Coalition cosies up to One Nation with preferences in ceasefire after 30-year war

The first three weeks of this federal election campaign were comprehensively drowned out by tariff policy bombshells lobbed by one of the world's most famous men.

Now, it appears the last two weeks will be obscured by the funeral and succession of the only other man on Earth more famous than the first. And — for good measure — the funeral will be attended by both.

It's very hard to focus on Australian politics when the world keeps getting tipped off its axis like this.

But with voting now having commenced at pre-polling stations around Australia, let us not overlook the historic, all-Australian union that was consecrated on Tuesday morning.

After nearly 30 years of unresolved tension, the Coalition and Pauline Hanson's One Nation have finally — decisively — tied the knot.

It was a registry office affair. The parties did not post a happy photo.

So how do we know?

We know because when pre-poll voting began on Tuesday, the "how to vote" cards issued by the Coalition place Pauline Hanson's One Nation candidates at number two in the vast majority of lower house seats.

And — after insisting that One Nation would advocate for "parties of freedom" and "conservative independents" over both major parties — leader Pauline Hanson pulped and reprinted her preference suggestions in a number of seats at the very last minute to place Coalition candidates second.

The seats included Dickson, the marginal Queensland electorate held by Liberal leader Peter Dutton. The first version of the One Nation how-to-vote cards had Dutton at number four. The new ones have him at number two.

One Nation chief of staff James Ashby explained to the Daily Telegraph that the last-minute reversal was intended to counteract the effect of Clive Palmer's preference guidelines, which in some cases urged a vote for "teal" independents.

"If it means saving Peter Dutton by shifting a 'how to vote', then we will do so," Ashby said.

If the world wasn't already so full of gobsmacking events, this development surely would be commanding more attention.

Think of it: Hanson is a political figure who owes her 30 years of fame to the fact that John Howard disendorsed her as a Liberal candidate way back in 1996, then placed her candidates last on Liberal how-to-votes in 1998.

Since then, Ipswich's most famous daughter has been in and out of the House of Representatives, in and out of prison, and into the Senate, where her term runs through to the next election.

It's been a wild ride.

Hanson was chased out of politics by Tony Abbott, before he became a Liberal prime minister. She brought former federal Labor leader Mark Latham back into politics in 2019, when he was elected to the NSW Upper House under the One Nation banner.

And for most of that time, the Coalition has struggled — sometimes miserably — with the unique challenge Hanson has posed to the conservative party of government, at whose right flank she has relentlessly nibbled.

The Coalition's perpetual One Nation dilemma

The dilemma is this: Let her in, and earn the opprobrium of centrist Liberal voters who don't like to be tied to someone best-known for racist division?

Or banish her, and lose primary votes in Queensland and the outer fringes of big Australian cities, where cost of living and the housing crisis are most readily linked to high levels of immigration? After some vacillation, every federal Liberal leader since Howard has opted, more or less, for the second.

Not this time.

In 139 of the 147 seats where One Nation is running a candidate, the Coalition will recommend that its voters put One Nation above the ALP.

In 55 of these seats, the Coalition has placed One Nation candidates in second place; in the rest, candidates from minor conservative groupings like Family First and the Libertarian Party are preferenced before One Nation, but One Nation still is ranked before Labor.

The Coalition has also give One Nation top ranking on its Senate preference sheets after its own candidates in Queensland, WA, SA, and Tasmania, where Senator Hanson's daughter Lee Hanson is One Nation's lead candidate. In NSW and Victoria, One Nation is in fourth place on Liberal Party Senate how-to-vote cards, below Family First, Christian and Libertarian candidates.

Twenty-nine years after Howard sacked Hanson from the Liberal Party, she's rocketed back to become — officially — the Coalition's preferred next-best brand to vote for.

It's a turnaround for Dutton, who in 2017 said of Hanson:

"People like One Nat­ion because they see Pauline Hanson and she says things that people want to hear, she doesn't deliver on it, but she says things that people want to hear. And if that works for her, good luck to her. But at some stage, as we found out in 1998, that comes to an end. There was a crash landing of One Nation in 1998. There'll be a crash landing again of One ­Nation."

Crash landing?

Eight years later, Hanson is still in the Parliament, and Dutton has just invited her aboard the campaign jet.

