With Australia’s first hard-left Prime Minister – who presents himself as a centrist, gaining the leadership of the Labor Party and, with around one-third of the primary vote, and the prime ministership – apparently doing all he can to damage our fundamental Western alliances, starting with our vital relationship with Japan, the very last thing the Coalition should be doing is badmouthing One Nation.
Critics might say that this column would obviously argue that. After all, we were one of the few at the 2025 election who, in this journal and on 2GB and Nine Network, called on voters to give their first preference to One Nation before the Coalition. We were hoping this would result in the election of the first One Nation Senator for New South Wales as well as a NSW MP. Senator Stacey was elected, but because of ill-health his place is now held by Senator Bell. As to their first NSW MP, the closest was Stuart Bonds, the One Nation candidate in the former blue-ribbon Labor heartland seat of Hunter, who won 40.96 per cent of the two-candidate preferred vote.
If the Coalition’s primary objective is to defeat Labor, the obvious strategy is surely glaringly simple: if they cannot say something good about One Nation, they should say nothing at all.
Badmouthing One Nation will make headlines and delight the pro-Labor media, but it will reduce the likelihood of defeating what has emerged with an increasingly effective Anti-Australia Axis, something I first wrote about with Jai Martinkovits in 2014 in Give Us Back Our Country.
The ultimate electoral objective must be to secure at least 76 seats in the House of Representatives for the broad patriotic right.
There is no need for a grand coalition between the three parties; indeed this is probably undesirable.
All that is needed, apart from there being no gratuitous criticism of One Nation, is an understanding that whether the Coalition or One Nation forms the next government, the patriotic party not in government will refrain from two things: supporting or moving a vote of no confidence or supporting or moving a refusal of supply.
After the next election, if the patriotic parties win 76 or more seats, they will then and only then have to agree on who should form the government. This would probably be the side which has the largest number of seats in the House. This is not assured; it is a matter for discussion and advice to the Governor-General.
Meanwhile, published opinion pollsters – beginning with Newspoll – would render a better service to public discourse if they focused on the two-party preferred figures rather than the ‘preferred prime minister’ metric.
In Australia, the ‘preferred leader’ calculation is interesting but of significantly less relevance. We live under a Westminster constitutional monarchy, not a presidential republic like the United States. A government rises or falls strictly on the floor of the House of Representatives (subject only to something extremely rare, a denial of supply in the Senate). The preferred leader score is a media talking point, not a constitutional determinant.
There have been a number of occasions where a large number of voters preferred the leader of a party different from the one they were going to vote for. While this may also happen in a presidential republic, it is probably more common in those following the Westminster parliamentary system – where a Prime Minister is in a much more fragile and less powerful position than an American executive president, who is more like a powerful elected king than the typical leader of a Roman-style republic. (Even then, when the Romans did eventually introduce a strong emperor, this was for the first three centuries under the facade of the republic.)
When Sir William McMahon was Coalition Prime Minister, many Liberal voters preferred, without ever voting for him, the style of the then as-yet untried Gough Whitlam. Power in the Westminster system ultimately turns on House of Representatives numbers, not personal popularity contests.
If the Coalition wishes to govern, it must focus on the arithmetic of the House of Representatives and recognise that with One Nation they are natural partners in providing Australia with stable, patriotic governance.
To those conservatives who are still severely opposed to Pauline Hanson, they should remember that in politics, as in statecraft, the supreme priority must be the removal of a government that threatens the nation’s security and constitutional foundations.
The surge in One Nation’s support has been the factor that forced both Coalition parties to install conservatives as leaders.
It will at times in the future change the House of Representatives from being a useless rubber -stamp and return it to the original constitutional intention. This was as the tool ensuring that we have not only representative but also responsible and thus accountable government.
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