Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.
This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.
I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.
It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.
The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.
Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.
The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.
None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.
Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.
What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.
A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.
That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.
The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.
A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.
Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.
It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.
If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.
There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.
And here is the bitter twist.
The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.
So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.
I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.
Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?
Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.
Sources
- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
- James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
- Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
- George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
- E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
- Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
- The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
- Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings
About this post
These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.