JENI O’DOWD: Guns and superannuation expose One Nation's true colours

For years, One Nation’s rise has been easy to explain. People are worried about immigration and our major political parties not listening to them.

Pauline Hanson was happy to air those grievances, in particular people’s fears that our immigration levels are too high. That’s been the whole story. Vote One Nation, send a message on immigration, move on with your life.

But now that story is falling apart, with two issues forcing people to really think about their support for One Nation: gun ownership and superannuation.

Anthony Albanese and the politically savvy NSW Premier Chris Minns announced a Federal-State gun buyback deal on Sunday, the next step in the response to the Bondi Beach shooting.

The move will force about 50,000 gun owners to hand back their weapons under new ownership limits. Between them, they’re holding up to 274,000 legally registered firearms, roughly a quarter of every gun on the State’s register.

This is the most serious tightening of gun laws since Port Arthur, introduced after 15 people were shot dead at a Hanukkah celebration less than a year ago.

Pauline Hanson’s response was that the decision was “crucifying” law-abiding gun owners.

Her argument is that it wasn’t the guns, it was the people behind them, and that taxpayers shouldn’t be paying to fix it.

The party’s firearms policy states it “opposes firearm reclassification, ownership caps, and government-funded buyback schemes imposed by Federal and State governments,” and calls itself a “proud champion of Australia’s responsible firearm owners and industry”.

Minns has said he is ready to fight an election on this. He also says One Nation doesn’t just oppose the buyback, it wants to unwind the anti-terrorism legislation passed last year in response to the same attack.

And then, on Sunday, Hanson opened another door entirely.

She told News24 compulsory super was “broken” and Australians doing it tough should be able to raid it now.

She later posted a clarification saying she wasn’t calling for an end to compulsory super, only easier access to it, before doubling down again within 48 hours, telling supporters online that “Jim Chalmers should keep his hands off your super”.

And that made it an election battle.

Chalmers called superannuation one of the defining issues of the next campaign, accusing One Nation and the Coalition of running a “dangerous and divisive anti-worker, anti-super ideology” that would “absolutely decimate” the retirement savings of millions of Australians.

Whichever version of Hanson’s position is the real one, the instinct behind it should worry anyone doing the maths on an ageing population.

The number of Australians aged 65 and older is set to almost double within 30 years.

Let people spend part of their super now, and you haven’t fixed the cost-of-living crisis; you’ve just moved the bill onto a much smaller pool of future taxpayers, at the exact moment the country can least afford it.

I know immigration is a huge issue, and people are right to be angry about the huge numbers of people entering Australia.

And we can thank Hanson for giving such a loud voice to people’s concerns, which arguably led Angus Taylor to announce a plan to cap net overseas migration to under 180,000.

Labor still won’t say a number out loud. One Nation wants the intake at 130,000 permanent visas, a figure so low it would tip Australia into negative net migration.

Immigration’s effects build slowly, spread across housing, schools and hospitals over years, easy to feel but hard to pin on one decision.

Gun control and superannuation do not. One is about 15 people who will never come home, a Government trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and a party saying no, actually, the priority here is the inconvenience to the gun owner. The second is about something people save their entire lives for and feel passionate about.

This is where a lot of soft One Nation support will silently crack, because supporting a party’s line on immigration doesn’t automatically mean you should support everything else stapled to it.

A year ago, none of this mattered much, because One Nation winning government was unthinkable. It no longer is.

Newspoll has had them ahead of Labor on primary vote for the first time since Julia Gillard was prime minister. Roy Morgan has them at 26 per cent, clear of Labor.

They’ve just won their first ever Lower House seat, at the Farrer by-election. This isn’t a protest vote anymore. It’s a party that could genuinely end up holding the balance of power, or more.

And guns and superannuation are just the start of what people haven’t clocked.

One Nation’s own website lays out, in impressive detail, exactly how it plans to cut $90 billion a year in government spending.

Almost every line item comes with a precise figure attached. Abolish the Department of Climate Change: $30b. Abolish the National Indigenous Australians Agency, in the party’s own words, to “bypass the Aboriginal industry”: up to $12.5b. Review $3b worth of medications approved for the PBS during the pandemic. Reduce funding for arts and multicultural programs.

Hanson also wants Welcome to Country gone — not reviewed, gone — “shut that all down” in schools, government departments and official events, funding cut entirely, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag no longer flown alongside the Australian one at official functions.

Schools would be redirected to “promote patriotism” instead.

The ABC would become a subscription service in the cities, funded only in regional and remote areas. SBS, in Hanson’s words, would simply be “gone”. No plan for what happens to multicultural broadcasting once it is gone, despite Australia being a proud multicultural society.

And I’ve written before about One Nation’s abortion policy, but it’s worth remembering it exists: reopening a settled debate, reducing gestational limits and introducing mandatory counselling.

A party polling at 26 per cent doesn’t get to be treated like a protest vote anymore, and it doesn’t get to have its firearms policy, its views on superannuation, its funding cuts and its culture war positions waved through just because its immigration line is the one voters actually like to hear.

At the ballot box, you don’t get to unbundle a party’s platform. You get the whole thing.

And for the first time, voters are being shown exactly what the whole thing looks like, not in a policy document nobody reads, but in real time, against a tragedy most of the country is still grieving and a fight over money people spend their whole lives saving.

That’s the difference between liking parts of what a party says and actually wanting them in charge.