Politics
The coming Liberal-National-One Nation merger
The Liberal and National parties could save themselves a lot of trouble if they simply merged with One Nation.
One of the many surprises in last year’s election was Dutton’s concession speech. His gracious and honest style was in sharp contrast to the Trumpian style of his election campaign. The Liberal Party’s election review suggests that the campaign style and policy proposals adopted by Dutton and his team were heavily influenced by what turned out to be bad advice from the party’s pollsters and political advisers. The implication is that had they been better advised, they would have adopted a different approach to the election.
This raises questions that are almost as old as democracy itself. If the expressed beliefs of those who seek public office are simply responses to assessment of public opinion, how much can we trust them? And what is their motive for seeking election? Is it simply a quest for a position of power and public prominence, or is it about implementing some policy agenda? Is winning office an end in itself, or is it a means to an end?
That question is particularly relevant in the context of the Coalition parties’ relationship with One Nation. Is its adoption of far-right populist policy proposals an attempt to recover ground from a resurgent One Nation, or does it reflect a genuine alignment of Coalition and One Nation values?
Robyn Eckersley of the University of Melbourne has addressed this question in her research, summarized in a Conversation contribution Why the Coalition’s lurch to the right is bad for the climate. She examined One Nation’s Parliamentary speeches on energy and climate change, and compared them with speeches on the same topics by six politicians “from the Coalition’s climate sceptic faction” – a group that includes Matt Canavan. Unsurprisingly she found considerable overlap between the Coalition members and One Nation:
Overall, we found significant overlap in how Hanson and the Coalition sceptics used nationalist and populist claims in their speeches. And they did so primarily to oppose decarbonisation, which they all agreed was a sure path to Australia’s economic ruin.
Most importantly she chose to survey speeches the Coalition made before Pauline Hanson re-entered Parliament in 2016, and well before One Nation’s recent rise to prominence as a political force to be reckoned with. That rules out the possibility that the Coalition’s present stance is in reaction to One Nation’s new prominence. In fact three Parliamentarians in her sample – Craig Kelly, George Christiansen and most recently Barnaby Joyce – eventually defected to One Nation.
These defections, and her choice to study the speeches of politicians known for their hard-right attitudes to climate change, suggest that her sample may be unrepresentative of the Coalition parties.
But when we look at the policy statements emerging from the Coalition parties, we find strong evidence supporting Eckersley’s finding that the Coalition parties see One Nation more as a rival for the same ideological space on the populist hard right, rather than as a party offering a different ideology. Taylor’s statements on migration are simply a toned-down re-framing of One Nation’s statements. Canavan turned up to Hanson’s anti-immigration rally last weekend, and used the occasion to assert that the government is pursuing a “global socialist agenda” in its climate policy. And both Coalition parties have put One Nation ahead of centrist independent candidates on their how-to-vote cards for the upcoming Farrer by-election.
If there are any moderates left in the Parliamentary Liberal and National Parties, they should surely understand that they are in a political movement that is being dragged into a seamless political alliance of extreme right populists. They have the option of forming a centre-right party that seeks to gain political power without tearing the country apart and without wrecking the economy.
The Farrer by-election is bringing these issues to the fore. Although it’s only a by-election, it’s politically consequential, as the ABC’s Jacob Greber explains in his post: The outcome of the Farrer by-election could be a watershed moment in Australian politics.
Independent candidate for Farrer Michelle Millthorpe would welcome support. Donations up to $1500 are tax deductible. As far as I know, no mining oligarch has given Millthorpe a new Cirrus G7 airplane, or $2 million in spending money.
Those dawn service booers
They’re not just a few isolated louts: there is some level of organization.
The louts who booed aboriginal returned servicepeople at Anzac Day dawn services gave Angus Taylor just the chance he needed to raise doubt about welcome to country ceremonies. He had to condemn the louts’ behaviour, but he didn’t have to add his opinion that “welcome to country has been overdone”.
When a big crowd is gathered for a ceremony it is not surprising that disruptors turn up. But it is surprising when the same pattern of disruption appears, on cue, in four different gatherings in state capitals.
We now learn that one of those charged with of booing at Sydney’s dawn service was a participant at the Nazi rally at New South Wales Parliament House.
All the evidence points to some level of organization in these disruptions. This is not to suggest that there is a conspiracy involving coordination between the Liberal Party and the Nazis: apart from their shared attachment to the colonial-era flag they live in vastly different political worlds.
But there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy or a formal mechanism of coordination for a convenient synergy to develop. Respectably-presented far-right movements that set out to disrupt the political order can always count on “useful idiots”, to use a term attributed to communist revolutionaries. These are discontented people, usually on the fringes of society, disproportionately male, who find that the extremists’ messages resonate with their own concerns. They feel they don’t have a voice, but there’s a small window of opportunity to have a voice in an attentive and silent crowd surrounded by media who will broadcast their anger to the world.
