(Image: Sky News)
(Image: Sky News)

After

Davie’s car pulled up at the Launceston bus station, the beigey-covered van getting the occasional stare. Davie still had the pink-tinted glasses and the steampunk black top hat on, wedged under the roof. He pushed a strand of grey hippie hair away. (“Nah, I was never a hippie.” “I bet you worked music festivals.” “Oh sure, I worked music festivals.”) “Hey, you have a great trip,” he said. I grabbed my bag and pad and thought I should have asked him, I should have asked him… 

Before

Outside in the foyer of whatever this place was — the Tailrace Centre, with its curved, corrugated roof, hard to work out whether troppo architects built it nine minutes ago or if it’s an 1850s slurry factory/grittling works — I paused to put on the credentials lanyard, then took it off again, then put it back on, undecided. This was avoidance pure and simple. There would be about five minutes before the thing started, but then, no, as the door flapped open for a second, that voice, that voice! They want to give more money to the unemployed. More! Well, I say give a man a fish you feed him for a day…

That voice! Tremulous, angry, hurt, betrayed but with a honeyish flow beneath. It curled out like perfumed scent, like a siren’s song. There was no avoiding plunging in.

Now I want to talk about climate change, Pauline Hanson was saying into a stand-up microphone before a broad circle of people amid a blaze of orange, the One Nation colour, with a touch of sky blue, strikingly effective design, trad but slick. Has the Hanson advance team tightened up? Pauline’s in canary yellow slacks and black/grey top, Jacqui Lambie colours — perhaps not quite. But a quarter century on, the anger is undimmed, the henna flame still burns: Now this is just rubbish, the idea that carbon dioxide, this gas, is killing the planet. My colleague Malcolm Roberts is a brilliant man, and he will explain the science, and look it’s all just something by the UN, they want… she pauses, gets the response “CONTROL!” from a few people. 

This is One Nation’s Tasmanian launch, and it’s going well. The whole of the “magnificent seven” were here, their five Reps candidates lined up against the wall, a doctor in a leather jacket, the Braddon candidate in a tam o’shanter he is never without (including for his poster), and the Clark candidate, skivvy and black bangs, later to croak her love for Hanson into the mic, the island’s potential big Goth girlfriend. Senate No. 1 Steve Mav, a large, dorky man in a striped sports jacket, is emceeing.

Hanson is storming through, the speech is tight and focused and loooong, an American-style stump number covering all the bases. Foreign ownership, our kids are never going to be able to buy a house here, farm land, the Chinese own 14% of our agricultural land — and from the prosperous-ish crowd it’s getting a good reaction, little bursts of applause. Then, and I’m absolutely against the vaccine mandate! 

That gets a roar! One Nation has grabbed the anti-vaccine crowd, absolutely, Lambie having come out pro-vax and the United Australia Party missing in action (Braddon candidate Kyle Squibb does not return calls. With a name like that… but he should be used to it by now). You know they’re saying overseas now they need fourth, fifth doses. It’s just going to go on and on. I am in control of what I put in my body! Another roar. 

So it’s still there, the One Nation crazy, the crank stuff, the loose facts on a few key matters, but amid it all, here is something that many readers are not going to like that much: Hanson has got her crap together. You might disagree with her solutions to the housing crisis, to industrial relations, to her old-school attack on arts funding (“a million dollars to do a tour of Beatles photographs!” got no vibe at all; most of these people have taken their kids to one of these regional shows), but no one can now deny that she has a big, joined-up argument, especially on the economy and the facts and figures at her fingertips.

Prompted on the debt, she goes into the iniquities of our resources giveaway. She’s connecting the tax giveaways, the overall revenue, what needs to be done. She targets the UAP’s flagrantly impossible promises on mortgage-capping — and, yeah, it’s the standard segue to get stump speech material into the mix. But just as you’re nodding along to it, I agree with that, I agree with that, she’s off again: And our Family Court, we got that done, we put it into the Federal Circuit Court and we’re going to do a lot more. We’ve got to push back against these feminists attacking good men — and I half agree with that, and the crowd loves it. 

