I was in a specialist's waiting room in Cairns with a relatively minor ailment when I could not but overhear some heated agreement between two other patients, men in their late 60s, about last week's Queensland election. Both had been One Nation scrutineers. Both were convinced of a major conspiracy by the Queensland Electoral Commission to do One Nation down.
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They could not understand how the commission could "eliminate" a One Nation candidate and start counting his or her preferences on election night when it was obvious the One Nation candidate had a good chance of coming second and should still be in the race.
A "we wuz robbed" chorus ensued.
I did my best to allow some facts to intrude on this conspiracy theory (early preference counting is done to get a better idea of the outcome earlier, but is only provisional and can be redone if need be), but to no avail until, mercifully, the specialist called in one of the One Nation scrutineers to be scrutinised.
The incident is just an example of One Nation supporters' delusion and refusal to change their view no matter what the evidence. Many people have rejoiced at One Nation getting no seats or possibly scraping just one, and that by a feral pest exterminator.
One may well say "watch out, Pauline!" given the history: more than half of One Nation's successful candidates have turned on the party and its leader.
So many think One Nation and its ilk are now a spent force. Wrong.
For a start, its primary vote in the Queensland election was higher than any recent third-party vote in a state or federal election. It was almost as high as all other minor parties combined, and One Nation didn't stand in every electorate.
The party got no seats because of the single-member electorate system and One Nation's dispersed geographic base. A similar vote in a proportional system would easily have given One Nation the balance of power.
That is what happened in the recent German elections. It has caused mayhem. A "far right" party's success denied Angela Merkel's moderate-right Christian Democrats a majority, or even the prospect of a majority in coalition.
This is not going away. (Or, in Pauline Hanson's ambiguous words, "we're not going anywhere".) Do not imagine that just because One Nation got zero or just one seat that its supporters will suddenly "see the light" and desert the party. To the contrary, the fact it got such a high vote with no seats will simply fuel belief in a conspiracy of the elites to deny it justice.
But "far right" is the wrong description for either Alternative for Germany or One Nation. These parties are not neoliberal, classic-economics, right-wing parties. They are really national-socialist parties: supremacist, race-based nationalism combined with heavy regulation of big business. It's 1930s national socialism without murdering Jews and homosexuals or waging an aggressive war. But all the other elements are there: xenophobia, disaffection, appeal to emotion, racial nationalism, protectionism, high regulation of industry, social conservatism, pointing at external enemies and so on.
The real question should be: why is One Nation getting so much support now? Are there any parallels, albeit on a much smaller scale, with 1930s Europe?
Well, to some extent, yes. After a couple of decades of neoliberal economics, privatisations, social-security cuts, austerity, stagnant wage growth, cuts to working conditions, outsourcing, factory closures, economic disruption and so on, there is obviously the same sense of alienation, anger and disaffection felt in Germany for the same reasons in the 1930s.
Similarly, it was the European Union-led austerity program that resulted in the rise of national-socialist Golden Dawn in Greece, which denied Syriza a majority in 2015.
In Australia, this is compounded by extremely high immigration and a sense (indeed, a reality) that employers are permitted to import cheap labour at the cost of existing residents. And this is compounded by the accusation that "Australians are not willing to do these jobs" when in fact they are, but not at the wage-slave rates on offer.
This is perhaps the greatest unnoticed irony in Australia. John Howard said he needed to be tough on refugees so people would stomach and not rebel against his mega-high immigration program, which benefited the Coalition's well-heeled donors to the detriment of most Australians.
The truth is the reverse. We should have been more circumspect on economic immigration, with all its unseen attendant costs, so that we would be in a better position to improve to our humanitarian and refugee intake.
And now national-socialist Pauline Hanson riles against being swamped by Muslims, when the real cause of the disaffection and alienation of her supporters – even if they don't recognise it – is being economically swamped by British, New Zealand, Indian and Chinese immigrants who impose an unsustainable burden on infrastructure provision and drive up housing costs.
But anytime anyone mentions that, they get accused of xenophobia, so they don't mention it – a xenophobiaphobia (to borrow Clive Hamilton's phrase). It's very convenient for the very few people who benefit from high immigration.
So to overcome the ghastly swing to One Nation, the Coalition must address the sources of alienation: reduce economic immigration; stop the downward pressure on wages through unfair labour laws (which in any event are harming, not helping, business by shrinking demand); and bring big corporations and public-utility monopolies into line.
Malcolm Turnbull said: "A vote for One Nation is a vote of Labor." Well, yes, but only because he made it so.
It may be that One Nation didn't get any seats, but the preferential system still gives it a lot of leverage. It's not going away unless the major parties address at least some of the economic concerns of One Nation supporters.
Our only saving grace is that most One Nation candidates and MPs turn out to be embarrassing crackpots or defectors or both, and fall well short of the administrative and propaganda efficiency which is the hallmark of the European version of their politics.
