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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Under Peter Dutton’s leadership, the Coalition has placed One Nation candidates second on scores of how-to-vote cards across the country.

The decision goes against decades of principled support within the Liberal Party - to oppose One Nation’s prejudice and racism.

It signals a shift not just in strategy – but in what the Liberals stand for.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe on the preference deal between One Nation and the Liberal Party… and how it could backfire.

It’s Wednesday April 30.

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RUBY:

So I wanted to ask what your first thought was when you heard that the Liberal Party and One Nation had done a deal to preference each other on their how-to-vote cards. What was your first thought?

MIKE:

Well, I thought it was pretty extraordinary, actually. Coalition voters are being told to put One Nation second in more than 50 seats across the country and to rank them above Labor in 139 seats. As far as I know, this is unprecedented. These two parties have been feuding, I guess you would say, for almost 30 years, ever since Pauline Hanson was kicked out of the Liberal Party way back in 1996.

So, you know, One Nation and the coalition have been bitter rivals, I think you would say, ever since then, because One Nation has done its best to peel voters off the right wing of the coalition, particularly in Queensland but clearly this is no longer the case. They're swapping preferences. And according to Pauline Hanson's Chief of Staff, James Ashby, in an interview last week. It's all about, quote, saving Peter Dutton, unquote.

RUBY:

Saving Peter Dutton from what?

MIKE:

Well, from losing the election and maybe even his own seat. At the start of the year, Dutton and the coalition were polling very strongly. People were starting to think they might actually unseat a one-term Labor government. But over the course of the campaign, the wheels have really fallen off and the Albanese government is now odds on to be returned either in as a minority government or maybe even in majority. Meanwhile, Peter Dutton's personal approval is tanking. Bare in mind, he only holds his seat, Dickson, on the Queensland Sunshine Coast, by about 1.7 per cent.

Audio excerpt – Pauline Hanson:

“Well, what happened was in the preferences, and it's only a recommendation, I must tell you listeners that.”

MIKE:

According to Hanson herself, this preference deal came about because Clive Palmer had put teal candidates above the coalition in some seats.

Audio excerpt – Pauline Hanson:

“And he's supposed to be a conservative, he's preferencing the Teals and going to Labor before the Coalition.”

MIKE:

So she decided One nation needed to act.

Audio excerpt – BLANK:

“That's why we changed our preferences in 11 seats and we put him below the Coalition now.”

MIKE:

Frankly, it was also a bit of a stunt because it focused attention on Hanson and One Nation, which they desperately need.

RUBY:

Okay. So Mike, tell me though, what this arrangement looks like in practice. If we were to take Peter Dutton's seat in Brisbane, for example, how does the deal work?

MIKE:

Well, right up until pre-polling started, which was last Tuesday, One Nation had its how-to-vote cards out there telling voters to put Peter Dutton fourth in the seat of Dickson. Then just before pre- polling, the party suddenly issued new how-to-vote cards elevating Dutton to second place. And in return, the Liberals in a bunch of seats, including Duttons, have put One In third place just after Family First.

RUBY:

Tell me a bit more about Family First, Mike. And I suppose the significance of the coalition, preferencing them.

MIKE:

Right. Well, in almost all the seats where it has not placed One Nation second, the Coalition has endorsed Family First for the second spot. Someone I was speaking to about this described Family First as, quote, One Nation with Bibles, unquote. It's a religious-based party very much in the mold of the sort of religious right in America.

It's anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-surrogacy. It opposes renewable energy and the Paris Accord on climate change, it opposes multiculturalism, it wants an end to Muslim immigration to Australia, it opposes tighter gun laws, it advocates for radically increased military spending. It’s not much different from One Nation frankly.

