Hanson is 72 years old. She wasn’t a particularly effective politician even when she was younger. The collapse of the Liberal party has created an opportunity and the opportunists are climbing onboard a party with some momentum and billionaire backing that lacks the discipline or structure to enforce it’s identity and aims, such that they are.
These people will do to ON what they did to the Liberal party, destroy it from the inside. It is my opinion that similar dynamics is why the Libs got wiped out in SA. They turned their back on the broadly popular moderate politics of Marshall and opted instead for extremist Christian identity politics. Having their pick speed run Christian cosplayer to convicted drug supplier didn’t help.
In my opinion Hanson does not seem particularly religious (or perhaps at all) and I suspect opening the doors to the Christian fascist types is more a means to an end when it comes to re-establishing White Australia or grifting more money and power than anything to do with her personal convictions.
If Hanson retains any control of her party she might seek to dump the lot of them if they start tanking her popularity. This isn’t the US.
I think Pauline Hanson isn’t charismatic enough to ensure one nation is implosion resistant, unlike with Trump. The republicans can’t implode at the moment since deviating from Trump is political suicide
The optimist in me hopes this will hurt one nation and be the start of their popularity decreasing. But the pessimist sees this as one more step towards replicating the hell hole that America has become.
I think the difference between America and Australia is the mandatory voting. I’m hoping the general majority won’t let shit like this fly. Where I’m guessing in America the empassioned fringe voters probably pull more weight than the disillusioned who won’t vote.
You’d think compulsory voting in and of itself would be a smarter early policy to aim for if you want a US political shit show. Then you make elections a workday. Then you make it so you fall off he roll every year or so. Finally you make it difficult to get onto the roll itself.
Even in the USA, if you divide the population into categories, the ‘did not vote’ cohort would win every election.
We are not anywhere near as religious a nation as the USA. Abortion just isn’t really a topic here, because the 10% who’d be against it wouldn’t stand a chance of passing such a change. I think getting rid of compulsory voting would be a more popular policy to start with.
Yep. It could go either way I think.
People want an alternative to Labor. The lazy strategy of vaguely catering to boomers is no longer working for the coalition - that base is simply dying out and they’ve never gotten around to appealing to anyone else.
Now their voters are splintering and ONP is picking up the nutters.
That’s pretty much it, yeah.
Can’t really expand on that either.
Labor’s had two terms now and while a lot of the stuff they’ve done is good, like wage rises and the work they’ve done in restoring healthcare access, people still aren’t feeling relief in terms of CoL.
This budget, while the jewel in the crown is long overdue, isn’t winning people over either. The NDIS changes are cruel and the developer giveaway is disgraceful.
Interesting, there’s a similar thing happening here in UK too with people turning away from 2 party labour and conservatives to:
- Plaid Cymru (Welsh independence party)
- SNP (Scottish National Party)
- Reform (England’s nationalist party)
- Greens
- Lib Dems
A suspicious person might think it’s an attempt to divide and conquer…
