Extract from The Guardian
The One Nation senator is spreading her populist wings and the
government must find a way to appease her bloc while protecting its core
vote in the bush
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the battleground of centre-right politics in Australia has shifted north.
In late September, the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, popped up to see Bob Katter and toured the Hells Gate dam site in north Queensland, snapped by the local paper after a helicopter tour.
This past week, with parliament still in recess, Malcolm Turnbull and Joyce have been back in Queensland, talking water and dams. The minister for resources and northern Australia, Matt Canavan, took the dams message to the far north.
Let’s call this week the touching tour.
In the last parliamentary sitting period, Turnbull told his MPs they had to make the government’s policies “tactile”. Presumably this means the government’s agenda needs to be more than abstractions, or beltway intrigues – policy needs to be there for the touch. So this week it was two men in matching Akubras, touching their way around Queensland.
But touching can be a two-way street and, this week, Rockhampton touched back. When Turnbull arrived in the beef capital on Thursday, he was welcomed by the local paper, the Morning Bulletin, which chose to depict him on page one as a cartoon clown.
There was no subtlety in the paper’s message.
An editorial accompanying Malcolm the clown declared central Queenslanders “die earlier than your neighbours in Wentworth, Sydney” (Mr Harbourside Mansion was implied, not stated). It said people were poorer, had worse health outcomes and fewer job opportunities. “So far, your government has failed to demonstrate it has a coherent plan to move the dial,” it said.
The Morning Bulletin noted there was now a new player in the political mix in Canberra. “There are any number of reasons Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is surging in the polls in this area. A lack of faith our people have that the two parties will make a difference is a key one of those.”
Hint hint, Malcolm. We’ve got Pauline, the dynamic red, so you’d better bloody pull your finger out.
We’ve reached the point in the story where I tell you Turnbull, Joyce and Canavan weren’t the only politicians winding their way through Queensland.
Hanson was in Gympie, smiling beatifically out of the pages of the local paper. Next week, with parliament still in a brief hiatus before the big sprint to Christmas, she’ll be in Charleville, Longreach, Palm Island and Maryborough.
“People now feel they do have a voice on the floor of parliament – that someone is actually listening to them,” Hanson told the Gympie Times. “The political patsies are out of touch and the issues faced here, including unemployment, are being faced across the country as well.
“People are sick and tired of the stranglehold the major political parties have on the people. They’re struggling in many areas, including a downturn in manufacturing and higher costs of living – they don’t feel like they’re being listened to.”
Hanson now has licence as a Queensland senator to travel throughout the state, the benefit of political incumbency for a micro-party used to campaigning on the smell of an oily rag. Her profile as a Queensland senator gives her a significant springboard to build her fanbase among the disaffected in a state in the middle of a difficult economic transition.
Cleverly, she has also got herself on parliament’s national broadband committee, which not only puts her in the centre of one of the most red-hot political issues west of the divide, it also allows her to move with her committee colleagues around the country at taxpayer expense in the event the committee decides to travel.
Current indications suggest she’s right on to it. This week, Hanson was spruiking for the forgotten people of Norfolk Island, asking the government to underwrite a plan to connect the island to a new fibre optic cable stretching between Australia and New Zealand.
If you happened to miss Hanson’s deft quickstep with the NBN committee, it’s worth a brief recount. She made it known to the government she wanted to be on that committee, but inconveniently, she lacked the numbers to win a Senate ballot.
John Williams, the veteran, independently minded National senator, was prevailed upon by the government Senate leadership to give up his spot. Williams went graciously, which really was big of him, given Hanson is coming after the Nationals’ bush constituency in no uncertain terms, and there are a bunch of Liberals still on the NBN committee who clearly didn’t make way. Now, there is only one National on the NBN committee. Such is life, or politics, in any event.
Tracking back to the week, when Joyce wasn’t touching things with the prime minister in Queensland, he was at the National Farmers Federation national congress in Canberra (with Pauline and Katter).
Joyce’s political career in Canberra runs in cycles. Sometimes he’s leashed, largely because Liberal colleagues insist that he is. Other times he’s completely off the leash, either because he can’t bear the constraints of Canberra’s talking point orthodoxies a moment longer, or because it’s politically convenient for the government that the leash comes off.
You might have noticed we are back in an unleashed period, a let-Barnaby-be-Barnaby moment, and the unleashing relates to political convenience.
