PAUL MURRAY: If Pauline Hanson wants power, we need to be shown the plan

It’s time people stopped making excuses for Pauline Hanson.

If her supporters think One Nation is a genuine party of government, then she has to be measured by the same metrics as any other political leader.

After 30 years in politics, Hanson is not going to get any better. She’s not going to get more coherent, she’s not going to get smarter. She’ll still be pulling her foot out of her mouth a lot of the time.

That said, she also doesn’t deserve to be verballed for things she didn’t say. Like wanting the White Australia policy back.

For someone who has watched her closely over those four decades, Hanson’s biggest failing is that she has never shown an ability to devise better, fully detailed economic and social policies and explain them to the nation. Which is a political fundamental.

What you see with Hanson is what the Lodge will get if enough Australians are serious about One Nation being a real contender and its leader a potential prime minister. And that’s a pretty basic package.

It is past irony that people who think everyman Albo is not up to governing the country are prepared to plump for the even more challenged Hanson.

It suggests that responding to an opinion poll can just be a risk-free expression of frustration.

There was nothing new in Hanson’s commentary while overseas recently when she bagged the direction Australia is taking and cried out against our unprecedented drop in living standards, the worst in the developed world.

She did so while warning about what she was seeing in Britain, which is ahead of us on the slippery slope to disaster.

And we do need to pay close attention to what has been happening there, both economically and socially. Because it provides a good template for what not to do to make our problems worse.

Hanson found some friendly faces in Britain, mainly among those from rising political parties like hers which also thrive on grievance, much of it founded in migration.

The growth in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and even more radical Restore Britain has spooked Labour, which crazily thinks that going even further left is the solution. So does Albanese.

Labour in government has orchestrated a quiet coup by which Andy Burnham this week became the Prime Minister with the imprimatur of an overwhelming majority of his party — the 379 of them who supported his uncontested leadership — to radically change its political direction without any mandate from the voters.

What does it say about British Labour that not one of their 403 MPs in the House of Commons thought they could do a better job than someone who had quit the parliament nine years ago after being twice rejected for leadership?

It says they are desperate. And out of ideas. And contemptuous of the public.

The saddest part about Burnham’s elevation is not that it’s a stealthy revolution, but that it’s really just another bit of political marketing. On his first day as Prime Minister, Burnham contrived to go to a homeless shelter in London where he “helped” prepare the breakfast. Yawn.

“Burnham’s early-morning trip to the homeless charity seemed designed to send a signal to the country about his priorities, and to underscore his pledge to tackle social issues and reshape British politics,” the leftist New York Times reported in a story run in this newspaper.

So here we go again. Another unquestioning media honeymoon. Why didn’t any of the three journalists by-lined in that report resort to the available facts? If Burnham wants to parade the homeless as a political prop, look at his record on homelessness.

As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, he promised on coming to office in 2017 to eradicate rough sleeping in the city by 2020, making the gesture of committing 15 per cent of his salary to the cause.

While homelessness fell in the early years, he admitted in 2019 he would miss the target. From a low in 2021 during Covid, when national policies were in play, Manchester’s rough sleeper figures then doubled in the final years of his mayoralty, ending up just shy of where he started.

He similarly missed his targets for building social housing, pledging 10,000 council homes but managing only 2368, leaving a record on both policies of over-promising and under-achieving.

Shades of Jacinda Ardern.

None of that is hard to find for reporters who are prepared to look and very relevant to his new promises.

The New York Times mob also reported this: “On a day of ritual and ceremony, Burnham pledged in a short speech outside No. 10 Downing St. to ‘put the care of people at the heart of everything I do.’

“He described his move into Britain’s top job as a ‘circuit-breaker moment’ to change the direction taken by a succession of neo-liberal governments over the past four decades that favoured privatisation and de-industrialised the country.”

Even though Burnham was clearly signalling a major lurch to the left, there was no attempt to examine those claims, or even contextualise them.

While the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were vanguard neo-liberals, they ended in 1997, having reformed the nation’s economy. Labour returned through Tony Blair who came up with his so-called Third Way, a shift away from neo-liberalism without rolling back the Conservative reforms, which later increased under Gordon Brown, a state interventionist.

The shift away continued under Conservatives David Cameron and Theresa May until Boris Johnson killed off neo-liberalism with massive state spending and intervention during the Covid era.

By the time Rishi Sunak arrived in 2022, it was a post-neoliberal economic environment shaped by Brexit, the pandemic and global supply shocks.

So Burnham was blatantly using long-gone neoliberalism as a bogeyman to camouflage his intentions to impose a new form of socialism on the UK with what he self-importantly terms “Manchesterism” as its model.

In his world, neoliberalism is shorthand for “austerity” which to economic rationalists just means necessary spending restraint. Anyone watching the Albanese Government would understand.

And anyone wanting to examine Burnham’s record on fiscal management at Greater Manchester will get a feel for what lies ahead. A mountain of debt.

UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government data show that borrowings rose by 65 per cent in the first two years under Burnham to a peak of £1.56b ($3b) in 2018-19. Greater Manchester’s debt was £964m when he arrived and £1.34b when he left, up 39 per cent.

His biggest success in Manchester is held to be in transport by bringing buses back under public control with capped £2 adult single fares and free travel for 16–18-year-olds.

Shades of Rita Saffioti.

Manchester’s public transport network now runs at a deficit of £227 million per year. That is more than double the previous subsidies paid under private ownership.

Public sector net debt in the UK is at 95.1 per cent of GDP — compared to about 55 per cent in Australia — which gives Burnham little room to move without tanking the economy.

There is plenty of criticism of the right-wing parties challenging Labour — and of One Nation, too — as being “populist”, mainly for their approach to migration.

But Burnham is offering populist socialism based around as-yet unexplained economic policies that will need new revenue sources from somewhere if he doesn’t want to bury the country further in debt.

We’re still at the magic pudding stage for the costings of most of Burnham’s slowly-emerging populist promises, but the detail behind his first move to take the 5 per cent VAT off power bills — saving an average household around £45 a year — is illuminating.

The VAT drop is about £850 million this financial year, supposedly to be met by axing former PM Sir Keir Starmer’s plan for a digital ID scheme, costed at £1.8 billion over three years.

But it was never funded by Starmer, so neither is this. Hardly a credible start to economic management.

And that ID scheme was Starmer’s attempt to outflank Reform as a way to fight illegal immigration. Burnham has now shown his hand: he thinks cost-of-living populism will trump social cohesion populism.

Which brings us back to Hanson.

The resurgence of One Nation is either the real deal this time or another false dawn which would dangerously further dent confidence in our political system. It’s time for Hanson to show-and-tell so Australians can judge.

After listening to her speech at the Leadership Matters breakfast on Tuesday, The West’s Jessica Page wrote: “The fine print of her proposed solutions doesn’t matter. Yet.

“She’s vowed to listen first, provide answers later, and argues that’s more than Canberra has done.”

Seriously? What proposed solutions? And after 30 years of endless complaining, more listening?

The media demands immediate answers from the Liberals and expects sound policy from the government, but Hanson gets an extended leave pass?

Please explain.