Put One Nation last?
Once upon a time, and not so long ago it was too, one could make an electoral choice guided by the principle of voting for the lesser of two evils. Many is the time I have run with party A rather than party B on this basis alone.
Extraneous psychiatric conditions that may have influenced my decision — such as the True Believer Syndrome — I fortunately outgrew at a very young age. In fact, I took pride in my ability to approach the topic of who gets citizen Dave's first preference in a strictly clinical manner.
I like to think that mine was always an informed choice. But now, I face a dilemma. If party A is a lesser evil than party B, how am I to then incorporate the newly advocated principle of putting party C last? It turns my method on its head.
Let us just say — for arguments sake — that party C happens to be Pauline Hanson's One Nation. If my primary electoral decision is to be one of placing One Nation below all other candidates, then I work up the ticket rather than down it. The primary objective of my vote then becomes one of keeping One Nation out of office. Any thing else I do with my vote is a mere secondary consideration.
But voting against something rather than for it is not my idea of a good day out. By putting all my evils in the one (Nation) basket, I am basically letting other parties off the hook. If One Nation is condemned because One Nation is racist, does that mean that the other parties get a clean bill of health?
I don't know about you, but I smell a lemon. On any issue, let alone that of racism, I'm not too happy clumping these parties together simply on the basis that they inhabit a "Pauline Hanson-free zone".
If party C is racist, then maybe party B is too, only less so. And if party B is less racist than party C, party A maybe less racist than party B. And since everyone of them denies the label, it doesn't really get us very far, does it?
But if we were to talk about something specific, like immigration policy, then that's a horse of a very different colour. One Nation and the Coalition and the Labor Party and the Democrats and the Greens all advocate a restrictive immigration policy. I'm not calling anyone racist but maybe the self-righteous should look to their own house before addressing us on next election day.
Being anything but One Nation doesn't help a party much at all. It's not a ticket to sainthood you know.
Dave Riley