The Courier Mail editorial
Monday, April 20, 1998
Polling conducted by AC Nielsen for the Courier Mail demonstrates conclusively that the National Party could be struggling to hold two and possibly more of its seats in the Queensland Parliament against challenges from candidates of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. In Barambah and Gympie, One Nation has support of about 27% of those contacts for the poll. About two-thirds of the One Nation supporters say they are former National Party voters.
Similar results had already been found in polling conducted by the major parties. Labor research published by the Courier Mail on Friday found that One Nation’s support in Hervey Bay was running at 26%, and that Labor would hold the seat on preferences. Premier Rob Borbidge dismissed the Labor findings as “unreliable”. Clearly they are not. Although One Nation’s vote in the rest of Australia has fallen to about 6%, it is apparently running at more than four times that level in rural and regional Queensland. The polling reveals that the Queensland Nationals’ tough stance on native title is having little effect on One Nation voters. They are not going to be influenced by what the premier says on Mabo or guns. They are at least as concerned about hospitals and unemployment.
A prospective One Nation vote in the state elections of between 25 and 30% presents a series of significant challenges to both the major parties. Its first consequence has been to push back the likely timing of the state election. Only last month the Premier was toying with the idea of an April or May election. The Government refused to confirm when it would present its budget and would not tell MPs when Parliament would sit. Now the Premier wants to reserve July for the election.
The most important issue to be faced is the allocation of preferences. Labor has on several occasions proposed both it and the Coalition parties should agree to put One Nation last. The Coalition parties have hedged their bets, saying that preferences would not be settled until a few weeks before the election, after all the candidates were known. That has led Opposition leader Peter Beattie to suggest the Nationals are contemplating some secret deal to exchange preferences with One Nation. Labor’s concerns are understandable, given the way the Coalition approached the vital Mundingburra election in 1996, courting independent candidates and reaching secret understandings with pressure groups such as the Police Union.
The Coalition’s refusal to come clean on preferences brings to mind the way in which the Prime Minister ignored Ms Hanson’s maiden speech. That was time when leadership was required to expose the factual fallacies on which it relied and the damage to Australia that her policy proposals would do if they were ever implemented. The Coalition should be saying now that they will put One Nation last. It doesn’t matter that some other candidate might emerge with even worse policies - it is One Nation which poses the threat.