JENI O’DOWD: Angus Taylor says he’s at war with One Nation, but facts say otherwise

Angus Taylor declared war on One Nation last week, or so the headlines said after his Sydney Institute speech. But you’d have to be Blind Freddie to believe it.

The Liberal Party and One Nation are not circling each other warily from opposite corners, waiting to see who blinks first.

They are already dance partners and have been for three Federal elections, with the Coalition directing its voters to put One Nation ahead of Labor.

On its own, that wouldn’t mean much: Labor preferences the Greens every election without anyone accusing them of a merger, and preferencing a minor party ahead of your main rival is how the system works.

But the real question is whether preferencing is just this, or whether it’s the visible edge of something more deliberate.

Taylor’s public position is that One Nation is “incoherent” and “not fit to govern”. He told the Sydney Institute that Pauline Hanson’s party was a column of smoke, long on rhetoric and short on substance.

But no speech, however combative, changes the arithmetic behind it.

Later pressed on Sky News about whether he’d ever formally work with Hanson, Taylor didn’t say never.

He said there was “no plan” for it. Asked about carving up seats with One Nation, same answer: “no plan to carve up seats”.

Notice the tense. Both answers are about right now. Neither one closes the door. Politicians only get that cagey when the honest answer will cost them votes.

It’s a strange kind of war in which one side won’t rule out fighting the other.

However, Taylor’s own colleagues have confirmed what he won’t say out loud. Backbencher Tony Pasin called for the Coalition and One Nation to work hand-in-glove to defeat Labor and carve up which seats each side contests. Taylor criticised him publicly but, significantly, didn’t discipline him.

And new Liberal Party president Tony Abbott has already left the door open to closer co-operation with One Nation, which is not the language of a party keeping its distance, and certainly not the language of a party at war.

Here’s the arithmetic that explains the Coalition’s stance. Forget ideology. This is about survival.

One Nation has polled as high as 31 per cent nationally and was running nine to 10 points ahead of the Coalition in Queensland.

Pasin’s own seat of Barker overlaps two South Australian State seats that flipped from Liberal to One Nation in March.

Taylor’s seat of Hume isn’t safe from a One Nation challenge either. In the places where the Liberal brand is bleeding out to the right, Hanson’s preferences aren’t a threat. They’re a lifeline.

And Monday’s Resolve poll gives Taylor’s strategy some cover: fight Hanson in the headlines, keep the preference deal intact underneath.

The Resolve poll saw One Nation drop three points to 26 per cent nationally, and Hanson’s preferred prime minister rating fall eight points to 25, while Taylor’s climbed two points to 21 per cent.

The tide turned after Hanson’s push for an Australian “monoculture,” a comment that landed badly in a country that is anything but.

But the Coalition isn’t just losing ground to One Nation. It’s being squeezed from both directions at once, bleeding regional and outer-suburban seats to Hanson while still trying to claw back inner-city seats lost to teal independents in 2022.

That’s a party fighting a war on two fronts, and a two-front war is exactly the kind of position where a quiet ally on one side becomes too useful to give up.

The preferencing, plus a backbencher campaigning for seat-carving, plus no real punishment for him, plus the party’s own president flagging he’s open to formal terms, stops being a coincidence.

That’s a pattern, and patterns are what you get when a strategy is emerging, and nobody’s been told to say so out loud.

Now imagine Pasin’s seat-carving comments, or Abbott’s openness to a formal deal, coming from a Liberal MP in Wentworth or Kooyong.

You won’t hear it, because those are the seats the Liberals are trying to win back from teal independents. Being seen anywhere near Hanson is politically damaging there.

Once, a formal arrangement between the two parties was unthinkable.

In 1996, former prime minister John Howard disendorsed Hanson before she’d even taken her seat and declared she would never sit with the Coalition.

But now, 30 years later, the party that once vowed never to touch her is arguing internally about how tightly to embrace her, and the only disagreement is over which electorates can survive the optics.

Hanson has been open for months about her willingness to work with the Coalition, and last week she accused Taylor of doing Anthony Albanese’s work for him by attacking her rather than Labor.

But both of them agree on the one thing that matters to each party. Their shared goal is to turf out the Albanese Government, and everything else is just a performance for the cameras.

It’s the new architecture of right-of-centre politics in this country, built on preference deal by preference deal while the leaders insist in public that nothing has changed.

We are watching the opening moves, not the finished picture, and pretending otherwise is the only thing keeping the fiction alive.