Pauline Hanson’s suggestion One Nation could help Coalition form government raises merger questions

Pauline Hanson’s suggestion One Nation would be open to forming a minority government with the Coalition has opened up a question about whether it needs to merge with the Liberal and National parties to ever get into power and dilute multiculturalism in Australia.

Despite beating the Liberal Party in most opinion polls, One Nation’s best chance of success is winning a swag of regional seats that have long been National Party heartland.

Even then, DemosAU polling shows One Nation winning just 12 seats as a protest party, mainly in Queensland and NSW that are several hours’ drive away from Brisbane or Sydney.

Taking seats off the Nationals would hardly take the centre-right of politics closer to power unless the Liberal Party got its act together and won outer-suburban, battler seats off Labor that traditionally back the winner.

Under that scenario, the Liberal and National parties would still fall far short of the 76 seats needed to form a minority government, prompting Senator Hanson to agree with a suggestion from Sky News host Chris Kenny they would need her help to ever get back into power.

“Of course. That’s the only way to move forward because I’m not going to be government,” she said on Wednesday night.

“I am a conservative at heart and I would work with them to give them supply.”

One Nation toyed with the idea of propping up former Queensland premier Rob Borbidge’s Coalition government in 1998, after winning 11 seats in a hung parliament, including six from Labor and five from the National Party — only for Labor’s Peter Beattie to come to power with support from a regional independent.

Senator Hanson has, for now, ruled out the idea of propping up the Liberal and National parties in a prospective hung national parliament, let alone merging with them.

“Would I join up to the rabble they are at the moment? No way in the wide world.”

David Oldfield, a One Nation co-founder who was elected as a NSW upper house MP in 1999 with the party, said One Nation should only ever form government if it had the most seats, arguing propping up a Coalition government would stop it from winning over disaffected Labor voters upset about climate change policies and multiculturalism.

“For One Nation to enact the policies it has, it needs to be the lead act, not the support,” he told The Nightly.

“If there’s going to be any kind of coalition, it’s going to be a One Nation government, it’s not going to be a three-way split.

“One Nation needs Labor voters to switch and it’s difficult to get Labor voters to switch if all they think they’re doing is creating a Coalition of the Liberal, National and One Nation group because that gives them the government they wouldn’t support in the first place.”

A series of polls now show One Nation beating the Liberal Party with One Nation having 26 per cent support in a new Redbridge Group poll, ahead of the traditional Coalition parties on 19 per cent. Labor was first with 34 per cent support.

A mainstream conservative party being surpassed at an election by a new, right-wing populist party opposed to multiculturalism would be novel for Australia.

But it’s been happening across Europe, including in Austria where the populist and anti-Islam Freedom Party two years ago came first, overtaking the Austrian People’s Party, the traditional mainstream conservative grouping.

A realignment of conservative politics isn’t unprecedented either in a Westminster parliamentary democracy.

In Canada, the establishment Progressive Conservative Party was left just two seats in the lower house after the 1993 election, with voters delivering a savage verdict on its new 7 per cent Goods and Services Tax.

The Reform Party of Canada, catering to regional protest voters in the nation’s oil-rich western provinces, won 52 seats on a platform of opposing bilingualism and multiculturalism.

Preston Manning’s group continued to win more seats than the Progressive Conservative Party at the 1997 election and again in 2000 as the renamed Canadian Alliance.

By 2003, a new Conservative Party of Canada was formed as a merger between the diminished Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance.

Stephen Harper, a former chief policy officer with the old Reform Party from the Alberta province, became Conservative prime minister three years later, ending 13 years of centre-left Liberal rule.

In Australia, the conservative side of politics now only governs in states and territories where the Liberal and National parties have merged or there’s only one mainstream, centre-right party running against a crowded field of populist parties.

That includes Senator Hanson’s home state of Queensland where the centre-right of politics has only ever won majorities in the 21st century under the LNP banner. The old National Party, on their own, haven’t won an election in the Sunshine State since 1986.

But to change Australia, One Nation would have to overtake the establishment and replace the Liberal Party and a reformed Coalition as the main conservative force. It won’t bring about a political revolution by merging with it.

The party of Hanson would need to become more professional, campaign-wise, to win over both disaffected Labor and L-NP voters at a national level like it did in Queensland in 1998, from the outer suburbs to provincial regional towns, but with a majority.

These are the people who can’t pay their bills or buy a house and are concerned about high immigration levels.

“Is there one, absolute standout issue? Prominently, in people’s face it would be multiculturalism and immigration and all of the disasters that have taken place,” Mr Oldfield said.

“Changing your vote is always about being angry. You don’t change your vote because you’re happy.”