CAMERON MILNER: Why Anthony Albanese should let Pauline Hanson deliver Budget reply

While Tuesday’s Albanese-Shorten co-authored Budget has been well leaked it’s this year’s Budget reply that will actually be the most important speech delivered this week.

But not the reply by Angus Taylor, but One Nation’s.

Labor will no doubt move heaven and earth to try to refuse One Nation the formal opportunity to do so.

However, after consistent public opinion polls and the crushing Farrer by-election win, One Nation can no longer be dismissed as a fringe movement.

Voters will want to hear what One Nation would do differently if they had the chance. No one wants to hear what dead man walking, Angus Taylor, has to say.

In last year’s Budget reply, Taylor helped seal the Liberals’ landslide loss by opposing tax cuts and promising higher debt for longer in his role then as shadow treasurer.

This year he’s gone from Chalmers’ little helper to complete irrelevance.

Taylor is now Opposition Leader in name only. He can blame Sussan Ley or spin that that Liberals copped an anti-establishment vote in the Farrer by-election all they like — no-one is buying it.

The Liberals couldn’t even get 50 people in a room to listen to Taylor’s nauseating, cliché-riddled pollie-waffle of a concession speech on Saturday night.

Farrer was all bad for the Liberals. They take from it a vote barely in double digits, a vacuous “leader’s” speech to an empty room and the stark reality voters are on the move to One Nation.

Anthony Albanese, who didn’t even have the guts to run a candidate, must also reconcile that a hell of a lot of now-former Labor voters went over to One Nation in Farrer.

The Nationals recorded a solid re-entry into the electorate and that’s a credit to new leader Matt Canavan who worked his heart out on the hustings. But it was still nowhere near enough.

Meanwhile, Labor is finally implementing the Shorten Budget we had to have, but will want the debate about its merits to be held against the enfeebled Liberals rather than the surging One Nation.

Labor’s next election fight for survival isn’t against the Liberal-National Coalition, but against One Nation. It’s the only party showing it can take primary votes from Labor.

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his UK Labour suffered catastrophic results in council elections, losing a number of seats to the Greens but overwhelmingly to Nigel Farage’s Reform.

Reform took votes from both Labour and the Conservatives.

One Nation is doing the same here in Australia. In fact, three in four Labor held seats in South Australia are a two-party contest between Labor and One Nation.

Consistent national polls put One Nation now ahead of the Coalition as the voters preferred alternative government to Albanese’s Labor.

Albanese’s Labor though — just like Starmer’s Labour — hides behind its sneers while looking down its nose at One Nation voters, telling ABC Radio audiences: “One Nation can never be a party of government”.

So, let’s have the debate if Labor is so assured of its position.

Don’t let Taylor’s weakness be Albanese’s only electoral strength.

Labor should have the courage to take on One Nation by allowing the party a Budget reply opportunity so voters can hear what both sides have to offer.

What’s Labor so afraid of that they will back in arcane parliamentary protocol and give the microphone only to Taylor, thinking that somehow avoids Hanson with a megaphone outside Parliament?

Labor has a genuine fight on its hands. It should, like Labor leaders including former Queensland premier Peter Beattie before, take the electoral fight to One Nation, not by ignoring or dismissing their voters, but by having the policy debates out in the open.

Albanese has an infamous glass jaw and maybe that’s the reason he’s shirking the fight. Who can forget the months of funk after his Voice to Parliament being rejected so comprehensively.

But for Labor’s sake, the courage they have finally found to deliver a Labor, reforming Budget must also be matched by the courage to take One Nation on at every opportunity.

Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor State secretary