What Will Moira Do Next?

Last Friday I hosted one of my former colleagues for luncheon at the Savage Club.

Whilst waiting for my guest to arrive, I grabbed a cup of coffee and settled down in the Social Room (the large downstairs bar) with a copy of the Australian Financial Review to update myself on business news.

As soon as I opened the paper, I saw an ad covering both of the next two pages for the United Australia Party (ie Clive Palmer’s occasional political vehicle), featuring Clive and his current sidekick, Senator Babet.

Hmmm… I thought. It looks like Clive is making another comeback. Then I turned to the companies index overleaf to check which publicly listed companies of which I am a shareholder were being covered in that issue.

The United Australia Party (aka Palmer United Party, aka Trumpet Of Patriots) has had a rather interesting and eccentric history over the past 13 years, as well as exerting a more directly plutocratic influence over Australian politics than most billionaires would attempt.

But then, Clive is not exactly subtle.

Choosing to resurrect the UAP at this particular moment, 12 months after the most recent federal election was called, and when Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging unprecedentedly in the polls as an alternative conservative protest party, does seem like an uncommonly eccentric decision by our most entertaining homegrown billionaire.

It was not however the most interesting political news of the past few days.

I would consider that the decision of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party yesterday to choose an alternative candidate rather than Moira Deeming MLC for the lead spot on the Western Metropolitan Province ticket for the upcoming state election to be a much more interesting outcome.

In other words, Moira has been dumped by her party, and is not going to re-contest her seat at the state election, at least not as a Liberal.

The news for much of the past 24 hours has speculated on what will happen next.

Given that the reappearance of Senator Babet and his sponsor Clive Palmer in political advertisements three days ago, it is moot perhaps to observe that the good Senator today has denounced the dis endorsement of Moira as a a disastrous decision for the Liberals, and expressed the hope that she defects and that everyone stops voting for them.

Of course he would say that. He narrowly beat out a Liberal for the sixth senate spot four years ago and is up for re-election next year.

I was not particularly surprised about Moira losing her endorsement. At various times in the past three years, I have expressed my grave reservations in this blog about Moira’s judgement, priorities and impact as a Liberal MP. I fear that her impact has been quite destructive to the chances of the Coalition at the next state election.

It also has, through her initial activities to pursue the expulsions of local Liberals who campaigned for Fred Ackerman after he decided to run against her, damaged the local Liberal grassroots base.

The question is what Moira will do now?

All the major news sources – the ABC, the Murdoch Press, and Fairfax – have speculated that Moira will defect to One Nation. The president of One Nation has described her as ‘courageous’ and said that she would be welcome in One Nation.

When I saw Moira Deeming speak to the Collins Club three years ago, just after she had been expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party, she described the Liberals as ‘The Party that I love’. Given that in that same speech she spoke about her non-Liberal background, and her first disillusioning encounters with Young Liberals, I suspect that her love has limits, and that those limits have been reached.

Joining One Nation must be very tempting right now for her. In the five state elections since the introduction of proportional representation to the Legislative Council, the Liberals have won a second seat in Western Metropolitan only twice. In the other three elections, that seat has fallen twice to the DLP, and once to Catherine Cummings under the Hinch Justice Party umbrella (a party which she immediately deserted).

It is very likely right now that One Nation could take that second seat, the one which makes up the two out of the five which get won by right wing parties, but usually not by the Liberals.

Will she join One Nation, or won’t she? Only time will tell, but my money is on an announcement within the next week.

Goodbye Len Deighton

There’s a somewhat irreverent website I like to visit for some dark amusement. It’s called Deathlist. It’s a British website run by people of approximately my age, and probably started off as a game played in a university cafe in the late 1980s, where a circle of friends would come up with a list of 50 people likely to die over the course of the coming year. The list eventually became a somewhat viral website.

The rules of Deathlist are simple. Only 25 people from the previous year’s list can reappear, and all the people on the list have to be famous enough to get mentioned on the UK media for something other than a condition causing them to die.

