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You have probably heard of “the Overton window”. It’s one of those faux-academic jargon phrases with which our language is increasingly cluttered. The eponymous window – named after the American social theorist Joseph Overton, who came up with the metaphor – defines the acceptable boundaries of public discussion. When those boundaries are exceeded, commonly by an iconoclastic politician who says something that no-one else has dared to say before, it is sometimes described as “shifting the Overton window”.
Nobody in our recent politics has shifted the Overton window more than Pauline Hanson. Her greatest impact has been in her assault on multiculturalism: what had been settled bipartisan policy for decades is now increasingly under challenge.
For 30 years, Hanson has built her reputation as the plain-spoken Aussie who dares to say the unsayable. Even when so much of what she says is appalling, she has nevertheless thrived on the disdain of the political establishment. Its response to her unfiltered prejudices only reinforced her outsider status. As respect for that establishment eroded, she became the main beneficiary. That was not so much because of her ideas as her image: we love a fighter, the person who stands up to Canberra, and Pauline seemed to fit the bill perfectly. But in enshrining her as a kind of battlers’ Joan of Arc, her legions need to be careful what they wish for.
When One Nation was a marginal presence, Hanson was easier to ignore. Today, when nearly one in three people tell pollsters she is their preference to be prime minister, the issues she raises dictate the parameters of much public debate. The Overton window has blown wide open.
Her popularity comes, however, at the cost of much greater scrutiny. It is that which may ultimately prove her undoing.
Hanson’s declaration that she could be prime minister changed the standard by which she is judged – for her admirers as much as by her critics. The question her supporters can no longer avoid is whether she is equal to the nation’s hardest job.
Notwithstanding her outsider’s appeal, do they really believe that someone whose only demonstrated skill has been as a political stirrer really has what it takes to run the country? Of course, there will always be those members of the “plague on both your houses” crowd whose reaction will be: “Well, she couldn’t be any worse than what we’ve already got”. Actually, she could be.
Viewing Hanson as an alternative prime minister has widened the scrutiny not just of her own capacities, but of her policies. Until now, it has been just a few of her unconventional pronouncements that got the public’s attention. Many of One Nation’s policies escaped attention, lost in the media frenzy around those utterances, together with the eye-catching stunts. No longer. As an aspirational party of government, attention will now focus on all of its policies. When that happens, even her devotees will have cause to think twice.
Obviously, there is the low-hanging fruit (pun intended) of people such as Malcolm Roberts. While all political parties have strange people in their ranks, this man would be a senior member of her cabinet. Do conservatives flirting with One Nation really want, sitting on the National Security Committee, a Putin-admiring man who promoted antisemitic material and appears more rabidly anti-American than the loopiest Green?
Just as Senator Roberts’ unconventional foreign policy ideas have hitherto escaped notice – until revealed in this masthead last week – so too have many of One Nation’s other alarming policies. While many of Hanson’s headline-grabbing remarks may give her sympathisers a warm inner glow, once they start ferreting around in the One Nation policy cupboard, they will find much to horrify them.
How many of Pauline’s blue-collar supporters will feel comfortable with her plan to make workers much easier to sack? How many of her libertarian sympathisers know about her plan to introduce a national identity card?
How many of her admirers in rural Australia have thought about the consequences of her policy for the compulsory sale of foreign-owned agricultural holdings? This policy would force onto the market an estimated 14 per cent of Australian farmland, creating a massive glut which would immediately crash the value of every Australian rural property. Since those assets are commonly highly geared, the collapse in land values could put thousands of family farms into negative equity, potentially triggering the debt covenants in their mortgages. One Nation’s policy would be a calamity for rural Australia – yet I suspect few of Hanson’s admirers in country electorates are aware of it.
This is the “eternity of pain” of which Angus Taylor warned in his speech to the Sydney Institute on July 9 – pain which Hanson’s supporters would feel sooner and sharper than most other Australians. Taylor’s decision to muscle up to One Nation came later than it should have done but, for all the reasons I argued in this column recently, it was absolutely the right call. There can be no turning back from it now, however much some antic voices on the Liberal Party’s extreme fringes might object.
The thing about Dr Overton’s window is that, however much it may shift, it never goes away. For the next two years, Pauline Hanson will be in the middle of the frame.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK. He served as a Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
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George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.From our partners
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