One Nation on the rise driven by the Opposition’s incompetence

Any poll taken in the next few weeks will show an even sharper increase in the vote for One Nation. Pauline Hanson should send a bouquet around to the Sussan Ley and the Liberal Party leadership, because it will be all their own doing.

It’s hard to imagine Australia has ever had a less competent opposition. Perhaps Labor was during its long twilight under Sir Robert Menzies, but surely even Caldwell had more wit than Ley.

There is nothing that gets the Liberal Party base more riled-up than the right to speak their mind – free speech. In 2013 and 2014 Section 18C of the Racial Hatred Act 1995 came to centre stage after Andrew Bolt was punished in the case of Bolt v Eatock for having suggested some Aboriginal people identified as Indigenous for personal advantage.

It was one of the great failures of the Abbott government that this legislation was not repealed, and the one most likely to be nominated as such by Liberal Party voters.

Yet here we are, 12 years on, and a successor Liberal Opposition is agreeing to a Labor bill to extend the definition of hate crimes and turn them from a civil offence into a criminal one.

When you ask people why they vote for Pauline Hanson and One Nation, one of the most common responses is “I don’t agree with everything she says, but I agree with her right to say it”.

She is a walking advertisement for the larrikin right to free speech, no matter how she exercises that – wearing a burqa into Parliament or standing and delivering on the steps of parliament or in the studio at Sunrise.

Unless she has an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment she will vote against the government’s legislation, and no doubt will be condemned by Labor and the Greens as a racist and terrorist enabler, making her even more emblematic of free speech than ever.

After freedom of thought, free speech is the most basic of rights. Without it we cannot be who we are. Liberals of all stripes, as well as conservatives, understand that. But it has been hard to win arguments based on that right, because part and parcel of it is that we must accept speech that is ugly and offensive. That is why in 2014 the Abbott government withdrew from the fight to repeal Section 18C.

But you can win this fight on free speech without fighting on those grounds. There are other ways of framing this debate, and one of those is around the growing perception that this government is about fantasy, not reality.

It is dawning on a majority of the community that our government, instead of being run by a cabinet of serious human beings, is being run by a student union collective, that puts the performative before the practical.

These are people who couldn’t run a student refectory profitably who are trying to run a country, and everything they do turns to ordure, instead of cleaning it up they paper over it.