Australia teeters on the brink of a populist uprising led by a longtime racist |
Australia teeters on the brink of a populist uprising led by a longtime racist
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The most dramatic moment of the campaign in the Farrer byelection is also its emblem. A Liberal member of parliament tries to recover his phone snatched away by an angry One Nation Boomer in an orange T-shirt. It’s a metaphor for Australian politics, where the Liberals are desperate to retrieve what was once theirs – about a third of their voters who’ve left to support One Nation.
But the metaphor breaks down today. Because while Senator James Paterson did get his phone back after a tussle at a polling booth, the Liberals are not about to recover their vote at the ballot box.
The Liberals are being humiliated. For the second time in two months, One Nation is relegating to third place the party that ruled Australia for two-thirds of the postwar era.
Pauline Hanson’s scrappy protest party is displacing the once-grand party of Menzies and Howard. First it was in the South Australian state election in March, where Labor won, One Nation ranked second and the Liberals third. And today in a rural NSW seat, according to all indications, One Nation appears set to win with an independent second and the Liberals third.
The seat of Farrer has only ever been held by the Liberals or Nationals since its creation in 1949. Liberal Sussan Ley won it last year with a primary vote of 43 per cent. Today, senior Liberals say they’ll consider themselves lucky if they can win 20.
“Dull lights don’t even attract moths,” scoffs Barnaby Joyce, who defected from the Coalition to One Nation last year.
But it won’t affect Labor’s dominance of the House of Representatives in Canberra and nor will it change the balance of power, so why does it matter?
“If One Nation wins this,” says psephologist Antony Green, “there are another two dozen seats they can win in rural and regional Australia” at a future general election.
And they would come at the expense of the Liberals and Nationals, who currently hold a combined 41 seats. “The Coalition can’t possibly get into government in their own right” in this case, says Green. They’d be forced to work with Pauline Hanson.
But the next general election isn’t due for two years, plenty of time for the Coalition to recover. Why get frantic about a byelection today? Because, as a Liberal frontbencher puts it: “I do think this is a historical moment, not part of the usual ebb and flow. We are in a totally new........