The obituaries are irreverent and perhaps rather insensitive (eg the heading ‘Mary Tyler No Moore’, or ‘Duke of Deadinburgh’, or ‘From Sceptre to Spectre’ – well, you get the gist) but funny in that horrid way that most of us would find, but be too polite to admit.

So I just took a look at Deathlist 2026 to see how their predictions are going so far this year, and noticed that Len Deighton passed away yesterday.

Deighton was an author, principally of spy novels. In my mid twenties I read several of them, namely the three trilogies he wrote about Bernard Sampson, the anti-hero outsider of British intelligence, someone who was loyal, but distrusted, repeatedly betrayed, and feared by his superiors. They were quite enjoyable, in their own way, and mostly went a long way to set Deighton up in the company of Robert Ludlum and John Carre as a leading author of spy fiction.

Ian Fleming, mind you, was in a class of his own, if you want my opinion. [Read The Spy Who Loved Me and see if you don’t agree.]

There were a few lines in various of his novels which still call out to me across the years. There is one passage, narrated by Sampson, where he discusses the French occupation zone of Berlin, describing it as given to the French ‘so they could play at conquerors’. Sharp and cynical and totally accurate.

And then there is Goodbye Mickey Mouse, his novel about a Second World War US pilot stationed in England. I think I might have read it in my late teens, if not my early twenties, but definitely a few years before I read the nine Bernard Sampson novels. There is one part where two of the characters are discussing the nature of war, and how men welcome it as a way to escape from the reality of their lives.

It’s very dark, but not quite bleak, and it has stuck in my mind for well over thirty years. He was much more than a spy novelist, his work approached serious literature.

Goodbye Len Deighton.

A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage

I still buy and read books, although I much prefer to idle a few hours away on the iPad with the Kindle app, reading what is on offer via Kindle Unlimited (my preference is for Sharpe and Hornblower imitations about the Napoleonic War).

Browsing physical books in an actual bookshop is still a simple and real pleasure for me, one which I do not envisage ever giving up.

Recently, when browsing in QBD at Highpoint West, I came across a new release called ‘A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage’.

With a title like that, I had to buy it, and I greatly enjoyed it, with the tension and black humour building as I got further into the book.

One very small detail which stood out for me, which really sets this book apart, is that the first husband (and victim) of the narrator happens to be an Australian, who is first introduced to us wearing a Western Bulldogs cap.

As this happens to be my team (and as we won today, I happened to have noticed that a few people besides myself were wearing such caps when out and about), I am pretty chuffed about this little detail. I have gone as far as contacting the author via instagram to ask what caused him to add this little detail, as it is very intriguing to me, but alas, no response.

I doubt that this book will be studied by scholars in the decades to come, with no Penguin Classic annotated edition to come out, so I expect that this question will remain unanswered.

But I suspect that this is the first time that, outside of Australia, any mention of the Western Bulldogs will have made it into literature, even the crime noir variety.

Iran – Will Anything Actually Change?

AI creates some very weird and wonderful fake videos these days. One which brought a chuckle to me (despite the gravity of the situation) was an AI revision of the Flock Of Seagulls hit (their only hit FYI) ‘I ran’. Trump, with his distinctively wild hair, takes the place of the lead singer of that band at the moving synth keyboard, singing ‘Iran’ instead of ‘I ran’.

Since I last reflected on Iran in this blog, some 49 senior regime officials have entered the afterlife thanks to American and Israeli aerial bombardment. It probably is a much higher number by now, but I stopped paying attention to the count early on in this bemusing war.

One of those casualties was the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, which represents the crossing of a long held line where heads of state usually do not get intentionally killed by their enemies in a war. [I notice that such a line goes back at least to the Hundred Years War, where French kings and princes went into battle and got captured rather than killed, although this is not a matter either in international jurisprudence or world history which I have ever studied]

With over four dozen senior officials of this extremely odious regime now no longer in a position to issue orders or participate in making decisions about the future of the Iranian theocracy, what happens now?

