was childcare worthy of higher wages and investment. Access to abortion would be restricted.
Migrants and their descendants who make up more than half the population, would be asked to pipe down. Their rich cultural offerings would be forsaken in creating Hanson’s new monoculture, a joyless cultural soviet defined as “one nation under one flag”.
Lauded by (too) many commentators as effective and as a test safely navigated, Hanson’s long indignant address was heaved with own goals.
It will more likely mark the moment that her party’s broadening appeal splintered - even allowing for the next couple of polls. That may read as a contradiction, but the aim in democratic politics isn’t to win opinion surveys, it is to win general elections.
When the major parties and unions package up her loose anti-women, anti-migrant, anti-worker quotes, it will become clear that One Nation is not the fast vehicle for a new people power it pretends to be. Great for billionaire plane-providing donors, sure, but the rest?
It was the same week when Donald Trump’s epic bravado against Iran (“a-whole-civilisation-will-die-tonight”) wheezed into a humiliating American whimper.
Trump’s only bauble is a return to the open sea lane that prevailed before he pounced. Yet even this is unenforceable.
The much-despised mullahs remain powerful and will now discuss with other Persian Gulf frontages what conditions might be applied to freighters transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Even before then, Trump’s vague 60-day MOU could be shattered by a furious Benjamin Netanyahu eager to spill more blood in Lebanon. US-Iran negotiations have already faltered.
Too harsh? Tell it to the White House. Trump condemned the IDF’s rubble-making strategy in Lebanon (as perfected in Gaza) declaring: “You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah”.
That exasperation came, fittingly, as the US went to water over Iran in Evian, France. Netanyahu’s perennial war-footing has finally succeeded in fracturing American resolve with Vice-President JD Vance fuming to the DC press pack: “Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. If I were in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
Then came this remark via a NYT podcast: “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have”. Crikey.
In Britain, where race-baiting demagoguery fanned incendiary riots in recent weeks, things on the divisive right have also unravelled. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK was primed to take a Manchester seat in a byelection.
It should have been a lock. Aggregated national polls have support for Keir Starmer’s Labour at a dismal 19 per cent. For Farage, the down-trodden seat of Makerfield was natural Reform territory, registering his sixth biggest swing nationally there in the 2024 general election - i.e. when Starmer was actually popular.
Instead, Andy Burnham easily retained it for Labour taking 55 per cent of the vote - more than the other 13 candidates, including Reform, combined.
The takeout for Starmer personally, though, is not good. Even before the byelection, more than 100 Labour MPs had called on him to resign. In winning big, Burnham overcame Starmer’s deep unpopularity by connecting with the very Britons left behind by successive Tory and Labour governments. The conclusion is unavoidable: Burnham is well liked and can beat Farage.
Starmer, is widely disliked and simply cannot. A challenge is imminent.
More broadly, the result suggests that it is possible at least, for a party in government to defeat a populist outsider insurgency. Although it must be acknowledged, Burnham, too, ran as a kind of anti-Starmer, anti-Westminster outsider.
A final few respectful words on the unrecognised danger of Hanson’s openly declared bans on certain media organisations, and individual reporters attending her press conferences.
This is a serious attack on a free press.
Her objective here, as with Trump, is to secure obedience, compliance, control. Popular or not, professional media play an essential role in applying scrutiny and accountability.
Reporters are not there to be compliant, or ordained.
Journalists and their employers who escape her bans and proceed as if all is right, are not lucky. Rather, they are complicit in validating dangerous authoritarian behaviour. Such techniques as Hanson is trialling are un-Australian and undemocratic. Journalists should have said so clearly and in real time.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times’ political analyst and a professor at the ANU’s Australian Studies Institute.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 4 hours ago
In a sane world, this would push the LNP into offering a middle ground: unapologetically right-of-centre policies, but drawing the line short of crank stuff like expelling women from the workforce or declaring the country to be an Anglo-Celtic monoculture. Though with the party being Abbott’s fiefdom, there’s not much hope of that.
Hopefully the Greens can broaden their appeal on the left flank and let the ALP achieve its destiny of becoming the broad-church moderate centre-right party the country is missing.