CAMERON MILNER: The real reason behind Albanese’s tough talk on ISIS brides

While the commentariat are focused on the battle between the Liberals and One Nation in the polls, the hard heads in the Labor party are focused on the main game: Labor versus One Nation.

It’s clear One Nation will do very well in the Senate at the next election — largely at the expense of the Coalition.

But it will need to take votes off Labor if it is any chance of getting Lower House seats, or the balance of power in the Senate.

Unlike Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which benefits immensely from the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, One Nation is largely locked out of the House of Representatives because of our nation’s compulsory preferential voting system.

But as Reform shows, it doesn’t take much for the Labour vote to crumble.

And the handling of the ISIS brides saga by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke could open up fault lines in Labor’s base and send more votes to One Nation.

That explains why Anthony Albanese has cranked up his rhetoric against the 11 women stuck in Syria.

The Prime Minister has said of the brides “you make your bed, you lay in it” and that he has “nothing for contempt” for those who left this country to support an Islamic State caliphate.

Surprisingly strong words from a leader who historically has been anything but.

Albanese knows he must take a strong stand to try to prevent the stampede of Labor voters to One Nation.

The experience of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer shows the danger in trying to play catch up after the voter leak begins.

The bigger the vote for parties once considered “fringe” — be they Reform or One Nation — the more mainstream they start to look. And the more likely voters will feel comfortable in making the shift.

The next election isn’t going to be determined by how many votes One Nation gets from the Liberals, but how many from Labor.

Albanese is clearly concerned about the message being sent to Labor voters by any support for repatriating the radicalised wives and children of the death cult which is alleged to have inspired the Bondi massacre.

Pauline Hanson understands this too. Her comment as to whether there exist any “good Muslims” was strategically timed to cause maximum coverage by ensuring rightful outrage.

Labor is fighting to prevent Albanese from the same electoral slide as Starmer. It is also stress testing its campaign architecture.

The party’s national secretary Paul Erickson last week ran a full campaign, complete with visits to marginal seats by the Prime Minister and nightly fundraisers.

The by-election in Sussan Ley’s seat of Farrer is a sideshow, while Peter Malinauskas’ campaign launch showed the South Australian contest is all about One Nation versus Labor.

Erickson and Albanese would do well to learn lessons of Peter Beattie and Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland, the only State to have seen One Nation Lower House members elected and where the Coalition has actually preferenced One Nation in an attempt to unseat Labor.

In 1998, at the height of Hanson’s first rise, One Nation won 11 seats, yet Beattie was able to form a minority government. Six months later, Labor won a by-election in one of those 11 One Nation seats. In 2001, Beattie won the biggest landslide in Labor history and reduced One Nation to a single member who resigned to sit as an independent.

Similarly in 2020, Palaszczuk faced down the Liberals’ preference deal with One Nation designed to wreck her Labor majority.

Queensland Labor has fought One Nation for over 28 years.

It has learnt to sandbag the Labor base by campaigning on issues as diverse as industrial relations and being pro recreational fishers, all while going into the leafy well-to-do suburbs and burning the Liberal vote to the ground for preferencing the race-baiting One Nation.

Beattie and Palaszczuk stemmed the losses, but had their biggest wins securing urban seats from the Liberals.

Some of those seats federally are currently held by teals, but the strategy is the same. Campaign to tertiary-educated, globally-aware Liberals and to multicultural communities second and third generations who are upwardly economically mobile, but haven’t forgotten their migrant heritage.

It’s an electoral contest in which the Prime Minister is very clearly engaged, as he stands up to the worst of Hanson’s dog whistling.

Labor just needs to survive the damage being done by Tony Burke, as he prioritises safeguarding his own seat over the party’s interests.

Lucky for Burke, he’s one of Albanese’s closest supporters. Otherwise, he would surely have suffered the same knee-capping as Jim Chalmers or Tanya Plibersek.

To Albanese’s credit, this time at least he is standing up for decency and Australian values.

Labor has a fight on its hands. Erickson knows it, so does the PM.

The next election isn’t going to be determined by how many votes One Nation gets from the Liberals, but how many from Labor.