Well, the son of the Supreme Leader has now been chosen as his replacement in that role. He is even more hardline than his father. The Council of Experts, a theocratic college which chooses the Supreme Leader and vets (ie disqualifies) candidates for elections, is clearly still extant and making the decisions for which it was established.

The apparatus of repression of the regime, particularly the Revolutionary Guards and the Islamic vigilante militia known as the Basij, is still operating.

And whilst AI on Facebook has generated songs about the Shah-in-exile being the sole legitimate alternative to the current regime, Pahlavi Fils has not offered up an actual alternative, in the form of a constitution, which could be the initial foundation for a new regime.

So… what do I think is going to happen? The Israelis and the Americans have mostly achieved their real war objectives – preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons by brute force. Once all the equipment is shattered, all the expertise exploded (I assume nuclear physicists in Iran were a high priority target), and the materials removed (Trump is now talking about collecting all of Iran’s uranium), Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons will be gone.

Aside from that, the people who have been sponsoring insurgencies (or terrorists, if you prefer) across the region will have been chastised with lethal force. The ability of Iran to sponsor mischief around the region will have been reduced, at least in the short term.

So then the US and Israeli forces will go away, and leave the theocracy to its own devices.

The alternative, which I do not see happening, is for the Shah to fly into Iran under cover of US armed might, and declare a newborn monarchy under a new constitution.

Nice dream, but whilst I am a Commonwealth Constitutional Monarchist, I am probably more of a republican about despotic regimes.

Apocalocyntosis Redux

Last summer, I wrote about trying to grow pumpkins. I ended up successfully producing two. They were butternut variety.

This year, I tried again. Put in a few seeds of a variety which grows best in pots. So I have a few tennis ball sized (so far) yellow fruits in vines growing in pots.

I also decided to try again growing giant pumpkins. I planted a few seeds in a compost heap. Now I have several very healthy vines growing out of that heap and several pumpkins rapidly fattening up. I do not really want a 50 kilogram pumpkin, as I cannot lift such a beast, but I am very curious to see how big I can grow them.

This makes up in part for the disaster which has been this year’s attempt at growing heirloom tomatoes. I take some consolation in knowing that it is a bad year for tomatoes for a lot of people, from what I have heard.

More Fun With Business Cards….

It is going to be a while before I run out of the business cards I ordered in late 2024. I did, after all, order 500 at that time.

But when I do, I need to work out what sort of outrageous claims I can make on the card, beyond calling myself by the post nominal ‘Esq’ and describing myself as a ‘Gentleman of Leisure’, which looks rather boring in comparison to some of the others I have seen.

Let’s look at the business card I was given at the Savage Club in late 2024 by one interesting character.

That chap calls himself ‘Man of Action’ and then lists the following services:

. Lions Tamed

. Insurrections Put Down

. Mountains Climbed

. Virgins Cured

. Opinions Given

. Channels Swum

. Wars Fought

. Lawyers Intimidated

. God Disproven

. Casseroles Cooked.

You would think this was pretty original. However, when I was at my Bottle Club at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar on Thursday, another chap handed me his newly printed business card which described him as a ‘Gentleman and Flaneur’. [In case you are wondering, a ‘flaneur’ is someone who ‘saunters around observing society’.]

The flip side of this chap’s card offers the following services:

. Revolutions started & uprisings quelled

. Tamer of tigers and wayward moustaches

. Souls saved & sceptics convinced

. International adventurer & sometimes casual hero, bounder and a cad

. The difficult done immediately.

. The impossible takes longer.

. Miracles by appointment.

. No obligations, no worries.

You can see some similarities and opposites between what is included in these two totally separate business cards, such as the taming of lions or tigers, putting down insurrections as opposed to revolutions started and uprisings quelled, God disproven compared to Souls saved and sceptics convinced….

