Recent months have seen a surge in the polls for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. For the first time, One Nation has overtaken the Coalition. The South Australian election, held in March, confirmed what these polls had suggested.
One Nation ended up with 22.9 per cent of the vote and four seats in the lower house. In the upper house, One Nation won three seats, including one for its South Australian leader Cory Bernardi.
One of the most striking features of the election was the collapse in the Liberals’ vote, with a 16.8 per cent swing against them that saw their share of lower house seats fall from 16 out of 47 to just five.
It would be wrong to dismiss the rise of One Nation as simply a re-shuffling of votes on the right. In a number of traditionally safe Labor seats there were also swings to One Nation, most significantly in the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide.
In the seat of Light, One Nation gained an extra 27.6 per cent of the vote, mostly from a 20.6 per cent swing against Labor. Similarly, in Elizabeth, a swing of 23.4 per cent to One Nation mostly came from a 15.7 per cent swing against Labor.
While Labor held these seats, and increased its majority in parliament despite a swing against it, the results should be a serious warning about the rise of One Nation and the far right.
During the election campaign, Bernardi endorsed comments made by Pauline Hanson claiming that there are “no good Muslims”, stating that he did not want Australia to become “some Middle Eastern kingdom or some backwater where they’re still living in the sixth century”.
Such a strong vote for this viciously racist party is of real concern.
Major parties response
Federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor has responded with vicious racism against migrants in an effort to mimic One Nation, denouncing “declining immigration standards”, claiming migrants are arriving who reject “Australian values”, and demanding Trump-style checks on social media accounts of tourists and other arrivals.
But the experience in South Australia confirms we can’t look to Labor for an alternative.
Re-elected Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas made gestures to the importance of diversity and unity in his election night speech but also took the opportunity to acknowledge One Nation and Bernardi, promising that he was ready to work with them “as long as it is in the interests of South Australians”.
Speaking to The Australian a few days later, Malinauskas made only mild attempts to respond to One Nation’s anti-immigrant racism and nationalism, instead claiming that we need to look at immigration as “an economic question, more than a social one”, and that progressives need to be more patriotic, saying, “The cultural question must be top of mind. It comes down to: Are you for Australia?”
Malinauskas’ “progressive” Australian nationalism is no counter to the more openly racist politics of Pauline Hanson.
Labor has helped create the conditions allowing the rise of One Nation’s vile racist politics.
Since the Bondi attack it has fanned the flames of Islamophobia. Malinauskas himself implied that Palestinian activists were culpable for the shooting when he urged the axing of Palestinian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide Writers’ Festival.
Federally, Labor has moved to block people travelling to Australia from war zones out of a determination to avoid anyone seeking refugee status.
International student visa fees have been increased, with the cost of temporary graduate visas doubling overnight as Labor sets out to cut the number of international students.
This racism comes in the context of the cost-of-living crisis and housing crisis that Labor has presided over. Real household disposable income has gone down since the last federal election and now Trump’s war on Iran is sending fuel prices and other costs soaring.
Instead of providing solutions for workers, Labor plans further cuts to services like the NDIS in the budget next month.
While state elections in NSW and Queensland are still some way off, there are concerning signs. In Queensland, Newspoll found One Nation was ahead of both Labor and the Liberals on 30 per cent.
Victoria’s state election is in November. Jacinta Allan’s Labor government is much more unpopular than Malinauskas’ in South Australia.
A former Labor strategist told Crikey that the western suburbs in Melbourne are “like a One Nation hunting ground … These people have gotten almost nothing from us in the past 12 years”.
Labor won’t stop the rise of One Nation. There must be a concerted anti-racist response to the rise of these far-right politics and a much stronger fightback against the conditions that have allowed them to grow.
By Angus Dermody
