BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Confirmation Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 28.3% saturation with 387 hits. Analysis detected 2,558 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,369 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 72.7% and a BS Rank of 80% (3,926 of 19,668 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 80.00% of the article peer group.
Britain has Nigel Farage, France has Marine Le Pen, and the US has Donald Trump.
Australia has Pauline Hanson, a 72-year-old, red-headed senator from Queensland with a knack for saying out loud what others think.
For 30 years, Hanson has been a player on the fringes of federal politics while never allowing herself to become part of it.
Today, she consistently ranks as Australia’s preferred prime minister in opinion polls as the political rules are overturned by the irresistible force of populism.
Hanson’s rise from the political fringes to centre stage has been swift.
Her party, One Nation, secured just six per cent of the national vote in the election 14 months ago.
This week’s Newspoll shows One Nation neck and neck with the governing Labor Party on 30 per cent.
The conservative Liberal-National Coalition is in dire straits with just 19 per cent.
One Nation’s surge occurred in the Australian summer as the nation took stock of the Bondi shooting attack on a Jewish gathering by anti-Semitic and Islamic State-inspired home-grown terrorists.
While the political and media class rightly focussed on the rise of anti-Semitism, popular anger galvanised around the failures of immigration policy and the radicalisation in mosques and prayer halls.
By the time politicians returned from their summer break to Canberra in February, One Nation had overtaken the Coalition and was closing in on Labor.
In a social-media-driven world that thrives on outrage and competes for attention, Hanson was delivering both.
What happens next is anybody’s guess.
Hanson, One Nation’s leader for life under the party’s constitution, faces an uphill battle to become prime minister under Australia’s unique instant run-off preferential voting system.
Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party remains the favourite to win the 2028 election and secure a third term with the support of preferences from the Greens.
What is clear, however, is that the political and cultural landscape has experienced a tectonic shift.
The old dividing lines between left and right, city and country, capital and labour hardly matter.
The decisive fault line now runs between insiders and outsiders: a globally minded, tertiary-educated elite on one side, the rest of Australia on the other.
Hanson first gained national prominence in 1996 when she was disendorsed as a Liberal candidate for a letter she had written to a local newspaper criticising race-based preferential treatment for Aborigines.
After winning the working-class Queensland seat of Oxley as an independent, she delivered an outspoken maiden speech warning that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’ who were not prepared to assimilate into the wider Australian culture.
The Canberra media establishment declared her beyond the pale, demanding that the new Liberal prime minister, John Howard, join the chorus of condemnation.
Many voters drew the opposite conclusion.
If the political class was so determined to silence her, perhaps she was saying something worth hearing.
One Nation has become a haven for refugees from both major parties.
They are united by a growing conviction that important decisions are made by people who neither understand nor particularly like the country they are trying to remake.
Immigration, Indigenous policy, climate change, Covid restrictions and gender ideology are different arguments about the same question: who gets to decide how Australia changes, and whose values matter when it does?
Hanson’s supporters are not casual floating voters.
They have switched tribes.
The chance that they will return to the established parties before the next election is remote.
The more she is denounced, the more convincing she becomes to those who feel they, too, have been treated contemptuously by the elites.
Every attempt to write her off as a racist or extremist reinforces the very grievance on which her politics is built.
There is an obvious comparison with Nigel Farage, although the two emerged from different political traditions.
Farage’s defining issue was Britain’s relationship with Europe.
Hanson’s was multiculturalism.
Yet both came to represent something much larger, giving a voice to voters who believed the political class had stopped listening.
Like the silent refuseniks of Soviet Communism, resentment towards the established order had been quietly building for years in the private domain.
The 2016 Brexit vote was the trigger for popular discontent in Britain to go public.
In Australia, it was the October 2023 referendum to enshrine a race-based Aboriginal Voice to Parliament in the constitution, which was defeated by 60 to 40 per cent.
The Coalition, which opposed the change, was on the right side of the argument, just as Boris Johnson’s Conservatives were over Brexit.
Yet both parties were too entwined with the establishment to maintain a populist position forever.
Both parties had also been in power during the Covid panic, a source of many of the grievances propelling populism.
Neither party could boast clean hands on immigration, a defining issue for populists everywhere.
While Tony Abbott’s Coalition had led the world in controlling illegal migration, the steady rise in student visas and other temporary arrivals was creating fresh concern that the system was being gamed through new loopholes.
Both parties had signed up to the goal of Net Zero and owned its unintended consequences: rising power prices that punished the poorest most, throttled small businesses and sent jobs offshore.
Both parties had largely remained mute in the face of rising radical transgenderism.
They stood by as the medical establishment became captured by a collective madness that declared the rules of biology old hat.
In Australia, as in Britain, conservative parties responded to embarrassingly large election defeats by appointing credible leaders with impeccable free-market, minimal-government credentials.
The Liberals’ Angus Taylor, like Kemi Badenoch, stands unambiguously on the same side of the populists in intent, if not in method.
Yet both struggle for traction in an age of shortened attention spans, where politicians compete with acrobatic cats for engagement on Instagram.
Hanson returned to Australia this week from an indulgent ‘fact-finding’ trip to the UK, organised and funded partly by an Australian commercial TV network and partly by her chief benefactor, Australia’s richest woman, Gina Reinhardt.
The One Nation leader was followed closely by representatives of Australia’s left-leaning press who declared her appearance on a Tommy Robinson podcast a career-ending error.
She had appeared to endorse the White Australia policy, a reading of the interview she later denied.
She was clear, however, in her attack on Islam, singling out Muslim migrants for their failure to assimilate and accusing them of defrauding the disability-payment system.
Yet Hanson once again defied her establishment critics with a rise in the polls and by returning to what amounted to a hero’s welcome at a business breakfast in Perth, gate-crashed by her jeering, cheering supporters.
Clearly, the jig is up for the technocratic elite, its credibility destroyed by its pursuit of madcap causes and its habit of feathering its own nest.
As in Britain, the short-term outlook is unsettlingly bleak: a Labor government that prioritises wealth redistribution over growth, imposes sin taxes on entrepreneurial risk-taking, and wages a new class war between young and old.
A poll this week found that almost 70 per cent of Australians feel the country is heading in the wrong direction and 47 per cent of voters said their ‘standard of living is worse compared with their parents at a similar stage of life’.
Pessimism is the political oxygen on which populism thrives, yet it is a malaise for which it offers a partial remedy at best.
The conditions that generate pessimism also make simple explanations more attractive.
Structural problems such as productivity decline, demographic ageing, housing shortages, energy investment and institutional drift are complex.
Populism succeeds by translating them into morally satisfying stories: elites betrayed you; common sense was abandoned; national values have been diluted by the influx of migrants.
The rise of One Nation says something important about Australia and its departure from the aspirational values and economic discipline that created the wealth more recent governments have squandered.
Yet One Nation does not necessarily tell us how to fix Australia, raising the prospect that the politics of disappointment may become self-perpetuating.
The very conditions that make populism attractive make the answers harder to sell.
Nick Cater is a Sydney-based columnist with the Australian and a regular spiked contributor.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.