And Family First is running 92 candidates in the lower house and two Senate candidates in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

So anyway, it is second on Dutton's seat in Dickson. It's also second on the ticket of the Liberals' deputy leader, Sussan Ley, who very much like her leader put Family First in second spot, One Nation in third. The Shadow Treasurer, Angus Taylor, Put Family First, second, a Libertarian candidate, third and One Nation fourth. So variations on this theme have been repeated all across the country, only in a handful of seats where they're trying to win back very moderate constituencies have they not put these two right-wing parties at the top of the ticket.

RUBY:

Okay. So these deals have been done, Mike, with both Family First and One Nation, to preference each other in various ways. But even though there might seem to be some alignment in the values of some of these parties, One Nation and the Liberals have been at war for decades, as you said earlier. So tell me more about that and how they fell out in the first place.

MIKE:

Well, we go all the way back to the 1996 election, John Howard versus Paul Keating. Pauline Hanson was at that stage the endorsed Liberal candidate in the Western Brisbane seat of Oxley, up near Ipswich, but she'd started causing problems for the party. She kept going off script. She had twice been formally warned about expressing her, I think you would call them extreme prejudices against Indigenous Australians and Asian migrants. And then came the third and final straw, she gave a newspaper interview where she attacked welfare payments to Indigenous people and also to Chinese and other migrants. And the Queensland State Director of the Liberal Party, was Jim Barron. And just three days out from the election he decided enough was enough and he called her in and told her he was disendorsing her. I spoke to him about this and he said that the conversation went something along these lines. He said. You're just refusing to play along. You're not behaving as a Liberal candidate. You're running against our policies." And she replied, pretty much, bring it on.

It didn't seem like a very consequential decision at that point, because the seat that she was contesting, Oxley, the liberals didn't really expect to win anyway. It was one of the safest Labor electorates in the country. But to everyone's surprise, Hanson won.

Audio excerpt – Pauline Hanson:

“Six weeks ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Pauline Hanson. Now she's the name in just about every radio bulletin, every television newscast and newspaper. No one can recall anything like it. She is a phenomenon.”

MIKE:

And then in September of that year, 96, she gave her infamous first speech in Parliament saying that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians.

Audio excerpt – Pauline Hanson:

“It is refreshing to be able to express my views without having to toe a party line. It has got me into trouble on the odd occasion but I’m not going to stop saying what I think.”

MIKE:

And then she set up her own party, One Nation.

RUBY:

Okay. And so once Pauline Hansen got in, Mike, how did her old party, how did the Liberal Party treat her?

MIKE:

Well, they have ever since largely kept their distance. And so in the 1998 and 2001 elections, One Nation candidates were placed last on the Liberal how-to-vote cards.

But there was internal debate about it. The issue has reared its head at various points since, in 2017 for example. The Libs in Western Australia decided they would preference one nation ahead of the nationals, if you can believe it. John Howard, ever the political opportunist, came out and supported that saying, oh, One Nation has changed. Of course, it really hadn't.
As recently as 2019, it came up again. At that time there were media revelations about One Nation's links to the US gun lobby. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, among others on the party's right, argued they should still be preferenced ahead of Labor, but Scott Morrison eventually made a big show of ordering Labor to be placed above One Nation.
So that's been the history, and then along came Peter Dutton and things have changed.

RUBY:

After the break – how the Liberal Party has shifted - right.

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RUBY:

Mike, you've been speaking to Liberal Party elders, people who were instrumental in pushing Pauline Hanson out of the party in the first place. Now we're in a position where the Liberals are preferencing her party, One Nation. So how are these people that you're talking to, reacting to that?

MIKE:

Well, Jim Barron, the former state director who actually kicked her out, told me he was appalled and I'll quote him because he was very strong. He said, all these years later, the Liberal Party has embraced the person who at once excommunicated. That's what he told me. He went on to say, it's devastating. And I think it says more about the Liberal Party than it does about one nation. Its radical, hardline, racist policies used to be at the fringe of politics. Now they no longer live on the fringe. The Liberal Party has pretty much normalised a lot of what Hanson was going on about.

RUBY:

Okay, so pretty strong stuff then Mike.

