Featured
I Don’t Like It
A (slightly partisan) Strategy for Progressives and Centrists to Beat One Nation
The optimistic and naive consensus that Australia could be immune from the right-wing populism seen around the world is now long dead.
Like Donald Trump’s MAGA or Nigel Farage’s Reform, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is now a serious political force reshaping how we view politics. Despite finding a base in working-class men and women of varying ethnic backgrounds, these movements push anti-worker agendas, promote so-called ‘traditional’ values, and demonise immigrants.
These are stances that clearly fundamentally disadvantage the people who support them. The elites are funding the ‘anti-elite’. They increasingly control the media, own the assets, and buy the politicians. 59% of print readership in Australia is now reached by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp alone, up from a quarter in 1984. Three companies receive about 80% of our free-to-air and subscription TV revenue. The media landscape in this country is a case study in using market share to concentrate power; let’s blame the bad actors, not the misinformed masses.
To defeat One Nation, you cannot legitimise bigotry by treating it like serious debate, but rather find the root of the grievance driving their support and remove it. In other words, make their lives tangibly better, by continuing to do things like changing how the taxation system works and helping the 90%, not the 10%.
This is Australia, land of the fair go — not class-dominated Britain, nor arrogant America. We’re not going down this road.
Economic inequality is the disease, and One Nation is the symptom.
The Australian economy is an extraordinary wealth-generating machine. We had one of the longest uninterrupted periods of growth, with GDP per annum growing above 3% for about 30 years. Our economy is significantly less equipped to distribute it fairly. Since around the start of John Howard’s reign, wages have been outpaced by asset prices to such a degree that the primary determinant of your financial position is not how hard you work, but what your parents owned. Young Australians today doing everything right, working full-time jobs, and saving well are still likely to be locked out of the housing markets of our major cities. In the early 2000s, the typical Australian home was around four times the median income, whereas today it’s more than eight times (nearer to ten in Sydney). There is no level of individual thrift that could save you from that. These are structural failures, not personal ones.
One Nation channels economic frustration into false and illegitimate targets, as the billionaires funding it laugh all the way to the bank.
People feel like the system is rigged against them. Who rigged it? The average person is being targeted by parties, bankrolled by dirty money from billionaires and coordinated lobby groups. The richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart, complains publicly of the minimum wage being too high, all while being worth $40 billion. She is One Nation’s most powerful backer: donating a $1.5 million plane, hosting $15,000-a-seat fundraising dinners, and personally shepherding Liberal donors to Hanson. A real movement of the people…
One Nation gives them an answer in tirades against the ‘woke’ establishment, the bureaucrats, and most critically, the immigrants. Although Hanson has picked up a few tricks by hanging around Mar-a-Lago with Trump, she’s been in and out of parliament since 1996. Her rhetoric has been present in the national debate for exactly those 30 years of growth, as our economy shifted itself further into inequality. It has now reached such a level that no one, in any party, can ignore it.
So, the game is simple. One Nation channels economic frustration into false and illegitimate targets, as the billionaires funding it laugh all the way to the bank.
Don’t debate, debunk, or dismiss.
When confronted by One Nation, the instinct in the mainstream left is to fight. The mission is to endlessly expose them, debunk them, and debate them. I know it feels righteous, but it doesn’t work.
Debate legitimises. If you’re sharing a stage, a panel, or even a news cycle on Pauline Hanson’s terms, then you’re already losing. You’re signalling her questions as justified. You’re conceding that immigration is the crisis, ‘traditional values’ are under sustained siege, and that the establishment must answer for itself to her. You cannot win this debate, and trying to do so misses the broader point.
Votes also aren’t changed by debunking. Deeply held beliefs, especially when rooted in real economic experience, are not dislodged by facts. Explaining that immigration grows the economy and that cost-of-living anxiety is overstated will not make someone feel more prosperous and less anxious; it makes them feel talked down to, and their impulse is to dig in their heels.
So then, why are people across the West supporting movements opposed to their own interests? Really, how stupid could they be? How racist? How sexist? How easily led? These are questions that mainstream and left-leaning punters across the world are asking.
But perhaps the cardinal sin of modern progressive politics is dismissal. In 2016, Hillary Clinton labelled Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” and it was this phrase that would become one of the American right’s most effective recruitment tools in a generation. It’s the same as the Australian inner-city progressive who talks at length about why One Nation voters are racist, ignorant fools who watch the wrong news. After his 2019 win, Scott Morrison’s class of “quiet Australians” was sketched out as naïve suburban dupes by commentators, fomenting resentment which has widely been noted to harden precisely the voters that the characterisation mocks against the political centre. That’s how you lose the person while trying not to lose the argument.
