A short while ago it seemed nothing could go right for Pauline Hanson and One Nation.
The obese, bankrupt, accused thief and blithering idiot Rod Culleton was creating drama after drama, driving the Western Australian stocks of the newly-insurgent right-wing party lower with every incoherent press conference. Finally the sweaty-faced, sartorially-challenged buffoon was stripped of his Senate seat, but not before the damage was done.
A QLD state parliament candidate Shan Ju Lin was unceremoniously dumped after poorly-worded social media posts regarding homosexuality and a picture of Barack Obama in drag caused some media types to clutch their pearls in dismay.
This came only a short while after another QLD candidate was forced to stand down for refusing to bow to basic party discipline in relation to yet more tedious social media nothingness.
All together, this handed ammunition to the ever more nervous leader of the increasingly vulnerable National Party Barnaby Joyce, who began making frantic comparisons to the recently deceased Palmer United Party.
And our tomato-faced deputy Prime Minister wasn’t the only one.
Andrew P Street, one of the more nauseating pustules on the backside of Australian political journalism, seemed almost orgasmic as he started gloating about One Nation’s imminent demise, describing the “crumbling” party as “derivative”, “uninspired” and “a poor copy of the PUP”.
The rest of the press and their Green-voting, inner-city neighbours cackled along as well. They made predictions of party implosion and wisely nodded at each other over the cheese and wine. After all, populist revolts starting in Queensland are hardly a new thing, and are traditionally flash in the pan.
But something was amiss.
As a long-term observer of the inanities of our chattering classes, there seemed to me to be something a little different this time, a tone to the laughter a touch unlike the usual point and shriek routine of those sitting atop the tree directed at those who might dare climb it.
Maybe they could feel something in the air; maybe the shocks that the left has suffered in 2016 had started to take their toll on the rock-solid certainties carved into the psyches of those crawling worms who consider themselves our moral, intellectual and social betters.
They were right to be worried.
At the tail end of the normally quiet summer political news cycle, the timbre of the stories around Pauline and her band of underdog insurgents started to change.
The Liberal Party in Victoria, one of the most leftist branches in one of the reddest states in the nation, checked their internal polling and almost soiled themselves. One Nation was tracking well enough to capture upper house seats in one of the strongholds of Australian leftism.
Fairfax published a poll showing that almost one in ten Victorians are backing Hanson, three times more than the Nationals.
Leftist Fairfax journalist Amy Remeikis sat in shock, with fork poised halfway between table and mouth over Christmas lunch, as her immigrant family members expressed their support for the fiery redhead and her rebellion of the fringes.
In Western Australia, a Reach-TEL poll commissioned by The Weekend West showed that the angry voters, battered by negative stories and a silly Senator, still backed One Nation enough to hand them the balance of power in the State upper house, with one in nine voters supporting the rebel party.
In the Queensland heartland, despite the dire warning from ever more panicked establishment MPs, Pauline’s crew is polling at 16% according to Galaxy, and outside the south-east higher still, with an election just around the corner.
Then Hanson got invited to the Trump inauguration, called for a banning of full-face veils in public buildings, helped stir up Liberal party in-fighting by endorsing Tony Abbott as Health Minister (the man who helped put her in jail), toured almost half the towns in regional Queensland while most other pollies were on holiday, and accrued mountains of positive press for her frugality with the public purse.
Despite the continuing declining ratings for most mainstream media outlets, there’s probably not a single Australian adult that hasn’t heard her name or the name of her party these past two weeks.
Then came the most astonishing development of all:
A Reach-TEL poll released last Sunday showed that One Nation is more popular than the Greens, with the Patriots at 9.7% and the Watermelons at 8.9%
Here at XYZ, and across the broader right, for years we have bemoaned the lack of a patriotic version of the Greens to pull the major parties to sanity as the Greens pull them to the left.
Without such an anchor, our society, our country and our culture seemed doomed to eventually wander off the cliff to the rocks of destruction below.
Think of the damage the Greens have been able to do with their consistent tenth of the vote; think of the damage not just in legislation but in how we think about our country and our society.
It’s enough to make you dream; what if our side could do the same to build our nation rather than to destroy it?
If One Nation can hold it together, if Pauline can keep a firm grip on the reins, if they can accept that they will be held to a far higher standard than the Greens, if they can stay strong in the face of immense adversity, then the collective prayers that shot in a multitude to heaven from the minds and hearts of the right-thinking patriots of Australia the first time they saw Malcolm Turnbull smirk as Prime Minister might have been answered.
A true revolution might be here, a revolution to cast down the ivory towers of the sneering sophisticates and save our people, our culture and our nation from the forces that would destroy it.
Photo by Nick Harris1 