Editorial, The Courier Mail, May 6th 1998
There is a real possibility that the composition of the next Queensland government will depend on the votes of a few independents, including members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Polling indicates that support for the major parties is divided evenly, with Labor and the National/Liberal Coalition each attracting about 40% of the vote. The remaining 20% falls to a variety of independents, Australian Democrats, Greens and One Nation, with support for the latter more substantial in certain rural and regional seats.
For One Nation to hold or share the balance of power in a Queensland Parliament would be a victory for short-sighted and crude populism and an indictment of the major parties for allowing such a profound increase in public cynicism and disconnection with mainstream politics. This week’s announcement by the Queensland Liberals that One Nation will receive preferences ahead of Labor will feed this disconnection. It is just the kind of political pragmatism over principle that drives voters to disillusionment.
Queensland Liberal president Bob Carroll says his party is not about giving “free kicks” to Labor, while his campaign director Greg Goebel says the election of a Labor government would be a disaster for the state. Presumably, Mr Goebel regards such a prospect as a greater calamity than one in which power resides with a party that advocates isolating Queensland from the rest of the world through xenophobic protectionism that shuns foreign investment and rebuilds tariff walls. And Prime Minister John Howard acknowledged in an interview in the Australian Financial Review that Ms Hanson was a “backward-looking person who would cost this country jobs”.
The Liberal’s Queensland partner, the National Party, has not spelt out its preference plan, although it appears the party will follow suit and put One Nation ahead of Labor. Polling in the National held seats of Barambah and Gympie point to such a preference swap as a prerequisite to survival. The equivocation on the issue by Mr Howard yesterday also hints that this conservative view is held more widely than just in Queensland.
The danger for the Liberals is that such hard-headed pragmatism will spark a backlash in metropolitan Queensland and other urban parts of Australia. Already, the Queensland decision is causing angst for Steven Huang, the party’s Taiwanese born candidate for the Southern seat of Sunnybank, who pledged in some material directed at his own ethnic community to put One Nation last. Senior Liberal Minister Santo Santoro is using the large number of “ethnic” candidates running for his party as a selling point in the election campaign.
This shallow victory for pragmatism might give the conservatives some comfort in what looms as a tight Queensland poll, but it will do nothing for the long-term health of the state’s public life. It would be refreshing if, for once, principle rather than pragmatism won in politics.