MIKE:

Very, very strong stuff. And he's right, this is a slap in the face for those who historically fought to distance the coalition from Hansonism. Ron Boswell, for example, was a National senator who represented Queensland for more than 30 years. In his valedictory speech when he left parliament about a decade ago, he actually said that he had, quoting again, risked everything to stand up against Pauline Hanson's aggressive narrow view of Australia. He said it was the greatest thing he'd done in his entire 30-year career. When I contacted Boswell, he declined to comment directly on the coalition's preference decision at this election, but he did point out that previously he had threatened not to stand again if the coalition preferenced One Nation, so that's how strongly he felt about it.

RUBY:

Okay. So given that then Mike, what does this deal say to you about the current Liberal Party and how its ideology is shifting under Dutton?

MIKE:

Well, I would argue it's been shifting even before Dutton. The Libs have been drifting rightwards ever since John Howard. There was something of a purge of the moderates under him. Then, of course, we had Tony Abbott, hard man of the right, who took the party arguably even further to the right.

And Peter Dutton is very much a creature of the Queensland Liberal National Party, which is very conservative. He's part of the party hard right. And back in 2017, Peter Dutton said of Pauline Hanson, she doesn't deliver on it, but she says a lot of things that people want to hear. So some of Dutten's positioning on matters of race, migration, Islam, culture war issues in general, his views are not a million miles from Hanson's, frankly.

RUBY:

Okay, so to come back to the preference deal then, how much of an impact do you think that that is actually likely to have, Mike on how people ultimately decide to vote?

MIKE:

Look, it's hard to determine the extent to which voters will be influenced by how-to-vote cards. After all, they're only the party's recommendation of how you should vote. You don't have to follow it. And a lot less people use how-to-vote cards these days than they did in the past. Back in the 1980s and the early 1990s, about 60% of people would follow the how-to-vote card. These days it's only about one in three, according to Professor Ian McAllister, who I spoke to. He's a distinguished professor of political science at the ANU. And he says that people are not only less likely to follow how-to-vote cards, they're also much more likely to vote tactically. And he gave me an example, citing the teal wave at the last election. He said that a huge number of people, almost half of those who voted for the Teals, were voting tactically. They were former Greens and Labor voters who voted Teal essentially to get the sitting Liberal out. They weren't disaffected Liberal voters. This adds to other evidence from past elections that suggests progressively inclined voters are more disciplined and tactical than right-wing voters. So between 80 and 85 per cent of those who vote number one for the Greens. Those preferences eventually flow back to Labor, even if they pass through other left of centre candidates en route. But only about 60 per cent of One Nation preferences come back to the Coalition. When I spoke to the ABC's election analyst, Antony Green, about this, he said that the concern for the Coalition has always been when the coalition loses votes to these right-wing parties, they tend to wander off, these are his words, they tend to wander off all around the ballot paper. They don't automatically come back.

And if history is any guide, the overwhelming majority of Green's preferences and teal voters' preferences will ultimately flow back to Labor. So the big question in this election campaign is whether the embrace by Dutton and the opposition of One Nation and Family First will bring them a similar benefit, or given their very divisive policies, will it simply drive away more votes than it attracts? All I can say is we'll know pretty soon.

RUBY:

Indeed, it's not long. Mike, thank you so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thanks a lot.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Labor has announced it will fund some of its election promises by raising visa fees for international students.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says the fee hike only amounts to a small rise – up from $1,600 to $2,000.

Meanwhile, when asked about the costings for the Coalition’s election promises, Opposition leader Peter Dutton said they will be provided ‘in due course’... but says ‘they’ve been properly funded’.

And

Prominent Indigenous leaders have accused politicians of fueling division over welcome to Country ceremonies, following Peter Dutton’s comments that the ceremonies were ‘overused’.

Former Liberal minister Ken Wyatt says welcome to Country ceremonies are not political… and co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue Pat Anderson says the ceremonies are not about welcoming people to Australia – but to cultures and lands.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, thanks for listening.

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