By Allan Little and Adam Baker
One of Pauline Hanson's former secretaries alleged recently that One Nation voters were "losers" and "half-wits". While the party's supporters may include a few half-wits, it is definitely true that many are losing economically.
The exceptionally strong vote for One Nation in rural and regional areas in the June 13 Queensland election cannot be explained simply as a redneck tendency or the "backwardness" of the bush. In a context of economic rationalism and relentless competition, many rural people have become victims of neo-liberalism, and they are suffering.
Historically, there has been legislation protecting small farmers and small growers' co-ops from the large-scale production of big-capital farming in Australia.
With the intervention of agribusiness, however, most of this legislation has been rescinded in the last few decades, leaving small farmers struggling to compete, David and Goliath-like, against the likes of United Brands, Chiquita Bananas and Blueberry Farms. The problem is that in this instance, David rarely wins.
Such large corporations have little trouble buying up and eventually monopolising an area of food production. The Cargill Corporation, for example, now totally controls the crushing of the seeds needed for canola oil.
An Italian company has made a $350 million bid for the dairy company Pauls, even before the deregulation of the milk industry in January.
Alongside these economic pressures on smaller farmers, the restructuring of state and federal government service provision to cut costs has caused the disappearance of many community services, including banking, legal and health services, which urban residents take for granted.
While rural Queensland has traditionally been a stronghold of the National Party, it has been unable to stop the rising popularity of One Nation in rural areas because it is split down the middle.
On the one hand, it has to appear to be listening to and catering to the small farmers. On the other, it has to carry out the economic rationalist policies demanded by big business, which hit the rural population hard.
Now the Nationals and Liberals are trying to allay the fears of the rural constituency by giving assurances that rural and regional areas will not be affected by policies like the full privatisation of Telstra. The Nationals are even making noises about not supporting full privatisation.
Such electoral opportunism is unlikely to placate a deeply disaffected and increasingly squeezed rural electorate.