That’s what Davie was there for, black top hat gliding through the crowd, a few other grey hippies around. “Oh, I love her, I love Pauline. I’m here for the family law stuff. It’s got to change. There’s got to be incentive for people to get on with their lives,” he said, picking up a samosa. “You’ve been married?” “Four times,” he said, big hippie smile crunching down.

Around us people are mostly in matching knit sweaters and expensive jeans. This is the new One Nation, prosperous types, consultants and real estate agents — half their national candidates are real estate agents — most of them far less interested in the complex economic arguments I’m impressed by than by the sugar hits: vaccine, climate change, Family Court, trans kids. 

Butttttt, there is still the magical thinking, which pops up everywhere. Out on the patio, next to an enormous iron BBQ with a little chimney, smoking what smells to be possibly a whole pig, Franklin candidate and anti-vaccine doctor Steve Hindley tries to explain the health policy.

“What we want to do is create four super clinics across the state, which will consolidate…”

“Sure, but the state is 60 GPs and several hundred nurses short. Who’s going to staff them?”

“Well, that’s a question of attitude of doctors and nurses…”

“Isn’t it just a question of paying them a ton of money to relocate and stay a while?”

“We need to change the whole way doctors think about their calling…”

There it is again, the vague spiritual-organic that has sneaked into One Nation’s hitherto fairly straight-down-the-line, petit-bourgeois resentment politics. Is it a sign that it is becoming a full-service, hard-right, populist party, capable of fusing economic nationalism to a genuine social conservatism? Were it to win the sixth seat in Tasmania, a polity very different in temperament from whack-a-doodle Queensland, it would certainly be on the way. 

In that respect, its hopes rest on Mav, now gawking around the snacks table, helping the blonde valkyrie Bass candidate line up her children for a photo op, four of them. “Are you having a great time, kids?” he said to the crew, who unsmiled back.

Its hopes rest on Mav and its greatest obstacle is Mav, a serial candidate and state joke, having run for a dozen or so offices, and spending a lot of time waving signs at intersections. He has a cloud hanging over him from dodgy doings at a WA Aboriginal corporation he managed. Pauline had tried to head that off early, I ran 12, 13 times before I got back, in the Senate, and Steve has a go, he has a go, and that’s what it takes. “Got back” is the clue. After a famous first career and false imprisonment martyrdom. Mav unites people from every other party here in being seen as the punchline to a joke. 

But true, he’s going to have a go, and he was probably Hanson’s best option. He needs to take a tranche of first-pref votes from Team Lambie so that the two groups even up, and then get Liberal over-quota preferences. The numbers are so small now, the sense of betrayal by Lambie so visceral, that One Nation possibly has more of a chance than many believe. 

Could Hanson, returned in Queensland, then build One Nation? Man, something has happened to her in the past few years, some getting wise that it can’t all be burqa stunts and tremulous hurt about things you “don’t like”. She’s realised you’ve got to have an account not merely of how we get out of this mess, but also of how we got into it and how to tell that story. Trouble is, that involves an economic rationalism, which has to charge into the face of the Coalition’s neoliberalism. Which in turn will make it willing to go elsewhere, and avoid the crankishness. And Hanson, at heart, is still a “spend-what-you-earn”, small-government type, whereas many of her crowd — the entire right’s crowd — are actually new-spirit, pre-Whitlam Labor nation-builders. Save, of course, for the damn real estate agents.

After

Which is the question I should have asked Davie as he dropped me off, a back seat full of stuff flying towards us, powered by inertia — first-aid kit, a gonk in a tie-dye mini-skivvy, couple of used cartons of Betta lime-flavoured milk, etc. “Yeah I lived in this for a couple of years! It was great!” His knees were gone, he was on crutches, he’d given me a lift, and I should have asked the question: OK, you like the family law stuff, but the rest of it? The climate change nonsense, the exaggeration of foreign ownership, etc. You can hack that? But I didn’t. Not merely cause it’s a semi-gotcha but some sort of political respect for the actual manifestation of a political determination, a room full of people turning up for something they can support, and not because the leader needed a crowd, or because there was soup or because she was on Sunrise with her compelling life story. The challenge is to get it from the other side.

Davie waved as he took off, and all the stuff flung itself back into the back seat, like memory, like the past. From a distance, momentum and inertia start to look the same.