The chap who handed me his card on Thursday said that he was thinking of including ‘Virgins cured’ on the card, except that he wants to remain married.

Which leads me to conclude that there is some printer of business cards somewhere in Melbourne who is catering to the whims of the more eccentric members of our Gentlemen’s Clubs, and producing some standard text options for amusing inclusion on cards.

It all does make my simple card look rather boring indeed.

Postscript:

Since typing this blog post yesterday, I did have a bit of a Google search on the subject of such business cards, and have discovered that such business cards with almost identical phrasing have been making the rounds since at least the late 1980s, and not merely in Australia.

Off With His Head! How To Best Resolve The Problem That Is The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince

I am fond of the plays written by Shakespeare, and by extension, those written by his near contemporary (and alleged ghostwriter) Kit Marlowe. The audiences at the time enjoyed a bit of gore, for instance, and so Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon), with its rapes, dismemberments, murders, and cannibalism, is particularly amusing.

So too are some of the purported histories Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote. Richard III, for instance, features the king’s brother being drowned in a tub of malmsey (a type of cheap alcoholic drink) whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London. Marlowe’s Edward The Second features the killing of the deposed king by having his bowels burned out with a red hot poker, a scene which would have probably delighted contemporary audiences.

But for all the gore of Elizabethan drama, the reality was not much cleaner. There have been many executions of relatives of kings in actual history. Two of Henry VIII’s queens, most famously Anne Boleyn, but also the hapless Catherine Howard, were beheaded in the Tower of London. This was, given the times, much cleaner and easier than divorce, given how much trouble Henry had with that earlier on in his love life. Lady Jane Grey, who was the figurehead of an attempted coup d’teat, also was beheaded after her reign failed to eventuate.

So too Mary Queen of Scots, someone too dangerous to allow to live, despite being cousins of the Queen Regnant and mother of Elizabeth’s eventual successor.

The lesson that we can take away from history is that if you were a royal, and you were an embarrassment to the sovereign, the cleanest and easiest way to end the embarrassment was with a headsman and a sharp axe.

Doing so inside the Tower kept it discreet. After all, a royal was not a common criminal, and to treat them as such would diminish the status and place of the Sovereign himself.

Which brings us to the arrest a couple of days ago of the Andrew Formerly Known As Prince, for questioning relating to allegedly corrupt practices relating to his former role as a trade envoy for the United Kingdom.

He is the brother of the King and the favourite son of our Late Beloved Queen. He is also a living and breathing embarrassment, who could very well face extradition to the USA to face child sex related charges if it were not that most of the American political establishment, including President Trump, is closely implicated in the entire Epstein scandal. It is not in the interests of the American establishment to extradite him and have him answer for those allegations in open court.

But his alleged misconduct in enriching himself in a public office in the UK as a trade envoy is another matter. The evidence appears prima facie strong enough that the police feel obliged to detain and question him, bringing forth the prospect that he could face public trial and imprisonment, despite his former status as a prince and a senior member of the Royal Family.

In the golden days, which our King might now be nostalgically harkening back to, a beheading was a quick and clean way of ridding oneself of such embarrassments. So too would the Prince of Wales be thinking this way, given that in his early childhood, he did tell a kindergarten teacher when having a tantrum that, when he was king, he would get his knights to cut off her head.

Of course ordering ‘Off WIth His Head’ as one of the Queens in Alice In Wonderland is not realistic in this day and age. But is it too late to arrange a car accident in Paris?

A Game Of Thrones (Or Seats) – Why The Liberals Face An Uphill Battle In The November 2026 Victorian State Election

Only the most unabashedly partisan of voters would argue that the current incumbent Labor government of Victoria deserves to win another term. The most recent revelations of corruption running to a 11 figure number (ie tens of billions) lost in inappropriate payments to entities and personages aligned with the more sinister elements of the union movement, combined with the ongoing technocracy and blatant cynicism (eg the cancelled Commonwealth Games debacle) of this government would cause most fair-minded people to think that State Labor deserves a period in the electoral wilderness similar to that to which the Old Testament God condemned the Israelites.