At the NFF, Joyce found his inner Pauline, sounding identical to the One Nation leader on the subject of foreign investment, even though the Turnbull government’s policy is to welcome foreign investment.
Warming to his Trumpesque, heavy-on-sovereignty light-on-facts theme, Joyce declared floridly at the NFF: knees up, people are not prepared to “die for a rented country”. “The love of one’s country is best delivered when you own that country,” Joyce reasoned. He noted in a subsequent radio interview that people tend to love something more when they own it.
And here, we land squarely on the Turnbull government’s dilemma.
The One Nation bloc is four votes in the new Senate. Hanson needs to be appeased inside the parliament, because those votes will be periodically necessary. She’s a swing vote to cultivate. War isn’t an option.
But outside the parliamentary precinct, she’s diabolical trouble. One Nation, if it gets its act together in this parliament, poses an existential threat to the Coalition’s core vote. Hanson needs to be neutralised outside the parliament.
So the Turnbull government has to make some important decisions.
From my vantage point, the options look like this. The government could try and neutralise Hansonism by strengthening the position of the Nationals in the bush with a combination of head patting and cash, and “letting Barnaby be Barnaby”.
But things could get complicated. If the political pressure starts to rise on the Nationals, we could see Barnaby off the leash not only with a burst of front-bar whimsy, but with a list of demands for serious revisionism on policy.
The trade-off during the Howard period between the Liberals and the Nationals was crude, but highly successful: Nationals toed the line on economic rationalism and, in turn, the money flowed to regional electorates.
But we are a distance from the placid consensus vibe of the Howard era. We’ve entered peak fractious and if things get too hot in the bush, the Nationals might seek new terms of engagement.
The government will then have a choice. It can lurch into populism and follow Hanson down the path of Hansonism, or it could hug the middle with some practical action.
One way of combatting the forces giving rise to Trump and Hanson and the Brexiteers is to start thinking more deeply about equity, which, I now believe, is an unavoidable conversation for the centre right. One way to address the anger and alienation with major party politics in Rockhampton is start connecting with the losers of three decades of economic transformation. Yes, really.
One of the more interesting interventions in recent times came from Turnbull’s departmental head, who argued in favour of redistributive policies as a mechanism for rebuilding public consensus for open economies in an atmosphere of rising protectionism.
Let’s call that one the better-angels recourse.
Make no mistake, this will be one of the most fascinating plays of this parliamentary term.
In late September, the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, popped up to see Bob Katter and toured the Hells Gate dam site in north Queensland, snapped by the local paper after a helicopter tour.
This past week, with parliament still in recess, Malcolm Turnbull and Joyce have been back in Queensland, talking water and dams. The minister for resources and northern Australia, Matt Canavan, took the dams message to the far north.
Let’s call this week the touching tour.
In the last parliamentary sitting period, Turnbull told his MPs they had to make the government’s policies “tactile”. Presumably this means the government’s agenda needs to be more than abstractions, or beltway intrigues – policy needs to be there for the touch. So this week it was two men in matching Akubras, touching their way around Queensland.
But touching can be a two-way street and, this week, Rockhampton touched back. When Turnbull arrived in the beef capital on Thursday, he was welcomed by the local paper, the Morning Bulletin, which chose to depict him on page one as a cartoon clown.
There was no subtlety in the paper’s message.
An editorial accompanying Malcolm the clown declared central Queenslanders “die earlier than your neighbours in Wentworth, Sydney” (Mr Harbourside Mansion was implied, not stated). It said people were poorer, had worse health outcomes and fewer job opportunities. “So far, your government has failed to demonstrate it has a coherent plan to move the dial,” it said.
The Morning Bulletin noted there was now a new player in the political mix in Canberra. “There are any number of reasons Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is surging in the polls in this area. A lack of faith our people have that the two parties will make a difference is a key one of those.”
Hint hint, Malcolm. We’ve got Pauline, the dynamic red, so you’d better bloody pull your finger out.
We’ve reached the point in the story where I tell you Turnbull, Joyce and Canavan weren’t the only politicians winding their way through Queensland.
Hanson was in Gympie, smiling beatifically out of the pages of the local paper. Next week, with parliament still in a brief hiatus before the big sprint to Christmas, she’ll be in Charleville, Longreach, Palm Island and Maryborough.
“People now feel they do have a voice on the floor of parliament – that someone is actually listening to them,” Hanson told the Gympie Times. “The political patsies are out of touch and the issues faced here, including unemployment, are being faced across the country as well.
