Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is not travelling west this week for the final gruelling days of the West Australian state election, but his government's low standing and the taint of a resurgent Hansonism are playing their roles in the local contest.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Barnett Liberal government faces being tipped out despite a 10 per cent, 10-seat, buffer. Its desperation has brought a costly deal putting the One Nation party ahead of the Liberals' junior coalition partner, the Nationals, in the upper house in exchange for One Nation preferences downstairs.
The bad blood this has caused with the Nats and the reputational damage this approach could create in voterland may not be worth the marginal gain anyway, because One Nation is not even running candidates in the first eight seats expected to fall Labor's way if a swing is on.
Turnbull's approach has been to refer questions on the deal to the state division.
For former prime minister John Howard, it had been a matter of principle: One Nation would always be last on the Liberal how-to-vote card.
Not any more. When Turnbull confidant Arthur Sinodinos was asked about the change some weeks back, he explained that Pauline Hanson 2.0 is a different, more sophisticated, product than that which was on offer 20 years ago. But is it really?
That this came from Howard's erstwhile chief of staff is significant. Ironic too.
With a surname like Sinodinos, he understands better than most the positive contribution of migration. Hanson's little-Australia nativism affronts this proud record directly.
Then there's his portfolio: Minister for Innovation and Science. Hanson's comments at the weekend reveal her as a pernicious science denier - an anti-intellectual Luddite - who invites ignorant parents to doubt the medical science of vaccination. It is no exaggeration to say that the irresponsibility of her recklessness may be measurable in lives lost.
At a time of battered public confidence in authority, facts, institutions and the central promise of modernity itself, Hanson's tinfoil-hat appeal to parents to "do their own research" exposes her as Australia's most thoughtless political figure.
And that's before you get to her admiration of a despotic war criminal such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she lauds as a model leader.
Yet the message to West Australian voters is that her eponymous party deserves support ahead of the Nats.
If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
It seems as though Hanson's Donald Trump-like attack on elite institutions has scored a direct hit. On the Liberal Party.