I am pretty partisan myself, but in the other direction, although the promises of Peter Dutton as Federal Opposition Leader last year caused me to preference Labor above Liberal for the first time in my life.

I am, therefore, hoping fervently that the Allen Labor Government is consigned to electoral oblivion in November, just over 9 months from now. That is despite the tragic departure of John Pesutto as Victorian Opposition Leader just over a year ago and the revolving door which has since followed. [Full disclosure – John is a decent fellow and whilst out of parliament served as the patron of the small Italian community group of which I am a board member.]

But thinking with my head rather than my heart, I am not optimistic about it actually happening.

I do not know much in practical terms about campaigning, but I do know that you need to have two things to be competitive: money and people. Money does help to get you people, in terms of paid staff to run campaigns and administrations. People are needed both to volunteer to participate in campaigns, and also to actually run as candidates.

At the moment there are deficiencies in both areas, and they are inter-related.

My impression is that the Victorian Liberal Party is still suffering from the $2 million fraud perpetrated on them by their then state director, Damian Mantach, which was discovered belatedly in 2015. Immediately after this, I am told that there was a significant fiscal belt tightening at headquarters.

Reduced staffing means a reduced ability to service membership issues, such as maintaining the volunteer supporter base. It also reduces the ability of the party administration to organise important meetings, such as preselection conventions, which are needed to endorse candidates.

The main financial backer of the Victorian Liberals is an entity known as the Cormack Foundation, which is a trust administering legacy funds from the sale of an AM radio station once owned by the Liberal Party very many years ago. After the discovery of the Mantach fraud, the Cormack Foundation trustees felt a natural reluctance to hand over more funding unconditionally without some changes in governance, which then resulted in acrimonious litigation. I am not sure whether they have resolved this difference satisfactorily, but this would hurt the capacity to run actual election campaigns.

The main issue is the one of people, which does tie into money, but I fear goes a little beyond it.

This is where we get to the Game of Thrones, or Seats, if you will, and what is needed to win an election and form government.

In the Victorian Legislative Assembly, the lower house of the Victorian Parliament, there are 88 seats. Of those, 18 are currently held by the Liberals, and 10 by their Coalition partner, the Nationals. There is one additional seat, Nepean, which is about to face a by-election as the former MP, a Liberal, resigned recently for family reasons (due to a smear campaign against his family purportedly run by Liberal insiders).

A quick Google search indicates that the cost to the Liberal Party for running a campaign in this by-election will be approximately $200,000, money it can ill afford to spend in the lead up to the state election.

So, assuming (and this is me being optimistic rather than realistic) that the Liberals hold Nepean, the Coalition is sitting on 29 seats.

All sitting Liberal lower house MPs have been automatically re-endorsed, by decision of the State Executive (which, I very recently discovered, was renamed such last year after being known as the spinx-like Administrative Committee for many decades).

When you subtract 29 from 88, you get 59. My understanding is that the Liberal Party is planning to run candidates in 51 of those seats – I assume that the other 8 might be earmarked for the Nationals as coalition candidates.

The magic number to win government is 45. That means that the Coalition needs to win at least another 16 seats from Labor in November.

Where we have a major problem is that there are no candidates endorsed for any of those seats, and therefore no one already campaigning there for the overthrow of this appalling government.

Nominations remain open in 47 of those seats, with no apparent closing date (FYI, I believe that nominations were originally invited in September last year). In 4 seats, which are regarded as most marginal, nominations will close at the end of February.

As we get closer to the election date, the absence of endorsed candidates has two serious issues at the least. The first is that the lack of candidates means a lack of campaigning at the local level, drastically reducing the likelihood of winning more seats.

The other issue is how exactly the diminishing lead time is going to impact on how candidates are chosen.

