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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Tammy Shipley believed someone was out to hurt her. I thought someone was after me and I wanted to just be safe. She's put under 24-hour surveillance. I tried to get in contact multiple times.
And then something strange happens.
She just drank and drank and had something like 20 litres of pure water.
Ambulance emergency. I've got a woman unconscious.
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It's been Pauline Hanson's week. It began with a poll showing her as the nation's preferred prime minister and culminated with a feisty address to the National Press Club, her first formal appearance there. Today, columnist, author and academic Waleed Ali on how One Nation could win the next federal election and why it's so hard for the major parties to counter Pauline Hanson.
I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Waleed, Pauline Hanson, you think she can win the next federal election, that is, one nation forming a government and Hanson becoming prime minister. And look, we will get to the reasons why in a moment, but are you being bold or realistic?
LAUGHTER
No, I think I'm being realistic. I mean, there's a lot to do. I think it's possible. But that's a significant thing to say. So let me be clear. If I had to put a number on it, I would say, I don't know, what, maybe a 15% chance? It's just a gut feel. The point about that is not that it's an enormous chance. The point is that a couple of weeks ago, I would have thought it was 0% chance.
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Chapter 2: What recent developments have made Pauline Hanson a preferred choice for Prime Minister?
So Pauline Hanson said... pretty much all of these things before. There might be a bit here or there, but what we hadn't seen before really was all of this in one place. and in such an esteemed place. So there was that, I think that moment where you see her at the lectern of the press club, where you go, okay, something has clearly shifted here.
She actually spoke for quite a long time, longer than the allotted time, and then ends up taking questions from the floor. Those exchanges, some of them were quite uncomfortable, quite terse, quite combative, in a way you don't normally see in that environment.
I've never seen a person that's such a trashy journalist. I can understand your question. You're going to be without a job. So anyway, I can understand that.
And I think that just kind of threw into sharp relief that we were watching a bit of a sea change.
Yeah, it was pretty stark. I mean, she was saying that multiculturalism is a complete failure and Australia should be a monoculture. I mean, how does that land? do you think, among the electorate? How do you rate her performance on a political level?
Well, the only way of determining how a performance is going on a political level is the polling at the moment, and it seems to be going very well. I mean, we'll see whether it evolves in a different way after this. I don't think it necessarily will. But it's interesting. I mean, you pull out those phrases and they sound sort of stark when you say it. But actually, when I...
heard that, my first thought was, well, this is pretty much what John Howard was saying. I don't know if he used the word monoculturalism or a monoculture, but he did say we are a multiracial nation and he did take a stand against multiculturalism and he abolished the Department for Multicultural Affairs. I think he renamed it the Department for Citizenship or something like that. So
We've seen these moves before. If it's an evolution at all, it's just that it puts it in sort of bolder terms or plainer terms. But it's very much in line with the kind of things she's been saying. Now, the question is, how will that land? Here I would just caution people against drawing simple conclusions based on
The idea that, you know, Australia is a multicultural nation and it has huge amounts of immigration in its population, so over years and years and years. So what I mean by that is that famous stat that gets dragged out all the time that 50% of Australians are either born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas and so on.
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Chapter 3: How could One Nation potentially win the next federal election?
Now, there is no denying, is there, at this point, that One Nation is attracting voters that it did not attract in the past.
Yeah, so that's the key point. I'm not saying this based on the fact that, wow, it's polling quite high numbers now and it's gone past the coalition and then more recently... It's gone past Labor in the polls. The thing that's happened in Australian politics, especially it was really stark at the 25 election, was this almost, it seemed, irreconcilable divide between city and country.
And so what that meant was that as the coalition kept getting banished from the cities and confined to the countries via the National Party and then some kind of mostly rural liberal members, there was no prospect that the coalition could form government because you can't form government in Australia without the cities.
And so I'd been working on the theory that as long as One Nation, as long as its surge was basically claiming rural voters, then it could surge really as much as it liked. It was never going to be a threat for government. What happened in the past couple of weeks is not that the number of total votes kept going up or total support kept going up. It's that the demographics started to broaden.
So this is what we saw in a Resolve poll, actually, that had One Nation in second place behind Labor. So it wasn't having it in first place. But it was starting to show that it's picking up city voters, tertiary educated voters, voters of higher income. And, you know, perhaps tellingly as well, that the majority of its support, by a small amount, but a majority nonetheless, is coming from women.
So that's a broad demographic, and the point is that's an election-winning demographic. If One Nation starts to become a party that has a realistic chance of picking up some city seats, then there is no reason that it can't form government. It really just becomes a question of extent. Can it get far enough into these demographics?
Can it get far enough into the cities by the time the next election rolls around for it to be in that sort of a position?
And you compare this to the rise of Donald Trump. Now, worth noting, before he was first elected in 2016, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, well, she was really writing him off. And, of course, some of his... supporters. Now, Anthony Albanese, he's not doing that.
People are under pressure. We understand that. It's easy to identify grievance. The issue is providing solutions.
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Chapter 4: What significant shifts have occurred in Australian political dynamics?
It's overwhelmingly a movement based on a mood, based on a posture, based on a rejection, based on a coalition of dissent. And the thing about that is that makes it an insurgent that is really storming the barricades of the establishment. And I don't know that in the end there's going to be that much that the Albanese government can really do to halt this.
Yeah, because there's a growing distrust here in Australia and, as you say, all around the world in the establishment, in the system, because people feel like the system is not working for them. They're worse off. They're not doing very well.
So does Pauline Hanson actually have to give these voters an alternative in policy or really does she just have to understand what they're going through and bring out this politics of dissent?
I mean, it might be that all she needs to do is embody a certain attitude, embody a certain posture. There's something there about authenticity and style and posture over content. So once you're in that phase, then you can actually kind of get away either without policy detail or with policy detail that doesn't necessarily withstand conventional scrutiny. And the reason is...
It's not playing a conventional game. So there's a kind of assumption that's pervading at least some political observers at the moment that this will have to run aground once One Nation receives the kind of scrutiny it's never received before and when it starts to have scrutiny put on its policies. Well, yes, maybe.
But that's applying the kind of logic that normally applies to conventional establishment political parties. And if that's not what you're looking at here... If you're looking at an insurgency, then none of that matters.
And by the way, like Nigel Farage in the UK, Pauline Hanson has some pretty wealthy backers, doesn't she? The mining magnate Gina Rinehart, she's given her a million dollar plane. She's raised millions of dollars in donations from her Fire the Liar campaign. It's important to have a hefty war chest, isn't it? Very important.
Yeah, well, that definitely helps. But what's interesting about all of those elements is imagine those things in the hands of any other political party. Imagine Anthony Albanese or Angus Taylor being gifted, not personally, but to their party, a private jet from a billionaire. It would be a scandal. they'd never really be able to live it down.
In the case of Pauline Hanson, much like in the case of Donald Trump, those sorts of things that would ordinarily be scandals, she can just brush off. I mean, her response was, it's a sexy plane and it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything. And then that's it, play on. I think these sorts of things underscore just how different the rules are that she's playing by.
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