Pauline Hanson hoped to repeat history. Instead, One Nation has failed dismally
Senator Pauline Hanson was bullish leading up to Saturday’s Queensland poll. She predicted One Nation would repeat its stunning success in 1998, when the fledgling party won 11 seats, routing the state Liberal National party and delivering power to Labor.
That result is one Hanson has long been keen to repeat. It elevated the rookie MP from pariah to powerbroker, making One Nation Australia’s third most powerful party. The LNP’s preferencing of One Nation over Labor had helped
cement its demise. In the 1998 federal election, then prime minister John Howard scrambled to avert a political bloodbath, banning all “deals” with Hanson’s rising juggernaut.
Nineteen years on, the LNP again preferenced One Nation, at a similarly dismal cost: in some parts of regional Queensland, the swing against it was double that against the Labor party. But this time, One Nation’s performance was far from stellar.
At 3.20pm on Sunday, when the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, claimed victory for Labor, One Nation’s Queensland leader Steve Dickson had lost the seat of Buderim, and climate change denier Malcolm Roberts had admitted defeat in Ipswich, home of Hanson’s old fish shop. Stephen Andrew, a pro-gun feral pest exterminator, has a slim chance of taking Mirani – but most analysts predict the party’s 61 candidates will fail to win a single seat.
At One Nation’s election party on Saturday night, Hanson remained upbeat. She told Channel Nine her candidates had averaged 20% of the primary vote and with postal and pre-poll votes yet to be counted, they would still claim several seats. She left the party early, with a bottle of Bundaberg Rum.
Perhaps a restorative Ginger Bitch (Hanson’s preferred tipple of Bundy and Dry) was in order. Behind the scenes, the result must hurt: Hanson and her chief of staff, James Ashby, have been preparing for the Queensland election for two years. They’ve failed spectacularly in their mission to make One Nation mark II a major political force, let alone a kingmaker in a minority Queensland government.
After her campaign-changing call that she’d do no deals with One Nation, premier Palaszczuk is set to form a majority. To add insult to injury, the minority parties with the best shot at parliamentary leather are Katter’s Australian party with two to three seats, and Hanson’s detested enemy, the Greens. Amy MacMahon almost toppled the ALP’s Jackie Trad in South Brisbane, and Michael Berkman may still take Maiwar from the LNPs Scott Emerson, becoming the state’s first Green MP.
In late 2015, I filmed Ashby at Hanson’s farm outside Brisbane, unveiling the fluoro-orange “I Trust Pauline” shirts, banners and corflutes that One Nation would use to promote its candidates to Queensland voters.
“They’re clean, they’re bright, they’re fresh,” Hanson beamed, then sat down to update her Facebook page. The anti-Islamic, anti-immigration and pro-farming posts on “Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain” were attracting a million-plus clicks, and played a major role in delivering Hanson to the federal Senate in 2016, after an 18-year political exile.
Ashby told me Hanson’s election was the “battle”, but Queensland would be the war. One Nation started fielding state candidates in December 2016, following the strategy that had nabbed the party four Senate seats. They bypassed the “elitist” media and posted direct to followers, styling Hanson as a Trump-style outsider and “voice of the people”, whose battler army would “drain the billabong”.
In the lead-up to the Queensland poll, Hanson’s regular breakfast TV spots and video stunt-driven social media campaigns expanded One Nation’s reach as planned: the Please Explain Facebook page was consistently averaging 130k likes and shares per post, compared with the 42k per post average of the Queensland LNP, ALP and Greens.
But while Hanson’s comment feed shows many Queenslanders still nurture a sentimental affection for “their Pauline”, the Ipswich underdog who dared to “say what Aussies were thinking” and survived death threats and a stint in jail to reboot herself as the leader of One Nation, that affection has failed to translate into seats.
Why have Hanson and her party failed to cut through?
Senator Fraser Anning’s rapid defection from One Nation’s federal ranks didn’t help the party’s electoral credibility, neither did Queensland leader Steve Dickson’s allegation that children are being taught how to masturbate and use dildos in schools. Hanson’s failure to censor sex-shop owner Mark Thornton, the Thuringowa candidate who linked “good sex” to domestic violence, was another low point of the campaign.
The media’s preoccupation with Hanson’s star power over her candidates, and LNP leader Tim Nicholls’ Sunrise gaffe, where he appeared to spruik a One Nation/LNP coalition, enabling Labor to slam the “cuts and chaos” that such an alliance would produce, also helped muddy One Nation’s standing with voters.
But far more damaging to Hanson’s dream of repeating her 1998 Queensland victory are the contradictory messages she sells as policy. The senator opposes coal seam gas mining because it pollutes aquifers “for future generations”, and has told me there is “no way” she’d let the Great Barrier Reef be damaged. Yet she rejects global warming as a “rort” perpetrated by scientists hungry for grants, and famously snorkelled in the Great Barrier Reef’s last unbleached pocket to prove that climate change is a myth.
Hanson rails against foreign exploitation of Australian agriculture and mining resources, yet backs the controversial Adani mega-mine in the Galilee Basin, which is set to pollute farmland and towns, drain the Great Artesian Basin, and ratchet up global warming by fuelling dirty coal-fired power plants across the world.
Hanson’s distrust of profit-hungry corporations, particularly Asian ones, is curiously absent when it comes to the scandal-plagued Adani, whose legacy of environmental destruction is indisputable, and whose touted figure of 10,000 new jobs for Queenslanders has repeatedly been called into question.
Hanson is against Queensland taxpayers forking out a $1bn loan to Adani, as is Palaszczuk. But so far, both leaders are ignoring a key message of this election. Queenslanders, in both the cities and the regions, are deeply divided about the mine.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the ultra-right powerbrokers who control his party, should take note. The Greens, not One Nation, were the real surprise on Saturday. Senator Hanson, if she really is fair dinkum about protecting our water and reef for “future generations”, should oppose Adani outright.
Dr Anna Broinowski is a filmmaker and author. Her new book Please Explain: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Pauline Hanson is published by Penguin