The preferred manner of choosing lower house candidates in Victoria is for all financial party members of 2 years’ standing in a particular seat to comprise 60% of the membership of a preselection convention, with the other 40% made up of mostly randomly chosen delegates from elsewhere in the Liberal Party. This rule, introduced around 2008 or 2009, was intended to encourage and nurture grassroots participation in candidate selection and hence to motivate local members to donate time and money in their local campaigns.

The alternative manner is to have the State Executive choose the candidates. That is a top heavy approach, where less than 20 people, none of whom are necessarily members of the local electorate, impose their choice of candidate on the rank and file. Several years ago, at the time of the Aston by-election, I wrote at length in this blog about why this was a process which is not going to inspire grassroots participation in the campaign process.

I also feel bad for those people who put their hands up last September to serve the party they support as candidates, and who have been left in a limbo not of their own making, uncertain as to whether they should put their lives on hold until November.

In this Game Of Thrones, I fear that not only are the Liberals going to lose for having started so late on basic administration, but that, more importantly, the people of Victoria will. We cannot afford another four years of this appalling corrupt technocratic government.

We Are Pleased To Announce That We Are Passing On This Rate Increase In Full On Your Variable Home Loan…

The heading for this blog post is taken from a message sent out in the past day by ME Bank to its home loan customers, following the announcement by the Reserve Bank that official interest rates were rising.

This tone deaf message probably marks the dissolution of the last vestige of the myth that ME Bank is there for its customers.

ME Bank started out as a home loan provider owned predominantly by a coalition of superannuation funds (ie the institutions which hold and manage the private retirement savings for most Australians, including yours truly). It was, for much of its history, known as Members Equity Bank.

Customers would have been under the impression that, as an offshoot of industry superannuation funds, ME was on their side, and that it was indirectly owned by them.

The idea that ME Bank is, or ever was, on the side of the customer is of course an illusion, and one which has lingered long since evidence to the contrary started appearing in their business practices and ownership structure.

In April 2020, ME Bank changed the redraw facilities on certain existing home loans unilaterally without informing customers first. This led to considerable customer backlash, as indeed it should, and led to the resignation shortly afterwards of the Bank’s CEO.

A year later the 26 industry superannuation funds who owned ME Bank sold it to the Bank of Queensland. This commercial transaction meant that ME Bank was no longer what it purported to be, a lending vehicle of, by and for superannuation fund members (to borrow my phrasing from Abraham Lincoln).

Now, in a moment of rare commercial honesty, ME has told its customers that it is ‘pleased to announce’ that it is passing on the rate rise in full. I like the lack of contrition. We need more of it in commercial life.

You really do have to wonder why people still think that this bank is different from the ruthless sharks in the Big Four. I’ve never bothered to bank outside the Big Four (except for my back up account with Border Bank, which is a fraction of my actual banking foot print, and which offers an underwhelming app), and I see no reason to go looking for alternatives to my usual banking practices.

I Blame Daryl Somers For The Rise Of Pauline Hanson

As a child, my favourite TV show was Cartoon Corner, which was on Channel 9 every weeknight at 4pm. It was a welcome escape from the weary grind of primary school, and was hosted by Daryl Somers with the puppet Ossie Ostrich as his sidekick.

That was Daryl Somers’ first TV hosting gig, and the show itself had started with another host, although I was too young to remember the previous host.

He and the Ostrich were very popular, and they soon had a spin off show called Hey Hey It’s Saturday, which ran for 3 hours on a Saturday morning. Hey Hey was a very different show circa 1975. It was a longer version of Cartoon Corner, with triple the number of cartoons.

However, the network apparently decided to give Daryl Somers creative control, and the show rapidly evolved from a kids’ show into something quite different, something which primary school age kids would find unwatchable and quite boring. So… by the mid 1980s, Daryl Somers was one of the hottest properties on Channel 9, hosting a show which had moved from Saturday mornings to evenings, and which was definitely not for kids.

