Coalition crumbled, not by opposing One Nation, but by aping it

Last Saturday morning, Barnaby Joyce took to social media with a proposal to jail people who burn or desecrate the Australian flag. It’s an issue that enlivens the political right and with parliament being recalled early to commemorate the December 14 Bondi terrorist attack and debate tougher hate speech laws, the former Nationals leader turned One Nation defector saw an opportunity to press the case. On his Facebook page, he posted a copy of a draft amendment to make flag-burning a criminal offence, punishable by two years’ jail.

“Little could speak louder to the hate of Australia than burning our nation’s flag,” Joyce wrote on the social media site. “So let us move an amendment to ban that action and see who votes for it. As the saying goes ‘put up the flag and see who salutes’.”

Within days, the opposition produced its own flag-burning amendment and put it on the table during hate speech negotiations with the Albanese government.

The government refused to support it, but the Liberals insisted on it going to a vote anyway. Presented in parliament on Tuesday afternoon by north Queensland Liberal Phil Thompson – a military veteran and a ban advocate – the amendment was given major party priority over Joyce’s version. It was put to a vote and promptly failed as expected. Joyce’s amendment was then deemed redundant and was not allowed to be introduced. Mission accomplished.

The Liberals and Nationals have been in the business of ostracising Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party for three decades. They used to do it by standing against their ideas. Now they copy them. The available evidence suggests it’s not working terribly well.

Poll results published this week show a new year surge in voter support for One Nation. The Resolve poll found One Nation’s primary vote had jumped from 14 to 18 per cent since December 7 and News Corp’s Newspoll had Hanson’s party vaulting ahead of the Liberal-National partnership on primary votes, 22 per cent to 21 – the first time that has happened and an increase of seven percentage points since November.

Those figures went through the Coalition like a thousand volts. By mid-week, Nationals leader David Littleproud had led his party to its second separation from the Liberals in a year as their quest for differentiation went into overdrive. Their assertion of independence is no newer than the push to ban the burning of the flag, but now it has an extra frisson, propelled by panic.

There has long been crossover between the issues the Nationals champion and those of One Nation, but Hanson’s was always the harder line. Despite that distinction becoming less and less, Hanson’s support has only increased.

This is not how the Nationals used to approach the contest.

Former Queensland Nationals senator and anti-One-Nation stalwart, the late Ron Boswell, diagnosed early that his party’s best chance of withstanding the threat Hanson posed was to be a bulwark against the wildest of what she espoused.

Boswell made it his life’s work to keep the extreme right relegated to the fringes of politics. In 2014, as he retired from a 31-year parliamentary career, the burly “Boz” warned his colleagues against what he detected was a creeping inclination to appease rather than challenge Hanson, to serve short-term Coalition interests.

“All you are doing is legitimising people voting for her – making it safe for people to vote for her,” Boswell later recounted telling them. Speaking to The Guardian in 2017, he said his parting missive had been to call his colleagues “stupid bastards” who could either fight Hanson or be “dragged to the right”. Boswell was recalling this in March 2017, in the wake of a speech Joyce had given to the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics and Sciences. The then Nationals leader and deputy prime minister had lambasted Hanson and One Nation and warned against letting their influence increase.

“You have to ask where do you think the nation will go if those individuals are running the country?” Joyce asked his audience. “I can tell you where it will go as an accountant. I will tell you exactly where it is going to go. It is going to go down the toilet.”

Boswell praised the pushback. Eight and a half years on, Joyce joined One Nation’s ranks and Boswell was appalled, deriding One Nation as a “party of complainers”. He died, aged 85, just under a month later. At his funeral on January 16, he was lauded for his unwavering battle against the far right and especially his success in fending off a Senate challenge from Hanson in 2001 under the slogan: “He’s not pretty, but he’s pretty effective.”

It’s probably just as well Boz didn’t live to see what Littleproud has now done to their party and the mimicry of One Nation in which he and his colleagues are engaged.

They seem to have misdiagnosed why increasing numbers of Australians are prepared to vote for Hanson. Imitation, inconsistency and melodrama are not going to win them back.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s eloquent dissertation on the “rupture” of the world order at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, reminds us that this is not an Australian phenomenon. In a no-punches-pulled speech, Carney spoke of “a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints”.

“Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.”

That rupture is being felt on the ground across the world, including here at home. Social research suggests Australians have begun to conclude the pressures they’re experiencing on housing and energy costs, and on household budgets overall, are not a temporary cost-of-living crisis but a permanent change to how things are. Some say they don’t recognise their lives any more. That’s not necessarily a new intergenerational complaint, but the scale of this current rupture is making the sense of it acute.

It’s not hard to see why people feel this way, with the breakneck and bamboozling acceleration of artificial intelligence, the self-serving unpredictability of powerful global leaders who no longer observe the rules of civil discourse between people or nations and just the fact that the mail no longer comes daily, airlines cancel flights at will and supermarkets routinely have empty shelves. From the global to the local, life is much less certain than it used to be. Just look at how much the price of gold has shot up in the past year. That’s not a sign of confidence.

Across the world, far right leaders are attracting support by giving voice to the fear that life is regressing and by promising to return things to how they used to be.

Vowing to turn back the clock isn’t realistic. As Carney so eloquently put it, nostalgia is not a strategy. But it appeals to people looking for a simple solution by persuading them there is one. People’s fears are real and must not just be batted away. The failure of governments to reassure is what has sent politics to this place. But fears should be addressed, not amplified and exploited.

This is the business the Nationals are now engaging in.

Boswell was right when he advised his erstwhile colleagues that the way to respond to people’s genuine grievances was to build, fix, protect and deliver – not to find minority groups to blame.

On the Labor side, it seems to think One Nation is a Coalition problem. It takes the view that it’s National and Liberal voters who are deserting to the one-time fringe party. Most are, but not all. With the Nationals and the Liberals no longer willing to challenge the language and ideas of the hard right and instead adopting them, that’s where debate will go too. That makes it a problem for everyone in politics.

The real craziness in the Nationals’ attempt to outdo One Nation is that all imitation is likely to do is add to Hanson’s credibility. When people feel deeply unsettled, they look for consistency, authenticity and simplicity. When they’re encouraged to get angry, they look for someone to blame. The hardline condemnations of migrants (no longer just asylum seekers), renewable energy and gun control – Hanson said it all first. By adopting her policy positions, the Nationals are implying she was right all along. Until governments find ways to make everyday life feel more secure, that surely can only see her vote continue to rise.

No wonder Barnaby Joyce doesn’t seem too bothered that his old party is nicking his ideas.

Karen Middleton is a political journalist and an author.

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