I am fascinated by the way political parties respond when voters start deserting them. One of the first principles of leadership is to look at yourself and your own role in what is happening. Political parties, apparently, prefer to investigate the voters.
An article in The Conversation examining how Donald Trump changed the United States made me wonder whether Australia is busy studying the symptom and ignoring the cause. Not because Pauline Hanson is Australia’s Donald Trump. She isn’t. Australia is not America. We have compulsory voting, preferential voting, an independent electoral commission and a parliamentary system that makes it considerably harder for one person to capture the machinery of government. All reassuring. Possibly a little too reassuring.
The more interesting question is whether some of the conditions that made Trump possible are already here. Trump and Hanson have something fundamental in common. Both tell people politics is a contest between ordinary citizens and an establishment that has stopped listening to them. It is an extraordinarily resilient political proposition. When the media attacks you, the media proves your point. When political opponents condemn you, the establishment proves your point. When experts explain why you are wrong, experts prove your point. It is almost magnificently self-sealing.
But Trump and Hanson did not invent all the grievances of the people who support them. They found people who already believed the political system wasn’t listening. That distinction deserves considerably more attention than it gets.
The response of established political parties to populism too often seems to be to study the populists. Who are these people? Why are people voting for them? What are they angry about? How do we win them back? All excellent questions.
There is one rather awkward question missing. What did we do?
Political parties appear endlessly fascinated by voter dissatisfaction and considerably less fascinated by their own contribution to it. There is a certain hubris in treating millions of voters turning away from you as an interesting sociological phenomenon. Perhaps the voters haven’t suddenly become inexplicable. Perhaps they have been explaining themselves for years.
Trump ultimately did something Hanson has never done. He captured one of America’s two major political parties, turning a populist insurgency into institutional power. Hanson doesn’t have to achieve anything remotely similar to change Australian politics.
A minor party doesn’t have to form government to change government. It only has to make a major party nervous enough. Australia has already run that experiment. Once a major party starts borrowing its language, priorities and policies, the influence is already there.
The insurgent doesn’t have to move into the house. Everyone else starts rearranging the furniture.
And Hanson has another advantage. She has been telling essentially the same political story for 30 years. So the resurgence of One Nation isn’t the arrival of some mysterious new force in Australian politics. It is an old message finding people newly prepared to hear it.
That should make the major parties curious about themselves. Instead, the temptation will be to explain Hanson. Perhaps commission some polling. Find the demographic. Identify the grievance. Develop the messaging. Workshop a phrase involving “everyday Australians”. Anything, apparently, except look in the mirror.
The lesson from America isn’t that Australia is destined to produce Donald Trump. Our institutions are different and they provide substantial protection. But institutions can only do so much when people stop trusting the people operating them.
Once enough voters conclude that the political system doesn’t work for people like them, attacking that system stops being a political liability. It becomes a qualification for office.
So I wouldn’t spend too much time asking whether Pauline Hanson could become Australia’s Donald Trump.
The bigger question is not whether Pauline Hanson can win enough seats to govern. It is whether she is already winning the argument. If the major parties are borrowing her language, chasing her voters and shifting the boundaries of what counts as mainstream politics, then the change is already happening.
And if they are doing all of that without asking what they did to make those voters leave in the first place, they are learning exactly the wrong lesson.
That would be quite an achievement. To learn the lesson of Donald Trump while carefully avoiding the bit about yourself.