I remember in late high school that one bloke in my class wanted to get a few people together to go on the Red Faces segment, solely to stick their fingers in their throats and barf up on live TV.

A shame that did not happen. It would have been very funny, albeit gross.

Daryl Somers had a hiatus from being a TV host for a while, but then made a comeback on Channel 7 as the inaugural host of Dancing With The Stars – a program I am proud to say I have never watched.

He was not the only famous person making a comeback on that show. Pauline Hanson was one of the ‘stars’ who danced in the initial season.

At that time, Pauline was more or less washed up. She had gotten into parliament as a disavowed Liberal candidate in a safe Labor seat in the 1996 federal election, and gone on to make significant waves with her comments on welfare, aborigines, and migrants, comments which resonated with the type of voters whom, in the USA, might currently be called the ‘deplorables’. She had set up her own party, One Nation, and attracted a few supporters around Queensland, and won a few seats in the 1998 Queensland state election with candidates who were not the run of the mill sort offered to voters (one was an artillery bombardier and another was a mechanic and ‘part time Santa Claus’).

Things fell apart however. She did not retain her seat in the 1998 federal election, there were disputes with various of her supporters, and she was targeted by Tony Abbott in particular for alleged misuse of electoral funding. This resulted in her spending several months in gaol until her conviction was overturned.

She even left One Nation for a while, after disputes with various of its officials.

I am not sure about the nous of those supporters. One of the more prominent of those, David Etteridge, suggested that Australia print more money and give it to the farmers.

This statement was enough to immediately turn me right off the idea of choosing her movement as a viable upper house protest vote (I rarely give the Coalition my Senate primary vote and I do retain a soft spot for the DLP).

Don’t take my word for it – the Australian Financial Review did an article in 1998 on this visionary economic thinking, describing it as part of ‘a long tradition of monetary charlatanism’:

https://www.afr.com/politics/funny-money-view-not-new-19980626-k852z

So by 2004, whilst the Howard government prepared to win a fourth term, Pauline Hanson was more or less washed up and marginalised.

And then came Dancing With The Stars, one of those many television programs which provide a vehicle for b-list celebrities to remain in or return to the public eye.

This was a stroke of genius on the part of whoever advised Pauline Hanson to do this. Suddenly, this political has been with her lost seat and legal troubles and rather wacky supporters was in the public eye again, in prime time TV, and dressed elegantly.

Her political comeback proceeded slowly and carefully, culminating in her return to Federal Parliament, albeit to the Senate, in the 2016 Double Dissolution.

Since that time, both sides of politics have seen the mainstream parties (the ALP on the left, and the LNP Coalition on the right) progressively lose more and more of the primary vote which they once took for granted. Independents of various persuasions (Teal and other) have taken numerous formerly stronghold Liberal House of Reps seats in unprecedented numbers.

Various formerly prominent figures, mostly from the Coalition, have defected to One Nation in recent years. Whilst George Christiansen and Craig Kelly joining at the time of their less than voluntary retirements from parliament could be construed as almost inevitable, former Labor Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham resurrecting his career in the NSW Upper House with One Nation was a surprise, even for one as erratic and petulant as him.

Now, former Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has turned his back on the party and coalition which not only gave him his distinguished political career, but introduced him to his future second wife.

The latest to jump onboard is Cory Bernardi, who used to be a Liberal Senator until he jumped ship after just after his reelection to form his own short lived party, the Australian Conservatives.

The recent poll results show that Pauline Hanson’s personal popularity is now at 38%, in front of Prime Minister Albanese at 34%, Barnaby at 23%, and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley at a niggardly 10%.

In terms of primary vote, Labor remains at 34%, One Nation has leapt to 26%, and the Liberal-National Coalition is at 19% – a record low.

I will be honest – I remain highly skeptical about the viability of One Nation, with its economic illiteracy (I refer you once again to the above AFR link to the wit and wisdom of former One Nation luminary David Etteridge), as an alternative government.