Peta Credlin gives us some insight into that feeling in a 10-minute clip on Sky – Enough with excessive welcomes – where she claims to speak for those who “don’t get a say”. If you watch it don’t bother with her contradictions and misunderstandings – confusing aboriginality with “race”, asserting that 172 years of occupation gives more land rights than 60 000 years of occupation, misrepresenting the meaning of welcome-to-country. Ignore her own expression of solidarity with the booers.
Rather, pick up the sentiment of her presentation: think how it would come across to those who have missed out – yong and middle-aged men who left school the day they turned 17, who have been unable to find a mate to share their life, who have never had a satisfying and well-paid job. When Credlin says “we have had enough” she is reaching to them, cleverly leaving the ideas of “we” and “enough” to their imagination.
Extremist movements offer these people something that gives meaning to their resentment – some idea of a common cause, and possibly restitution of something they believe has been taken from them. That something is likely to be their “white” identity, which is why the welcome-to-country ceremonies at Anzac Day touched their fragile sensitivities. They are inconsistent with the image of white warriors from far-flung colonies of the British Empire protecting their land against Muslims and whatever strange people live to the east of Turkey and to the north of Australia.
That confected image has a difficult relationship with the reality of our military history, explained in a Late Night Livesession – How war fired up indigenous soldiers – in which David Marr interviews historian John Maynard, author of Challenging Anzac: stories that don’t fit the legend. Maynard also has an essay, posted on The Conversation, Aboriginal Anzacs fought for Australia, but returned home to racism. It fuelled their activism, recounting some of the degrading experiences of aboriginal soldiers during and after military service.
The treatment of aboriginal people who served in that conflict, and in the 1939-45 wars, was disgraceful, particularly in the way aboriginal veterans were denied the support and recognition offered to “white” soldiers.
You can get some firm numbers, and details of specific discriminatory measures, in a La Trobe University history of indigenous Australian service men and women, and a AIATSIS website Serving their country.
Reasonable people with a respect for their country and the contribution of soldiers find the behaviour of these louts to be repulsive, but as the ABC’s Rhiannon Soliman-Marron reminds us, they jolt us into an awareness of racism in our country.
That awareness is uncomfortable, and many want the problem swept under the carpet: we wouldn’t have had these embarrassing incidents if the dawn services hadn’t included a welcome to country. Branches of the RSL are being pressured to think that way, and Taylor leaves us in no doubt that he does too.
But dropping them from future ceremonies would be a terrible concession to those who are trying to tear our country apart. That’s the way right wing extremist movements work, by gaining a series of small victories, until one day the civilizing institutions are gone. Even those who may have had legitimate misgivings about inclusion of welcomes to country in dawn services should understand the consequences of a backdown.
In fact, judging by the volume of the cheers that overwhelmed the voices of hate, and the tone of letters to the editors of quality media, Taylor does not speak for the majority of Australians. To quote from one of those letters, penned by Kim Woo of Mascot:
I would like to give the booers the benefit of the doubt – that they were simply ignorant about how many Indigenous soldiers had sacrificed themselves for our nation as far back as World War I – therefore I ask Angus Taylor to address this problem now, to explain to those who object to the Welcome to Country ceremonies at our Anzac Day dawn services, to prove his potential to be a unifying figure for a future Australia.
Is he up to taking that opportunity? Or is he too intent on a competition with One Nation for the extremist vote, fixated on a vision of a glorious day when the unified forces of the National, Liberal and One Nation parties can throw this terrible Labor government out of office, without any consideration of where such a political alliance would take the country?
Port Arthur and other massacres
The Port Arthur and Bondi massacres were horrible, but there have been many others that have almost passed unnoticed.
The media have provided plenty of coverage of the Port Arthur massacre – well-written recollections and other stories, but generally lacking any new insights.
The Museum of Australia has a straightforward account of the massacre, and of the Howard government’s firearms laws. Rick Sarre of Adelaide University has a Conversation contribution describing how firearms control has developed over the 30 years since the Port Arthur massacre, and in the wake of the Bondi murders which precipitated another round of regulations and a buyback scheme: Months on from the Bondi terror attack, the national gun buyback is floundering.
Just as the media were running out of material for reminiscences about Port Arthur a wannabe assassin had a go at the US cabinet, prompting stories about America’s security vulnerabilities. (Having lost a prime minister in the surf we must surely hold pride of place on that score.)