To understand why, I'm afraid, it's necessary to poke around a bit in the polls that have been published in the past few months.

What are the polls saying?

Much has been made of the decline in the Coalition's fortunes, and the improvement in Labor's.

Redbridge pollsters Tony Barry and Kos Samaras, who have campaign backgrounds in the Liberal and Labor camps respectively, have been tracking 20 key seats expected to be fought closely between the two major parties.

Over four "waves" of research, the Coalition's primary vote has declined by nine points, from 43 per cent of respondents, to 34 per cent.

But according to that research, Labor's primary vote support has gone up only two points in that time — from 33 per cent to 35.

The vote for "others", however, has rocketed from 12 per cent to 18 per cent.

And this has been Dutton's horrid conundrum. He's losing support, but not to Labor. He's losing it to his right — primarily to One Nation, now estimated in other polls to be riding at about 8 per cent nationally, compared with the 4.9 per cent the party recorded nationally at the 2022 election.

Unlike Dutton, Hanson has no worries about holding on to inner city "teal" seats and can happily go full MAGA, as she did in a recent campaign video, chiding Dutton for his unwillingness to associate himself with the phrase "Make Australia Great Again".

One Nation is reported to have reissued how-to-vote cards putting Coalition candidates second in the Labor-held seats of Hunter, Paterson, Shortland, Whitlam, the NSW seat of Calare (currently held by ex-National Party independent Andrew Gee), the Queensland Labor seat of Blair, the Victorian seats of Monash and Bruce and the Tasmanian seat of Lyons.

Electorally, it's probably the best spot of news Dutton has had all campaign.

For decades now, the preferential voting system has worked better for Labor than it has for the Coalition. This is chiefly due to the fact that when voters opt for the Greens, their second preference has been much more likely to go to Labor than a One Nation preference was to go to the Coalition.

While Labor has won many seats with the help of Greens preferences, you need to go back to 2001 to find a Coalition candidate who came in second, then was helped over the line by preferences. So the existence of a straightforward exchange brings the Coalition/One Nation relationship much closer to that between Labor and the Greens.

Let's see how that might work.

What happened last election?

In the Queensland seat of Blair (where Hanson was once the federal MP), One Nation and Clive Palmer's United Australia Party together commanded 16 per cent of first preferences last election.

Sitting Labor MP Shayne Neumann is on a margin of 5 per cent, and thus has plenty to fear from a Coalition candidate fuelled by well-directed One Nation preferences.

In 2022, six out of 10 One Nation first-preference votes ended up with the LNP candidate. With Hanson directing preferences specifically to the LNP, that proportion is likely to be higher.

Keep in mind: A party's how-to-vote cards are not binding. They're just a guide. Every voter has the right to assign their preferences however they like, but some voters like to have a recommendation from their preferred party as to how they should number their ballot.

And they do make a difference. Otherwise, who would bother?

Back to Palmer — who re-entered the federal election scene recently astride a new party, Trumpet of Patriots.

Palmer has adopted a different tack from Senator Hanson's; he's promised to put incumbents last, no matter which party they're from.

But this policy — which in some seats has entailed directing preferences to "teal" independents — has caused discord among some Trumpeteers. In the Liberal-held seat of Flinders, for example, Trumpet of Patriots candidate Jason Smart recently withdrew his candidacy over a preference guide placing the "teal" independent above the Liberal sitting MP, Zoe McKenzie.

Smart, who described himself as "nobody's chump" has now urged Flinders voters to put him last, while Palmer issued a mysterious press release yesterday afternoon announcing that he was personally investigating "tampering of the party's how-to-vote cards".

Is Palmer planning his own stunning reversal? He may be, although most polls have Trumpet of Patriots well below the 4 per cent of the national vote earned by Palmer's former party, the United Australia Party (deregistered owing to a headache-inducing series of administrative decisions and litigation last year).

After 30 years, Pauline Hanson is the number one name on this election's right-wing protest ballot. And for the first time in 30 years, she's the Coalition's plus one.

Editor’s note, April 23: A previous version of this story said the Coalition had One Nation as second preference in 139 seats. While the Coalition has preferenced One Nation above Labor in 139 seats, they have ranked One Nation second on the ballot in 55 seats.

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