Queensland voters are clearly unhappy with the major parties and unhappy with government. Less than three years ago, they expressed their unhappiness with government by voting against the Goss Labor Government in sufficient numbers to make it vulnerable to just one by-election which it lost six months later. The Government changed to a conservative one. But after more than two years in office, the voters expressed dissatisfaction with it. At first, according to opinion polls, the dissatisfaction appeared to manifest itself in a resurgence of Labor, but as the campaign wore on, particularly in the last week, voters realised they did not have to revert to Labor. They could say, “”A plague on both your houses.” And that is precisely what they did by voting for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in numbers not imagined just a week ago.
Last night more than 20 per cent of Queenslanders voted for One Nation, making it the largest of the conservative parties. If the voting system had been a direct proportional one, Queensland might have seen a One Nation Premier.
How is this phenomenon to be explained? What implications are there for a federal election? In some respects, there are similarities between the Queensland and federal situations. Long-serving Labor Governments had been thrown out largely by voters wanting to punish those governments rather than by voters welcoming the new government (like Menzies in 1949 or Whitlam in 1972). In both spheres the new conservative governments did not make much headway on the economic front. So might we expect similar disillusion in the federal sphere to have a similar aversion to returning to Labor and sound in a large One Nation vote? It may be there will be a reluctance to return to Labor so soon, but a large vote for One Nation federally is more problematic. A lot of the One Nation vote in Queensland came from rural and regional centres. Queensland is demographically different from the rest of Australia. It is much more decentralised.
A more important factor will be that One Nation will now be under greater scrutiny and its policies will be found wanting. In this Prime Minister John Howard is right. One Nation offers simplistic solutions to complex problems. It imagines a fortress Australia with no immigration and manufacturing industries propped up by subsidies and tariffs. It has proposed absurd schemes to give farmers loans at fixed 2 per cent interest.
This result is an indictment against the major parties. Labor is indicted for setting up the environment in which One Nation thrives by going too far and for paying too little attention to attaining widespread public support for some of its social programs, its attention to special interests and for stepping up family-reunion immigration to unprecedented post-war levels, largely to buy votes rather than in the national economic interests. The conservatives are indicted for not meeting the Hanson challenge early and firmly. Treasurer Peter Costello has done better than Mr Howard on this score.
The trouble is that much good work in social programs will now be under threat if both parties view the One Nation phenomenon and react with fear. In particular, valuable skilled migration programs may suffer.
The major parties have a great deal of work to do. Mr Howard must follow-up his belated attack on One Nation just before the election. He must point out frequently and in detail how and One Nation’s simplistic solutions will not work. He should announce now that One Nation will not get Coalition preferences. He should have announced it months ago.
The major parties have a lot of educating to do.
The media has an important role, too. Many have said that media attention has given One Nation and Pauline Hanson undeserved publicity and that if her maiden speech had been ignored she should have gone away. But it was likely that some force like One Nation would have arisen anyway, just as they have in other countries. But with six or seven MPs rather than one, it will be incumbent on the media to seriously question One Nation policies and point out their folly. The free flow of information and ideas and the constant questioning of them is the lifeblood of democracy.
The importance of education in a democracy so that people have to skills to question the simplistic has been highlighted by yesterday’s result.