“People are sick and tired of the stranglehold the major political parties have on the people. They’re struggling in many areas, including a downturn in manufacturing and higher costs of living – they don’t feel like they’re being listened to.”
Hanson now has licence as a Queensland senator to travel throughout the state, the benefit of political incumbency for a micro-party used to campaigning on the smell of an oily rag. Her profile as a Queensland senator gives her a significant springboard to build her fanbase among the disaffected in a state in the middle of a difficult economic transition.
Cleverly, she has also got herself on parliament’s national broadband committee, which not only puts her in the centre of one of the most red-hot political issues west of the divide, it also allows her to move with her committee colleagues around the country at taxpayer expense in the event the committee decides to travel.
Current indications suggest she’s right on to it. This week, Hanson was spruiking for the forgotten people of Norfolk Island, asking the government to underwrite a plan to connect the island to a new fibre optic cable stretching between Australia and New Zealand.
If you happened to miss Hanson’s deft quickstep with the NBN committee, it’s worth a brief recount. She made it known to the government she wanted to be on that committee, but inconveniently, she lacked the numbers to win a Senate ballot.
John Williams, the veteran, independently minded National senator, was prevailed upon by the government Senate leadership to give up his spot. Williams went graciously, which really was big of him, given Hanson is coming after the Nationals’ bush constituency in no uncertain terms, and there are a bunch of Liberals still on the NBN committee who clearly didn’t make way. Now, there is only one National on the NBN committee. Such is life, or politics, in any event.
Tracking back to the week, when Joyce wasn’t touching things with the prime minister in Queensland, he was at the National Farmers Federation national congress in Canberra (with Pauline and Katter).
Joyce’s political career in Canberra runs in cycles. Sometimes he’s leashed, largely because Liberal colleagues insist that he is. Other times he’s completely off the leash, either because he can’t bear the constraints of Canberra’s talking point orthodoxies a moment longer, or because it’s politically convenient for the government that the leash comes off.
You might have noticed we are back in an unleashed period, a let-Barnaby-be-Barnaby moment, and the unleashing relates to political convenience.
At the NFF, Joyce found his inner Pauline, sounding identical to the One Nation leader on the subject of foreign investment, even though the Turnbull government’s policy is to welcome foreign investment.
Warming to his Trumpesque, heavy-on-sovereignty light-on-facts theme, Joyce declared floridly at the NFF: knees up, people are not prepared to “die for a rented country”. “The love of one’s country is best delivered when you own that country,” Joyce reasoned. He noted in a subsequent radio interview that people tend to love something more when they own it.
And here, we land squarely on the Turnbull government’s dilemma.
The One Nation bloc is four votes in the new Senate. Hanson needs to be appeased inside the parliament, because those votes will be periodically necessary. She’s a swing vote to cultivate. War isn’t an option.
But outside the parliamentary precinct, she’s diabolical trouble. One Nation, if it gets its act together in this parliament, poses an existential threat to the Coalition’s core vote. Hanson needs to be neutralised outside the parliament.
So the Turnbull government has to make some important decisions.
From my vantage point, the options look like this. The government could try and neutralise Hansonism by strengthening the position of the Nationals in the bush with a combination of head patting and cash, and “letting Barnaby be Barnaby”.
But things could get complicated. If the political pressure starts to rise on the Nationals, we could see Barnaby off the leash not only with a burst of front-bar whimsy, but with a list of demands for serious revisionism on policy.
The trade-off during the Howard period between the Liberals and the Nationals was crude, but highly successful: Nationals toed the line on economic rationalism and, in turn, the money flowed to regional electorates.
But we are a distance from the placid consensus vibe of the Howard era. We’ve entered peak fractious and if things get too hot in the bush, the Nationals might seek new terms of engagement.
The government will then have a choice. It can lurch into populism and follow Hanson down the path of Hansonism, or it could hug the middle with some practical action.
One way of combatting the forces giving rise to Trump and Hanson and the Brexiteers is to start thinking more deeply about equity, which, I now believe, is an unavoidable conversation for the centre right. One way to address the anger and alienation with major party politics in Rockhampton is start connecting with the losers of three decades of economic transformation. Yes, really.
One of the more interesting interventions in recent times came from Turnbull’s departmental head, who argued in favour of redistributive policies as a mechanism for rebuilding public consensus for open economies in an atmosphere of rising protectionism.
Let’s call that one the better-angels recourse.
Make no mistake, this will be one of the most fascinating plays of this parliamentary term.
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