One Nation is now the most popular party among Gen X voters, and equal with Labor on 35% of the vote with Baby Boomers. Overall, one in four Aussies are prepared to vote for them.
Establishment conservatives are just as unhappy about this as the far-left, and have been rushing to give their expert opinions on the “rise of Pauline Hanson” and what can be done about it.
Their analyses, however, do nothing but show a) how out of touch they are with everyday Australians, b) how doomed they are as a political force, and c) they they should never be taken seriously again.
Let’s start with Andrew Bolt. Once hated by the left to the point he was attacked by Antifa in the street due to being seen as being “far-right”, his milquetoast centre-right opinions are mainly ignored these days are he addresses the few viewers that haven’t abandoned Sky News since it become a 24-hour anti-Semitism hysteria channel, and writes an uncontroversial column that no one ever talks about.
On Thursday he wrote a piece titled “Hanson’s support won’t vanish if the media and the Liberals ignore, abuse or ridicule her”, which as per usual for Bolt is half-right and half-backwards.
Bolt correctly points out the idiocy of his News Corp colleague Paul Kelly in thinking he can scold voters into returning to the now-left-wing Coalition that has repeatedly failed them, but then makes a classic conservative error.
“The Hanson threat will only end when the Liberals learn to talk to her voters and offer credible policies to fix what alarms them,” he writes.
Bolt is still imprisoned by the mental model that got the Liberals into this position in the first place – the flawed idea elections are won in the centre, that the right centrist policies will win over the most people.
This is the same model that caused the Coalition to move to the left after their 2025 election thrashing, when everyone on the actual right knew they needed to do the opposite.
This model, also embraced by the left and every mainstream political pundit, ignores what the voters actually want, and is based on wishful thinking and a naïve belief that a few policy tweaks will make all of the right wing voters return to the centre, and also capture enough Labor voters to win an election.
But it completely misreads the real reasons for One Nation’s rise in popularity – anger over mass immigration, cost-of-living and housing prices, and frustration at the uniparty that has moved to the left in unison for decades while ignoring the will of the people.
Pauline Hanson is, rightly or wrongly, seen as the most racist woman in Australia, maybe the world. Yet one-third of two key demographics are prepared to vote for her anyway, overcoming decades of corporate media and political establishment sneers and smears, and her own many flaws and failures.
These are not centrist voters, these are fed-up Australians who want radical change, and One Nation is the most radical option. No Coalition policy tweaks are going to appeal to them.
But Bolt is far from the worst.
In The Weekend Australian today we have three analysis/opinion pieces from senior and highly respected writers – the newspaper’s National Editor Dennis Shanahan, former executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies Tom Switzer, and veteran commentator and political advisor Chris Kenny – all looking at the One Nation phenomenon and attempting to explain it.
As an aside, cuckservative Kenny showed how woefully out of touch he is on Sky News this week when he lectured Hanson about cutting immigration, telling her if she did so the universities and student accommodation companies would suffer.
In other words, the Great Replacement must continue so the universities can continue making billions of dollars handing out increasingly worthless degrees to foreign students who don’t speak English properly and/or are just looking for a path to permanent residency, and so foreign-owned corporations can make even more billions housing them.
“Conservative” commentator Chris Kenny tells Pauline Hanson Australia’s record-high levels of mass immigration must continue or foreign-owned student accommodation companies will suffer.
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Shanahan’s piece is titled “How the people were lost: truth behind One Nation poll vault”, Switzer’s is “Pauline Hanson tapping into seismic Western shift on the right”, and Kenny’s is “Hanson’s rapid rise is due to one key quality – consistency”.
Here are their conclusions:
Shanahan: Weak major party leadership is the problem, and maybe a think tank-devised “citizen’s assembly” is the answer to voter dissatisfaction and declining trust in government.
Switzer: It’s part of a global trend, but hopefully the Liberal Party will overcome it.
Kenny: The Coalition needs to be consistent and offer “clear policies on the crucial issues”.
These three articles are all awful in their own ways, yet somehow they got printed in Murdoch’s flagship broadsheet, all on the same day.
Like Bolt’s column, they each contain elements of truth, but either fail or refuse to address the root causes for One Nation’s recent success, despite their headline promises.
The reality is that the Liberal Party is too far gone. Even its so-called right-wingers, who have little to no power anyway, are centre-leftists. Reducing immigration by 25% is nowhere near what the average One Nation supporter wants.
The one quarter to one third of the population who say they are going to vote for One Nation are actually looking for something more extreme that even Pauline Hanson has to offer, and many likely believe she is more racist and more radical than she actually is.
No amount of global trend analysis, strong centrist leadership, consistency, or credible and clear policies are going to woo them back.
Australians are seeing their country being stolen from them in front of their eyes, and they are going to vote for whoever seems most likely to stop it.
That means remigration, mass deportations, closed borders, massive economic reform, and the Liberals, just like their counterparts overseas, do not have what it takes.
More and more Australians are realising that this is an existential crisis, and it cannot be solved by the major parties, nor can it be bandaged over by the current government’s Police State Multiculturalism model.
The right is rising, and this will continue until the future of our country and our people is secured – conservatives can either get on board, or be left behind.
Header image: Pauline Hanson and conservative ex-PM Tony Abbott (Facebook).
The post Conservatives are deluded about the rise of One Nation first appeared on The Noticer.
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