By Graham Matthews
BRISBANE — Pauline Hanson was forced to flee from a One Nation meeting in the small town of Oakey, near Toowoomba in Queensland, on January 20. Her pursuers were not enraged leftists, but former colleagues who had left One Nation and formed the City-Country Alliance (CCA).
On the same day, Queensland and NSW police launched simultaneous raids on the Queensland and national offices of One Nation, seizing numerous boxes of files and downloading all information stored on computers.
On January 14, One Nation national director David Ettridge had resigned all his posts with the party and with the private company One Nation Limited, claiming he was intent on pursuing "business" opportunities in Asia. On the same day, One Nation formally expelled its remaining five Queensland MPs who, along with former senator-elect Heather Hill, had formed the CCA in December.
Rise and fall
The decline of One Nation as a political force has been almost as stunning as its rise. Within a year of Pauline Hanson's election to the seat of Ipswich in the 1996 federal election she had established an extreme right-wing populist organisation with branches in every state.
Basing itself on disaffected white workers and small farmers, One Nation won more than 20% of the vote in the June 1998 Queensland election, humiliating the Liberal Party and taking huge votes from the National and Labor parties. Eleven One Nation MPs took their seats in the Queensland parliament and the party fell only a couple of seats short of being able to form a coalition government with the National and Liberal parties.
One Nation suffered its first real setback in the October 1998 federal election: Hanson failed to win the seat of Blair. One Nation's Queensland vote declined to around 15%, but this was sufficient to elect Hill to the Senate. Hill was subsequently denied her seat by a Federal Court decision, because she had retained British citizenship. Her running mate, Len Harris, became the One Nation senator for Queensland.
At the end of 1998, the One Nation garment began to come apart at the seams. Queensland MP Charles Rapoult resigned from parliament and the ALP was able to retake the seat in the resulting by-election in December 1998.
Then, in February 1999, five of the remaining Queensland MPs left the party, to sit as right-wing independents. Their main grievances were the tight control exercised over the party by the national executive — Hanson, Ettridge and NSW upper house member David Oldfield — and the unrestrained influence in the party of small proto-fascist organisations, like Tony Pitt's Confederate Action Party.
In August, One Nation's electoral registration in Queensland was successfully challenged by an embittered former candidate. The Queensland Supreme Court found not only that One Nation was incorrectly registered in Queensland, but also that Hanson and Ettridge had deliberately misled the electoral commission into granting electoral registration to One Nation.
In the months that followed, it was revealed that One Nation had only three members at the time of its registration: Hanson, Ettridge and Oldfield. The extra 497 names supplied by One Nation as its "members" were in fact members of the "Pauline Hanson Support Group", a separate organisation which had no right to control the party, vote on policy or anything else.
One Nation's deregistration left its remaining Queensland MPs in a precarious position. Hanson fled for a "holiday" in the United States, exacerbating tensions between the MPs and the party's remaining directors. A tussle developed over control of the direction of the party and retaining the perks of parliamentary jobs. The result was a cold split in December and the formation of the CCA.
City-Country Alliance
The MPs initially claimed that the CCA was simply an interim formation pending the re-registration of One Nation. But in January, CCA parliamentary leader Bill Feldman and new figurehead Heather Hill joined the chorus of condemnation of One Nation, claiming that serious questions remained about its financial accountability. The final drama was played out in Oakey on January 20.
One Nation is unable to field a candidate in either of the two state by-elections on February 5, eclipsed by CCA which is fielding candidates in both seats. CCA is not expected to receive more than 10% of the vote however, a far cry from the 20% vote One Nation received in June 1998.
One Nation's demise as a formal party may be all but completed and the CCA's prospects are modest: both things that the left can feel more than happy about. But there are also cautionary lessons that the left must draw from the meteoric rise and fall of the Hansonites.
Most disturbing is the lengths that the major parties and their retainers will go to extinguish a political threat to the status quo. The powers-that-be will not cede even a small share of power without a desperate fight — not even to the far right, let alone the left. The police raids and threats of fraud levelled against One Nation's leading lights could just as easily be levelled at progressive forces.
Second, although Hanson may be yesterday's woman, the conditions that led to her rise continue to exist; farm failure, high unemployment and the persistent stench of scapegoating all remain robust features of Australia's political system. Protest parties like One Nation will emerge again. The challenge for the left is to harness this discontent and prevent it from turning to right-wing populist monstrosities like One Nation.