David Lockwood says despite its attempt to appeal to plebian culture, One Nation is a pro-establishment party. We won’t beat it by yelling ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ but by building a credible, militant and anti-establishment working-class alternative.
‘Surge’ has been everyone’s favourite word to describe what has happened to One Nation over the past 12 months or so. Beginning perhaps with the beet-rooter Barnaby Joyce joining the motley crew in December 2025 (though that could have gone either way), continuing through the South Australian election and now, it seems, moving on to the Farrer (NSW) byelection on 9 May.
Surge: a sudden, large increase, typically a temporary one (languages.oup.com).
But then, who knows?
Despite its previously poor showing in South Australia and battling the electoral system (the party would have done much better under a system of proportional representation), One Nation won four seats in the SA House of Assembly, while Cory Bernardi and three others appear set for comfortable berths in the upper house Legislative Council. They swept up 22.5% of first preference votes in the lower house, more than twice the vote of the Greens on 10%.
In the forthcoming byelection, the front runners are One Nation, followed by a Teal-inclined independent Michelle Milthorpe, with the Liberals struggling along at number three. And remember, this is Sussan Ley’s former seat, bequeathed as a poisoned chalice when she departed the Liberal leadership and politics. Looking further ahead, if One Nation does well in Farrer, it will have the momentum for more surge in the Victorian elections in November. Some suggest that One Nation is beginning to win votes from Labor’s working class base. While that won’t be clear from the Farrer byelection, the Victorian results may reveal whether this is true.
Why is this happening? Amid increasing rejection of the established parties, One Nation has managed – through a combination of quirky leadership, lame stunts and above all immigrant bashing – to put itself forward as an anti-establishment force, standing up for hardworking, battling Australians, beset as they are by . . . something. This relative success is despite the fact that One Nation periodically falls apart and has to put itself back together. It is in a ‘put back together’ phase, for now.
There is something real at the heart of this. According to Kos Samaras of Redbridge Strategy and Analytics: “It’s driven by a deep sense of economic abandonment and a sense the two-party system has failed the country. It’s definitely not superficial. We saw that in South Australia.”
In times like these, a break with the established system might be expected in the direction of the left. After all, economic hardship, climate catastrophe and imperialist war are produced by capitalism. The solution to these intrinsic crises lies in the replacement of capitalism with socialism. But the left – both its Laborite version and the socialist left in general – has thus far been remarkably unsuccessful in mounting a convincing case that what is needed is a radical anti-establishment and state disloyal movement. A movement that takes a stand against capitalism itself and for a break in the constitutional order to bring about socialism.
Forces on the left like the Labor and trade union bureaucracy and even the Greens cannot fulfil this role because they are regarded as part of the establishment. So even One Nation’s pinprick ‘radicalism’ causes them anxiety.
State-loyal with a lunatic fringe
A fatal flaw lies at the heart of One Nations’ anti-establishment pretensions, however. The fact is that One Nation is part of the state-loyal establishment itself.
Its policies consist of doing various things within the capitalist system a bit differently – but certainly not breaking with that system itself. It is anti-(black and brown) immigrant, pro-imperialist and skates very close to climate change denial.[i] Its fundamental philosophy is that everyone should work harder and keep their place.
But it also fans the flames of the crank fringes: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy nutters, anti-Semitism, fighters against the ‘One World’ globalist conspiracy, climate change deniers – and probably flat earthers, to boot.
Despite its lunatic fringe, it would appear that a section of Australian agricultural and resource (mining) capital is actively backing One Nation. Not surprisingly then, it receives generous funding from various mining and agribusiness interests, including the use of Gina Rinehart’s personal jet to fly Barnaby and Pauline around the country – and indeed the world if we count Hanson’s jaunt to Mar-a-Lago and the CPAC conservative shin-dig.
The One Nation candidate in Farrer, David Farley, is a classic example of the breed. He is not a battling small farmer. On the contrary, he’s the former chief executive of the Australian Agricultural Company, the “oldest continuously operating company in Australia”. Founded in 1824 and now with a market capitalisation of $800 million, AACo manages 6.5 million hectares of land in Queensland and the Northern Territory – about 1% of Australia’s land mass.
Now he runs Matrix Commodities, consultants to agribusiness and agribusiness investors. Someone, close to literally, with his snout in the trough.
Perhaps conscious of One Nation’s reputation of running, um, less than ideal candidates (hello Mark Latham and the conga line of suckholes), Farley told the Sydney Morning Herald that he represents a new ‘quality’ type of candidate.
The flaw in this argument is his other examples were Cory Bernardi and Barnaby Joyce.
Having congratulated himself, Cory and Barnaby as ‘quality candidates’, he was quite open about where One Nation was opening up new sources of support – and it isn’t struggle street.
“That’s not just mum and dad in the streets, that’s Toorak and Woollahra. And the good thing with Toorak and Woollahra is they bring their purse with them.”
We cannot effectively fight against One Nation by just pointing out that they are (a) right wing and (b) racist (or even ‘fascist’ – which they clearly aren’t).
The left has to have something to say about the concerns that One Nation raises. And that means building a united working-class movement that seeks to break with the constitutional order and with capitalism – which all the major parties support.
At present the mainstream left represents the ‘progressive’ wing of the establishment – the very element of society that sneers at deplorables. The Marxist left remains on the fringes, trailing the progressive establishment on most social issues (republicanism, environmentalism, top-down ‘anti-racism’).
Only a break from liberalism and a surge of our own towards Marxist unity can start the hard work of building a credible working-class alternative that can actually address the social, economic and political issues that alienate so many people from mainstream society.
[i] The public perception of the racism of One Nation’s leadership and many of its supporters (which undoubtedly exists) rests primarily on public statements/outbursts by its revered leader, Pauline Hanson. Its policy actually calls for the deportation of 75,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ (the majority of whom would be black or brown) and a cut in immigration by 570,00 from current levels. (www.onenation.org.au/immigration).