But it has been running a very clever grassroots campaign for several years, using ridicule and social media (particularly in the form of animation) to undermine the credibility of the major parties, and to present itself as a responsible and mainstream choice.

Right wing alternative parties do not usually make a significant impact beyond winning a few seats. There are two major reasons for this.

The first is that the Liberals and Labor are (or perhaps were) significant institutions, supported by an ecosystem in civil society.

Labor has the union movement and the various socially progressive movements and organisations, whilst the Liberals have several think tanks (the IPA and the CIS spring to mind), the Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Both of those parties also, due to many decades of existence, have a core movement of supporters, including not only thousand of grassroots members – the ‘true believers’, but also former political staffers and parliamentarians who remain committed to the party who gave them their careers.

The second reason that alternative parties fail is that they usually are centred on one leader rather than being a genuine grassroots movement.

Bob Katter’s Australian Party is a current example of that, with little support outside FNQ (much as many of us find him personally quite loveable).

Another is the vehicle, in its various names, funded and led by Clive Palmer. As the United Australian Party, Palmer claimed that his party had 100,000 members. However, did any of them actually pay membership fees or have any say when he would pack the party up after elections.

The DLP, in its heyday from 1955 to 1974, was not run by one personality, but was closely tied to B.A. Santamaria, whose Svengali-like presence in the backrooms did drive its decision making. His movement, and the various trade unions which remained affiliated to the DLP until its initial winding up in the late 1970s, provided a link to civil society that other conservative third parties did not have.

Cory Bernardi is, in my view, an even egregious example of the one man political party. He left the Liberals after he was reelected to the Senate to convert his emailing list (of which I was a subscriber) into a political party, the Australian Conservatives (something which I was wise enough to avoid).

He quickly persuaded the Christian based conservative Family First Party, which occasionally would win Senate seats in Victoria and South Australia, to disband and merge into his new party. He also persuaded Victorian state MLC Rachel Carling-Jenkins to abandon the DLP and join his party.

In the first of those above instances, an existing and successful minor conservative party with an existing grassroots supporter base and network was persuaded to abolish itself for the chimera of Bernardi’s rhetoric. In the second, the DLP lost its sole state MP, who then discovered after the event that Bernardi had no intention of running a full service political party (ie in lower house Federal seats or in state elections). He only wanted a vehicle for Senate elections.

He also persuaded some disillusioned long term Liberal party ranks and file members (I know at least two) to jump ship for his new movement.

Ultimately, when his new party did not draw the electoral success he was hoping for, he disbanded his party. Did any of those party members who joined him have any say? All he did was to destroy one existing third party and seriously damage another. Well done Tory Cory!

Now he, along with various other big political egos, has joined One Nation, a party which, in its current form, has a constitution which guarantees the undisputed leadership of Pauline Hanson.

One Nation has had a history of fragmentation over the past 30 years. Its current veneer of unity is unconvincing to me. But with the various grassroots protest movements campaigning against both state and federal Labor governments, and which include the sort of people unlikely to ever be seen in Liberal party branch meetings, it may for the first time be taking up roots in civil society and developing an ecosystem of its own.

If that is indeed the case, then One Nation may actually be, for the first time, becoming a real and viable alternative. It has happened before in other countries – with the collapse of established governing parties in Italy in the early 1990s and their effective replacement by parties further to the right, and with the merger of the long existing Progressive Conservative Party in Canada with the Canadian Alliance in 2003.

I do not think that the potential collapse of the Liberal Party would be a good thing for our democracy, much as they are so uninspiring at the moment. Most of the prominent defectors to One Nation have been men who, in public life, have shown erratic and irresponsible tendencies, and whose economic views range from intelligent (Cory Bernardi despite himself) to cheap populist (Barnaby). If these people were to have a greater say in the corridors of power than they have had an opportunity to in the past, their irresponsible and ego driven tendencies would ruin the country.

And it all traces back to Pauline’s comeback on Dancing With The Stars. Shame Daryl Somers, shame!