CAMERON MILNER: Hanson’s Sicilian sojourn won’t stop One Nation’s march

The polling trend is Pauline Hanson’s best friend. Individual polls mean far less than the direction of their travel.

This isn’t a straight line sprint, but a gruelling Mount Panorama race and the winner is determined over many laps.

The breathless commentariat from Canberra pour over polls like each is a portent of exactly what’s happening. It isn’t, they are nearly all within margins of error.

Yet commentators have in the past week wasted column inches on whether a White Lotus moment or a Tommy Robinson podcast was the end of Pauline Hanson.

Newsflash, it wasn’t.

The reality is our politics is fundamentally changed by the rise in One Nation.

As keffiyeh-wearing inner city types choke on their chai teas as they proselytise about tolerance, voters who work for a living are fed up with government.

A dam wall has broken and Australians are prepared to openly back One Nation as a solution to our nation’s problems. This is no longer a fringe movement, but an orange army of young and old, city and regional voters for whom the cosy duopoly of Labor and Liberal has them feeling cheated and dudded in equal measure.

One Nation, Labor and the Coalition are in a three way tussle for supremacy.

Each party is fighting each other as much as they are their traditional opponents.

Labor is losing votes to One Nation because of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and for Anthony Albanese’s lies. Labor’s primary barely has a 3 in front of it. Albanese has done to the Labor vote what he said he wished he could do with Kylie.

The Liberals are no better. They are struggling to keep a 2 in front of their vote. Leader Angus Taylor looks out of place and isn’t match fit for the pub brawl that is Aussie politics today.

In the midst of this, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a genuine third force.

The party already had a base in Australia. More recently it has mopped up the right-of-centre minor party vote, has taken half the Coalition’s vote and about 15 per cent of Labor’s to consistently hold second place on primary.

One Nation will continue to want to grow at the expense of both the Coalition and Labor.

This explains Hanson’s “monoculture” speech at the Press Club and even the Tommy Robinson walk through. Both were designed o continue to wring voters from the Coalition on migration generally and radical Islam specifically.

It might have had some ABC types tutt tutting, but they weren’t the audience.

Likewise, Taylor’s gibes at One Nation were about locking in wavering Liberal voters as they considered defecting.

Both of course say they are opposed to the weak, lying and policy lazy Albanese.

Albanese of course says he isn’t concerned about One Nation as breaks his promise to First Nation’s leaders to attend the Garma Festival — the place he launched his failed Voice to Parliament plan — such was his fear of the images it would send to teetering Labor voters.

Labor will use its national conference this week — the last with Wayne Swan as party president — to talk to former Labor voters, now One Nation ones, deeply concerned about the Bondi massacre, red carpets for ISIS brides and a firebombed synagogue.

Labor is in overdrive appealing to their remaining voters who are thinking of jumping to One Nation.

It’s no longer a Queensberry rules boxing match, but a Joe Rogan-inspired three-way cage fight in which everyone is the enemy. Three will enter, only one will exit victorious.

At any given moment one or the other will get a cheap shot in while the other two are wrestling hard. Like the polls, it’s not any one kick or punch, but the overall momentum of the fight that needs to be watched.

The trend of the polls is the only critical piece of information that can be relied upon, even as individual polls bounce around.

The trend currently predicts the fight between the Coalition and One Nation will deliver a Labor return. A vote for either Taylor or Hanson will end up being a vote for Albanese.

This is being seen in Victoria with Jacinta Allan’s desperately unpopular Government in with a real chance of holding on as school prefect turned Liberal leader Jess Wilson has her momentum gate crashed by One Nation.

The polls certainly aren’t friendly to Albanese, consistently in deep negative territory. He is now the longest serving, least liked party leader on record, but One Nation may still be the only reason Labor is returned in 2028 federally.

Meanwhile Hanson will take comfort from the trend of the polls which, despite the commentariat, is consistently holding second place and is the only reason why a promise breaking, small target, mediocre Albanese Government is under any pressure at all.

Individual polls are just click bait, your only friend in politics is the trend and Hanson’s got it and continues to hold on to it poll after poll.