Liberals can’t lay a finger on Labor. Now there’s someone who can – Pauline Hanson

Inside every newspaper journalist lurks a pathological hoarder. We are also, for the most part, slobs. To walk into a newsroom is to revisit yesterday’s headline, last week’s coffee dregs and ancient budget papers and AFL guides that speak to a time when the government still balanced its books and Essendon won finals matches.

Once in a while, amid the dust and detritus of forgotten reports, yellowing editions and unopened mail addressed to a former scribe who took a redundancy three rounds ago, newspaper offices can also yield a gem.

So it was a week ago when, in the immortal worlds of Prince, I was busy doing something close to nothing and came across the half-buried, tea-stained cover of a Quarterly Essay journalist David Marr wrote nearly a decade ago about the second coming of Pauline Hanson – ranga redux, as Marr dubbed it.

Towards the end of Marr’s opening stanza, this quote by Melbourne businessman and philanthropist Peter Scanlon leapt off the page. “The sad part about our current democracy is that the two major parties can’t work out they will die if they don’t work together. What they’re doing is allowing the fringe to take control.”

Scanlon over the past 20 years has through his eponymous foundation invested a significant chunk of personal wealth into researching and documenting the nebulous concept of social cohesion.

His cautionary observation in Marr’s essay about the long-term, centrifugal forces shaping Australian politics, when read in the context of this year’s Victoria election, is both prescient and disturbing.

One Nation still dwells on the political fringe and the major parties, intent on tearing each other apart, are sleepwalking Victoria towards a very real possibility that by the time the votes are tallied in November, the party of the White Queen (another Marrism) will also hold the balance of power.

If this sounds far-fetched, let’s recap the story so far.

Victoria’s long-term Labor government, led by a hand-me-down premier with a Morrisonesque approval rating, is seeking to secure a historic, fourth consecutive term with a collapsed private vote, a corrupt major project sector and paralysing levels of debt in an economic climate where inflation, interest rates and fuel prices are rising.

The best thing Jacinta Allan and the ALP have going for them in this mission improbable is the electoral limitations of the Liberal Party, a moribund political organisation with seemingly no idea how to win metropolitan seats west of the Maribyrnong or north of the Yarra, or appeal to voters under the age of 40.

The prospect of the Coalition picking up the 16 additional seats they need to form a majority government within these demographic restraints seems every bit as improbable as Labor’s mission.

The rise of One Nation changes this calculus.

In once dead-red seats like Melton in Melbourne’s west and Greenvale in the north, the steady erosion of Labor’s primary vote and swelling support for One Nation has created a situation where One Nation MPs could feasibly get elected to the lower house on Liberal Party preferences.

This won’t happen from a protest vote alone. Resolve Political Monitor founder Jim Reed was recently conducting qualitative studies in Victoria, where he says support for One Nation is tracking towards 20 per cent. He was struck by the number of people who told him they were planning to vote One Nation because they want a change in government and see this as the best way to get rid of Labor.

“Some One Nation voters are using their vote quite tactically,” Reed says. “We’ve spoken to people who would like to vote out Labor but don’t think the Liberals can do it now, so they’re jumping on the One Nation bandwagon to effect that change.”

Political analyst Kos Samaras, a director of the Redbridge Group that also surveys Victorian voting intentions, says when Labor-held, outer suburban seats in the north and west are added to those in Melbourne’s south-east and regions that One Nation could win from the Coalition, there is a genuine chance of One Nation playing kingmaker to a Coalition government.

The key number in the most recent Redbridge statewide survey published by the Financial Review is that, when asked whether they would direct their preferences to Labor or One Nation, 69 per cent of Coalition voters favoured Hanson’s lot. What the Liberal Party does with its how-to-vote cards, although symbolically important, will have little material impact on this torrential flow of preferences.

The instinct of both major parties in Victoria, from their mutual positions of relative weakness, is to dial up the rhetoric to a Spinal Tap 11. Liberal MPs accuse Labor of running a gangster government. Labor accuses Jess Wilson of cosying up to One Nation and leading a party of political extremists.

The Labor campaign machine understands the Liberal Party’s self-destructive pull towards One Nation voters and will ruthlessly exploit it. Any issue on which the Liberals and One Nation are likely to agree – and disagree with Labor – serves as an electoral wedge between the party’s conservative and liberal constituencies.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has ruled out an “alliance” with One Nation if the Coalition forms the next government but on the most racially charged issue before voters – the Treaty negotiated last year between the Labor government and Victoria’s First People’s – the Liberal Party and One Nation are on a unity ticket to tear up the agreement.

This is not where a prospective party of government wants to be.

The biggest question facing Victoria is not which party governs next but whether the reasoned centre can stop voters being flung to an angry periphery.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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