The rise of One Nation and the party’s relative success in last weekend’s South Australian election – gaining over 22% of the primary vote and surpassing the Liberal Party on 19% – has led to the usual outrage, equivocation and evasion by Australia’s media and cultural establishment.
How could this happen? These things are simply not meant to occur. Most of the arguments offered for the abandonment of the Liberals and the resurrection of Pauline Hanson and her party predictably focused on questions of culture and economics.
Paul Kelly in The Australian, for instance, argued that what the Liberals need to do to neuter One Nation and return to prominence is to rediscover their “cultural credentials as the party of tradition”. What Kelly counsels is for the Liberals to “present themselves as the party of flag, anthem, patriotism, duty, honour, family, personal responsibility, and unity in diversity”.
Waleed Aly in the Nine press, meanwhile, noted the importance of economics in the rise of right-wing outfits like One Nation. “Conditions are extremely favourable for insurgent politics right now”, he observed, while adding that “cost of living anxiety has returned with a vengeance”.
Aly also warned that “there are few limits on how far economic turmoil can radicalise politics” and reminded us that “the horrors of the 1930s followed the Great Depression, and led to communisms and fascisms across Europe and Latin America [and] White nationalist groups have always prospered most in economically moribund areas of the US”.
The total truth of that last point aside – see nationalist and wealthy Japan for a counter – the establishment view appears to be that all would be fine in Australia if only the economy were in better shape and we still had the cultural traditions of Robert Menzies and the 1950s.
This is obviously wrong.
The chief cause of One Nation’s appeal is, of course, the dramatic demographic shift now occurring in Australia, driven primarily by our record rate of immigration.
Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann discussed this exact phenomenon with Quillette earlier this month. As Kaufmann states, the rise of One Nation is due to “the same forces driving populist movements across the West – rising immigration levels, cultural change, and increasing political polarisation”.
Kaufmann further adds that “immigration has become one of the most politically salient issues for voters. As public concern about cultural and demographic change has grown” at the same time as “populist parties have gained support by challenging mainstream political taboos around immigration and national identity”.
This is plainly what is happening here as well.
Indeed, as the latest Scanlon survey into social cohesion found, support for multiculturalism in Australia has shrunk, while the number of us who think that the “immigration rate is too high” has reached a record of 51%. Another poll by the Institute of Public Affairs showed that 63% of Australians want migrants from countries with “shared-values”.
It is not hard to understand why. While correlation is not causation, we need only note that since Australia recently embarked on its odyssey into hyper-diversity a number of negative developments have arisen.
Among those most prominent are: an explosion in crime, with crime rates in some areas reaching their highest levels ever; a collapse in social trust and an overall loss of faith in democracy; an unprecedented social-cohesion crisis as seen in the likes of persistent pro-Palestine protest marches that shut down our major cities; and our worst ever terror attack, in which 15 people were slaughtered on the country’s most iconic beach.
All this is obviously intertwined with the failure of our political system. This is most easily confirmed in the return of One Nation and the fracturing of our long-held two-party consensus. Indeed, the Right side of this consensus has reluctantly said as much via a leaked internal review that showed the Liberal Party was highly unpopular within migrant communities.
The reason for the return of One Nation is therefore simple.
Everyday Australians do not like the unprecedented level of cultural and demographic change they have been subjected to and they want it stopped.
The average Aussie voter, like his counterparts across the West, has simply noted what has happened to his country and is voting for the party he perceives as best placed to fix it.
This, incidentally, is also why arguments about the crudity of Pauline Hanson or the vulgarity of Donald Trump always fall flat. Supporters of One Nation and followers of figures like Hanson or Trump are fully aware of their leaders’ personal failings – but they simply do not care.
Like what was said of Trump in 2016 – that his supporters took him “seriously, but not literally” while liberal elites took him “literally, but not seriously” – the same can be said of Hanson. Hanson’s supporters do not care about the literal gaffes she makes, but they take her seriously as the almost sole Australian political figure who will support them and their idea of Australia.
While this stance is pejoratively termed “populism” by left-liberals, it is nevertheless “popular” and it is by no means irrational. As the pseudonymous British writer J Sorel noted of similar trends in Britain in the wake of that country’s experience with demographic diversity and mass immigration, “populism” is simply “political opposition to a rapid decline in living standards”.
As Sorel states, the desires of normal Britons to seek shelter from the cosmopolitanism foisted on them “were not plaintive animal bleatings, but were done ‘for entirely coherent and rational reasons’”. Indeed, Sorel rightly notes that different people in different parts of Britain “observed phenomena like mass migration, decided that they did not like them, and voted accordingly”.
Adjacent to all this is the issue of ethnicity. As British-based writer Aris Roussinos has written, the desire by a people to maintain their ethnic majority is neither illogical nor illegitimate, and an indispensable underpinning of any successful state is a coherent ethnic core.
Citing the work of British academic John Hutchinson on the status of ethnic Russians during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Roussinos noted that for Hutchison all stable political orders “have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations”.
Indeed, as Roussinos adds, for Hutchinson “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.”
So obvious is all this, Roussinos wrote that it is a “social-scientific truism” which takes a “wilful blindness to ignore”. Indeed, it is now that obvious it has become “the pivot of British politics”.
Well, this truism has now arrived in Australia as well. And whether our own myopic managerial elite want it or not, the shift towards national-populism via parties like One Nation is now the pivot of Australian politics too.
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