BEN HARVEY: One Nation and the art of the possible

“I hate the burqa. Hate it.”

As usual, Pauline Hanson didn’t wallow in shades of grey when she headlined a business breakfast in Perth on Tuesday.

As master of ceremonies, I got a taste of what it’s like in what Liberal MP Tim Wilson calls “the orange paddock of despair”.

Her condemnation of the divisive religious dress was one of several statements that justified a security presence that made the Strait of Hormuz look like a garden party.

I felt like a decoy ginger while I was on stage.

For better or worse, this diminutive 72-year-old lady is not for turning.

She was speaking publicly a few days after her “fact” finding mission to Britain which started with a controversial discussion with white supremacist Tommy Robinson and ended with a controversial White Lotus discussion with One Nation purse-holder in chief, Gina Rinehart.

Most politicians would lie low amid such contention but for Hanson, this was Groundhog Day.

She was a hit with the crowd, but you always are when you’re preaching to the converted. After 30 years on the hustings she knows what her audience likes to hear.

“I tried to introduce my Bill, and they wouldn’t allow me to introduce it,” she said when contextualising her Senate burqa stunt.

“So, I thought ‘OK, well, if you don’t want to ban it, well, then I’ll go and wear it.’ That’s when I went upstairs and I ran in my office and I put it on. They didn’t like that either.”

She had the crowd eating out of her hand.

As for the crowd, it was a diverse group, if not in colour (they were pale to the point of translucence) then in demography.

There were as many women in their 80s as there were men in their 20s. For every well-moneyed husband and wife there was a suburban couple who had clearly had to save up to afford the ticket price.

Judging from their differing reactions to what Hanson was speaking about, One Nation voters have a few things in common.

They like calling a spade a spade.

There was a huge round of applause when she said “people say to me ‘but you’re only saying what we’re thinking’. But I’ve got the guts to get out there and say it.”

They don’t like the Greens.

“You tell me one of the Greens that you want to spend time with,” she said to raucous laughter.

“And who’d want to spend time with Lidia Thorpe? Not me. I can’t stand even being one seat away from her.”

They do like the Australian flag.

The promise that “under a One Nation government, there’s only one flag, and it’s called the Australian flag” received one of the biggest cheers.

And they don’t much like journalists.

When The Nightly’s editor-in-chief Christopher Dore asked whether a ban on immigration from certain Muslim countries constituted a form of the White Australia policy, he was heckled.

And when Hanson shot back, the crowd backed her to the hilt with cheering and clapping.

“No, it’s not,” she said defiantly.

“No, it’s not. No. No, it’s got nothing to do with that. That’s not to do with the White Australia policy at all. So don’t go there with me. I’ll tell you what, because I won’t stand for it.”

Hanson used her keynote address to identify this country’s problems.

It is hard to fault her logic that Australia’s immigration, housing, tax and energy policies are a mess.

The missing piece of the One Nation story is what are the solutions?

Hanson says there will be more clues coming.

“I’m not going to give you a taxation policy because that’s something that I’ll be working on before the next election that I want to take to the people,” she said.

That’s fair enough, but she and her policy advisers better get cracking because the problems she has identified are almost intractable.

Politicians know that everyone campaigns in poetry and governs in prose but One Nation’s policies need to measure up not just as sound bites but by the Australian Constitution, United Nation charters, legally enforceable alliances and the international bond market.

How do you reign in overseas arrivals without tanking the economy or betraying the country’s rich migration heritage?

How do you stamp out fundamentalist Islamism while respecting the fundamental human right of freedom of religion?

How does Hanson reconcile this statement: “My main aim is to get our debt down from $1.2 trillion”, with this one: “stop taxing people to the hilt”.

How does this goal: “governments have to rein in their spending”, exist alongside a plan to give every illegal immigrant a free ticket home?

Hanson says she’ll cut the ABC’s budget but killing Big Ted isn’t going to pay for the 50,000 extra Border Force officers we’re going to need to make Australia great again.

Will One Nation, as the party of government, be like the dog that caught the car?

Bewildered as to what to do with that which it had been chasing for so long?