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It was one of the great failures of the Abbott government that this legislation was not repealed, and the one most likely to be nominated as such by Liberal Party voters.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

Can you name me one thing where they have been successful? If it wasn’t for massive inflows of migrants, our economy would be visibly running in reverse. The energy “transition” is a farce, with coal-fired Eraring just this week being confirmed to run for yet another 2 years. 1.2 million new dwellings promised in 5 years likely to be missed by 20%. Record numbers of households living in mortgage and rental stress. Jim Chalmers’ “surpluses” piling up as surplus debt and spending now as high as it was during COVID and tax at record levels in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

These are the things that struggling households care about most.

There’s a litany of failures here, to which you can add the Bondi massacre. It’s not due to a lack of laws. Last term of parliament Albanese passed 355 acts, and since the last election 55.

It’s due to unrealistic presumptions as to what is possible, combined with managerial incompetence.

These bills that have passed the house will also just add to the pile of mostly useless legislation.

Take guns. John Howard initiated tougher gun laws in 1996. What is proposed now will make virtually no difference to how tough our legislation is. It’s a bit like deciding that, even though we have seat belt legislation, some people are still dying in car accidents, so we’ll legislate to make people wear two seat belts instead of one.

The hate crimes legislation masks the failure to enforce the current laws against terrorism. These are laws directed not at thought crimes, but at crimes against the person and property. As a free speech absolutist I can say Amen to the proposition that any person, minister of religion or other, who promulgates violence against members of any community, on whatever grounds, ought to be guilty of a crime, no matter what his religion might say.

Just as freedom of religion cannot allow suttee, stoning, honour killings, child marriage, or female genital mutilation, neither can it allow preaching harm to your fellow citizens.

This legislation allows the government to list organisations as terrorist organisations, and there are 31 on that list (with 23 having a connection to Islam, 3 are ethno-nationalist, and the remaining 5 neo-Nazi).

Hamas and Hezbollah are both on the list, so anyone advocating for them, or supporting them is caught by our criminal code. That includes replacing your profile image on X or BlueSky just after October 7 with a paraglider, or displaying the flags of Hamas or Hezbollah in your bridge walks.

If the full force of the law had come down on those displaying these symbols two years ago it might have dawned on march participants that this is not a reality TV show, and that creating a hostile atmosphere towards Israel and Zionists can easily lead to the torching or graffitiing of synagogues, chasing Jewish youths around Melbourne in your motor vehicle, or even a massacre on our most iconic beach.

The social environment could have been completely different, by application of the law. So too could the security environment if our intelligence agencies had been properly resourced and funded. Head counts now are down on what they were ten years ago.

Will these laws make it safer for Jewish Australians? If we can’t enforce the laws we have, why would you think more laws are going to make a difference? Has anything this government done worked for the better?

Which is the framing that would have turned this debacle for human rights into a debacle for the government. It would have shown that the opposition has more than tactics, that they have strategy. That they can avoid the difficult areas and zero in on issues that unite their base and show the weakness of the government.

Instead they have allowed themselves to be sucked into the government’s narrative with only some poor victories achieved in making the bill less bad.

Less bad isn’t what people on the right are looking for, which is why they are turning to One Nation.

All of which suggests we need a revolution inside the Liberal Party, or a completely new party of government. I can’t see that revolution happening, so it will have to be a new party of government.

All the while our situation continues to deteriorate right across the board.