The Washington incident has given Glynn Greensmith of Curtin University an opportunity to outline her findings in her book Mass shootings, media and motive: how changing coverage can save lives. She is interviewed in a session on Late Night Live, about how the media should cover mass shootings. Most perpetrators of these incidents are driven by a desire for infamy, which is why the media should be careful in the way they report them. She presents credible evidence that media coverage of news of mass killings that focuses on the perpetrators and on their grisly achievements tends to motivate others – a contagion that knows no national boundaries.
You might have noticed that the ABC has been describing the Port Arthur massacre as the worst mass killing “in Australia’s modern history”. It’s a quiet reminder that between 1788 and 1930 at least 10 000 Australians were murdered in massacres. For the most part the perpetrators were unpunished.
All you need to know about polls
Pollsters’ techniques are improving, but they have basic limitations in gauging support for small parties and independents.
“We don’t pay any attention to the opinion polls: the only poll that counts is the election.”
We hear that often enough, and it’s utter bullshit. Politicians pay obsessively close attention to opinion polls, and they pay pollsters for polls that the public never see.
Polls aren’t just the occasional piece of interesting information: they are consequential. We now know that over-optimistic polling contributed to the Liberals’ catastrophic loss in last year’s election, leading them to put too many resources into unwinnable seats, while neglecting seats that turned out to be vulnerable.
We can be fairly sure that changes in tax and expenditure to be announced in the Commonwealth budget will have been influenced by polling.
And polls evoke reactions among voters. We wait to see what the political analysts make of the South Australian election, but polls probably influenced people’s votes. Did polls showing high support for One Nation help establish a legitimacy for that party? “If others are supporting them they must be OK” – a positive feedback loop. It is possible that polls suggesting that Labor would clean out almost every seat in the Legislative Assembly resulted in some voters, wary about the absence of an opposition, refraining from voting Labor – a negative feedback effect.
Writing in the Saturday Paper Stephen Koutsoukis has a highly informative article – Inside polls: How 291 people put One Nation in a position to win – covering pretty well as much as would be included in a basic university unit in statistical sampling.
Don’t pay too much attention to the headline of his article, which looks like a lead-in to an exposure of a Taylor-Canavan-Hanson-Joyce conspiracy. Nothing so juicy, but it is a solid description of the way opinion polling has become more rigorous, and therefore more accurate, through paying more attention to the structure of samples. The accuracy of polls leading up to the South Australian election is testament to this improved quality.
In that election pollsters did well in predicting the outcome for the Labor, Liberal, Greens and One Nation parties. Mathematically, pollsters do their best predictions when there are two parties each enjoying support around 50 percent. and not too badly when parties’ support is in double digits.
As the actual support drops off, polls become less accurate. If you’re surveying 100 people, you’ll find plenty of Labor and Coalition supporters, but your chance of finding a supporter of the Legalize Cannabis Party is slim. Or you may stumble across a couple of supporters in the same way that you might bump into an old school friend in the Almaty airport terminal. Polls don’t do a good job at finding support for very small parties.
Nor do polls, particularly national polls, do a good job in picking up support for independents. Political parties have policies and track records in office. But each independent candidate has his or her own policies, shaped in large part through interaction with the community. That’s why, in spite of improved mathematical techniques, national pollsters aren’t able to tell us much about the prospects for independents.
Happiness
Something about life in English-speaking countries is making people feel unhappy.
The Nordic countries hold their top place in happiness, according to the World Happiness Report, that ranks people’s scores on a 0 to 10 scale of “life evaluation”.
While a group of Nordic countries stand out with scores between 7 and 8, most well-off countries have scores between 6 and 7: Australia’s is 6.9.
Australia has slipped in world ranking, from #12 in 2019 to #15 in 2025., according to the index. That 3-place fall is the same as New Zealand’s from #8 to #11, but not as drastic as some other countries in the Anglosphere: USA from #18 to #23, Canada from $11 to #25, and Britain from #13 to #29. By contrast the Nordic countries have held their high scores and high rankings, and countries in central and eastern Europe have improved their scores and rankings. For the 15 highest-scoring countries these movements are shown in the graph below. (Australia’s is the heavy black line.).
The report comments extensively on this fall in the Anglosphere, noting that it is most heavily concentrated among people aged under 25. It also notes that in turn this fall is associated with use of social media. In this context it notes and comments with support on Australia’s leading role in restricting social media use among young people. The report is reasonably conclusive about causality: “we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level”.
The complex relationship between internet use and wellbeing is picked up in the report’s summary:
The estimated relationship between internet use and wellbeing varies sharply across generations, genders, and regions. It is strongly negative for Gen Z, moderately negative for Millennials, near zero for Gen X, and slightly positive for Baby Boomers.
The report’s specific summary for Australia draws attention to a number of negative factors contributing to our falling score. We do well on some important metrics – healthy life expectancy and real income. But on others, including rising inequality, and increasing perceptions of corruption. our indicators are heading in the wrong direction.