That's interesting.
Presumably he's promoting his latest quarterly essay?
One Nation voters in 2016 were almost entirely native-born Australians. Not even newcomers from the UK or New Zealand were drawn to Hanson’s party. Her people are absolutely ours and One Nation is the most Aussie party of them all. Liberal 78% native-born Labor 79% Greens 82% National 91% One Nation 98%
Age and sex:
One Nation is a party of old people but there’s no sign they are dying out. According to the AES figures, roughly a third of Hanson’s voters in 2016 were under the age of 44. And women are voting One Nation. Back in the 1990s, voters were mostly men. That’s shifted. Here’s the split: 1998 male 65%, female 35% 2016 male 56%, female 44%
Reports from focus groups suggest these are working women, better educated than the men. “They looked like nice Labor voters working in nice jobs,” said one researcher. “We had a childcare worker, two government workers, and I think there was a teacher. Yet they like Pauline.” Other reports from focus groups suggest contradictions here: “Women like her because she’s a woman who speaks her mind. Men like her because she’s a woman who stands up against feminism.” That she’s a woman from the “life doesn’t owe us anything” school is a key aspect of her political makeup.
Class:
Most One Nation voters see themselves as working class. McAllister calls that “pretty clear”. This hasn’t changed in 20 years. Hanson’s people may have aspirations but they don’t see themselves coming up in the world. Greens 24% identify as working class Liberal 32% Labor 45% National 46% One Nation 66%
Religion:
Hanson is not pulling the religious vote. Rebecca Huntley, social researcher and former director of Ipsos Australia, says: “We’re a little shielded from the worst implications of the rise of the Trump vote by the fact that this is not a highly religious group.” Hanson’s staunch defence of Christianity in the face of Muslim hordes isn’t about faith but preserving our way of life. Hanson’s moral agenda is to punish welfare bludgers not perverts. One Nation voters rarely worship. While 48% of Australians never attend church – not even for weddings and funerals – the figure for One Nation voters is 60%. Breakaway Cory Bernardi is pursuing a tiny constituency who believe in small government and high Catholic morality. Hanson backs neither: she’s a secular, big government woman. That’s a big constituency.
Where do they live:
Both the city and the bush. One Nation has always had a strong city presence despite its image as a bush party. Labor party research and focus groups report strong growth of support for One Nation in seats on the fringe of big towns and capital cities, seats on the edge of – but not actually among – migrant suburbs. This appears to be a pattern across Australia.
Education:
Reports from focus groups suggest city folk most respect Hanson. “The bush is more sceptical of One Nation than the cities,” says one researcher. “In the bush they tend to say she doesn’t have the answers. Those in the cities are more in agreement with her. They rate her intelligence in the city. They say she’s doing better, she’s learnt a lot. In the country they think she’s a bit stupid.”
How educated are they? Then and now, the figures show the typical One Nation voter didn’t finish school. Yet they are not unqualified. They make an effort. Tradespeople are strongly represented in party ranks. But eight out of 10 have never set foot on a university campus. “That’s the big political effect,” says McAllister.
Australia came late to the game. Since 1948, Americans have been polled after each election to find out why they voted as they did. The Swedes started to take these national snapshots in the 1950s and the British in the 1960s.
Belfast-born Ian McAllister began the Australian Election Study after Bob Hawke’s third victory in 1987. From his post at the Australian National University – where these days he is Distinguished Professor of political science – McAllister has conducted a dozen of these big, after-the-event surveys over 30 years. “We ask how people made their choices: the effect of the election campaign, the effect of the longer-term predispositions, the background characteristics, the political socialisation. It’s about trying to unravel all of these various things that come together to make simply a choice on a ballot paper.”
McAllister’s questions are controversial. The political science industry feeds off the Australian Election Studies. Dinner parties break up in confusion as pollsters and academics bicker over questions asked and not asked. McAllister told me: “If I put in every question that everybody emailed me or wrote to me about, you’d have a thousand-page questionnaire and nobody would fill it in.” He says the point of the surveys sent to thousands of voters after each poll is continuity. “When you’ve got exactly the same question being asked consistently over a period of time using essentially the same methodology, you’ve got an unusually reliable measure of something.”
The Australian voter is a species he has come to admire deeply. “First of all they have to go to the polls more than any other voter in the world that I can possibly imagine. And secondly they have to deal with a range of complexity in electoral systems, in terms of casting a vote, which again defies anything in any other society.
So the Australian voter, I think, is pretty overburdened by politics.” Yet they remain thoughtful. “People don’t make whimsical choices by and large. They do look at policies.” They are not volatile. “We found in our surveys early in the piece about 70% of people never ever change their vote from the very first election they voted in to the last election before they died. These days it’s around about 50%. So basically most people don’t change. And when people do change it’s a relatively small proportion that change from election to election.”
That we’ve been so stable makes McAllister particularly alert to “the unexpected long-term decline” of trust in the political class, in career politicians, in democracy itself. “Australia has stood apart from a lot of other countries because it’s had very high levels of satisfaction with democracy historically, some of the highest in the world, second only to one or two Scandinavian countries.” He dates the slide from 2010. Elections since then haven’t provided the usual upswings of faith and hope.
The numbers have kept falling. “One of the things I observe in our surveys is the proportion of people that believe the government would have a positive effect on the economy in the future year was at its lowest level we’ve ever recorded in 2016. So people don’t have confidence in the government … They see this quick turnover in leaders. They see scandals to do with expenses, and so on. And they become very jaded. And then I think we’ve had a lack of decisive leadership as well. I mean Rudd Mark I was the last popular leader that existed in Australia. We haven’t had one since.”
Ever since McAllister gathered the first set of One Nation numbers in 1998, political scientists have been disputing what they mean. Do they show people flocking to Pauline Hanson because of the flags she flies – particularly on race – or are they falling in with her simply because they’re disenchanted with the political system? McAllister sees a shift from one to the other: “My sense this time is that ONP#2 doesn’t really stand for much, other than being anti-establishment, whereas ONP#1 had a more definable policy basis. So Pauline Hanson is tapping into the prevailing political distrust in career politicians from both sides.” But others citing the same material come to the opposite conclusion. More of this dispute later. It’s fundamental to understanding the challenge Hanson poses to public life in this country. Is she a party of policy or protest? Hanson is a puzzle with consequences.
Newcomers from the UK or New Zealand were not drawn to Hanson’s party. One Nation is the most Aussie party of them all
McAllister ran the One Nation numbers from the latest AES for this Quarterly Essay. They are the best available evidence of who Hanson’s voters were and what they wanted at the 2016 elections. The numbers come with a caveat from McAllister: “Treat the survey data – because of the small numbers of ONP supporters – as a blurry image rather than a precise profile.” Even so, as we picked our way through the material together, McAllister identified issues where One Nation’s views emerge in full focus. Andrew Markus also commented on the figures for me, as did Murray Goot of Macquarie University, an expert on polling with a particular interest in the One Nation vote who has often taken a contrary view to McAllister. Finally, I’ve drawn into the discussion several professional pollsters who have conducted focus groups among resurgent One Nation voters since the elections in the bush, in towns and, these days more than ever, in capital cities.