Change the question.
Get Toby Riches’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
When we debate cultural anxieties, identity, and immigration, One Nation finds an easy win. They’ve spent 30 years gearing up for it. They own the emotions, know the right language, and have built their entire political institution around this conflict. Trying to win this is playing a game that we don’t need to. Do not step into that terrain.
The One Nation brand demands answers to its questions. You concede to them the moment that you even try to give them one.
The best progressive politicians know it intuitively. The move is to change the question. Never avoid the hard issues and reframe them if needed. If a voter is convinced that their community is being destroyed by immigration, the incorrect response is a lecture on economic benefits from migration. An alternative might be Socratic questioning. Instead of arguing your case, you let the voter surface the contradiction. You ask: Who owns your house? Who set your wage? Who’s getting the tax break? These questions purposefully don’t attack the voter directly (or their beliefs). Stanford researchers Broockman and Kalla found that to shift attitudes on contested issues, non-judgemental and structured conversation framed by open questioning can hold up months later. Meanwhile, fact-checking and direct rebuttal triggered defensiveness and routinely backfired. This method works on One Nation’s core claims, as it redirects the anger towards its actual source, rather than telling people that they’re wrong to be angry.
Paul Keating never, ever ran from conflict. He reoriented it into the terms of the common interest, where the immigrant and bureaucrat are not the enemies. Instead, look into the vested interests, the old money, and those who have had it too good for too long. Barack Obama shared the same instinct, but he executed it differently; see people in their real lives, elucidate their real pain, find the real source of the anger.
The One Nation brand demands answers to its questions. You concede to them the moment that you even try to give them one. If you change the question to issues such as intergenerational wealth, housing, and wages, you’re on better terrain. Our answers are better, our record stronger, and the talking heads of One Nation only have noise.
Reframing is the means to the end.
If nothing changes, then nothing changes. We can change the question, win the argument, and still lose the decade.
The antidote to populism is not messaging. Messaging helps to deliver the medicine of competent, material, visible governing. People must feel a difference in their lives, to their wage, their rent, their kid’s future. Infrastructure announcements that won’t be delivered for years to come or abstract policy do not cut through. If someone’s life is tangibly and concretely better than it was three years ago and they can explain why, then that will cut through.
The Hawke-Keating governments knew that Medicare wasn’t just great policy, but also a daily, lived reminder that Labor governments do real things for real ordinary people. Medicare will never be culture-warred into irrelevance because it’s there every time you need it.
Today, we look at housing, wages, and intergenerational wealth. Inflated asset prices fuelled by generous capital gains tax concessions, locking you out of the market; a wages system that tells workers to be grateful for what they have while transferring wealth upward. Those are structural features of an economy that rewards wealth over work.
Messaging helps to deliver the medicine of competent, material, visible governing. People must feel a difference in their lives, to their wage, their rent, their kid’s future.
When progressives deliver on those, One Nation has the ground taken out from under them. They minimise the grievance, while disengaging from the debate. Starve One Nation of its strength: despair. The politics of rage don’t work when the government is visibly and materially improving your life.
The alternative to dwell on.
A One Nation government is not an abstract threat. It would be a government with the immigration policy of the far-right fringe, climate policy taken from mining billionaires, and an economic policy taken from nothing, because it has none; a government which stands for nothing but dishing out blame. People who voted for it would be the first to suffer, as the housing crisis deepens and wages stagnate.
If we get this wrong, people suffer. Worst of all, the very foundations of our nation would see irreparable damage characteristic of historical far-right governments.
The anger is legitimate and the grievance is real, but it’s misdirected. It’s misdirected because it lets people like me, progressives and centrists, off too easily. We cannot allow them to blame the wrong people. We solve this by delivering a government that improves people’s lives so fundamentally that it makes the entire question of One Nation beside the point.
We built compulsory superannuation, we built Medicare, and we’ve built a minimum wage that is the envy of our allies. We know that the fair go matters.
We know the disease of One Nation. We know the cure of redirected conversation, owing to good policy. What we don’t currently know is whether we have the tenacity and belief required to administer it before the patient has no time left.
This is Australia, land of the fair go, and we’re not going down this road.
Toby is a first year Politics, Philosophy and Economics student, and this is his first article for Statecraft. We’re hoping Toby shares more articles with Statecraft before his inevitable shift to leading national political campaigns.
Thank you to Boudica Gotlucky and Jack Power for editing this article.
