There are more South Australians than there are One Nation supporters, though both are minorities. But at the moment there can be no doubt which group of Australians has more national political leverage. One Nation wins hands down. Just look at how they are being treated by the federal government, whether by Malcolm Turnbull or his sidekick, Arthur Sinodinos.
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Some of that difference is circumstantial. The federal election has passed and now state elections in Western Australia and Queensland, with both governments in potential danger, are in the offing. That's changed the playing field.
Leverage – doing more with less, like political judo – is possible for smaller players when the time's right. Both the electoral system and the federal system traditionally offer opportunities for leverage. Sometimes they overlap, as they are for One Nation in the current environment. Its supporters' votes are regarded as a valuable commodity.
Before the last federal election, South Australia, even though it was small and had a state Labor government – a potentially disastrous combination when dealing with a federal Coalition government – did well out of the situation.
The Coalition's fear of losing House of Representatives and Senate seats to Labor and minor parties such as the Nick Xenophon Team helped mightily in enabling SA to benefit disproportionately from an extremely generous deal to have the new submarine fleet built in Adelaide. Eventually, even that deal only limited the political damage. The Coalition still lost seats in the state.
Maybe uncomfortable memories of the largesse Turnbull handed out 12 months ago make it more palatable for him to beat the South Australian government around the head over its state-wide power blackouts. Turnbull's strident attacks used the South Australians as a surrogate for the alternative energy movement as a whole and served a national purpose for him.
South Australians have become surplus to requirements politically, at least until the next federal election, and are therefore fair game in an unfair attack on their governance, good sense and general competence. All of this appears to have taken place cynically, against expert federal bureaucratic advice to the contrary.
One Nation, on the other hand, seems to have the whip hand in Western Australia and Queensland, as well as being a valued ally of the government in the Senate. From all reports, it has Labor and the Coalition parties seeking its preferences. Undoubtedly, both major parties fear the impact of a growth in One Nation support at state elections. They have One Nation's stunningly good performance at the 1998 Queensland elections, when it won 23 per cent of the vote and 11 seats, firmly in their minds.
They are offering preference deals, not submarines. In Western Australia, the Liberal government is apparently dealing One Nation its preferences in the upper house (where One Nation has the chance of success in multi-member electorates) in return for One Nation preference support for Liberal candidates in single-member lower house seats, where One Nation probably can't win. This is a common form of cross-house preference dealing, variations of which the Greens and the Australian Democrats took part in in the past, so can't be condemned as a tactic in itself.
But it's a sign of the times that One Nation is much more acceptable as a preference partner than it was 20 years ago. Preference-swapping is not just a mechanical exercise without strings attached because it offers a form of recognition and legitimacy to the other partner. Twenty years ago, One Nation was thought to be beyond the pale. It's now won more widespread acceptance. The WA Liberals are even planning to preference One Nation above its erstwhile Coalition partner, the Nationals.
The new federal Industry Minister, Sinodinos, sought to explain this change of heart, from a time when John Howard refused to preference One Nation, on the grounds it had evolved since then and was now a "very different beast". For someone who once had a reputation as a strategic thinker when he was chief political adviser to the prime minister, Sinodinos then bought himself trouble by saying One Nation was now a lot more "sophisticated". It's not clear what he meant by this observation, but it implies that the respectability of that party's ideas and the reliability of its parliamentary representatives have improved.
This evaluation is clearly suspect given One Nation is the party of conspiracy-theorist senator Malcolm Roberts, not to mention its long-term party leader, Pauline Hanson. One Nation has not changed much at all over time, apart from its targets being Muslim rather than Asian, although the political environment around it certainly has. It now exists in the world of Brexit, Donald Trump, Cory Bernardi and the Q Society. Hanson is riding a wave that allows her to confidently disparage other parties, such as Queensland Labor.
Politics is the art of the deal (now recognised as a Trumpism) and of the practical outcome. Winning is everything and relationships between players constantly shift as the parties jostle to be part of a winning alignment. This shows in the very different treatment of South Australia and One Nation by the federal powers that be.
What's more, the contrasting leverage available to these two small players is an insight into the broader battle of ideas in Australian politics at the moment. Alternative energy and other ideas associated with South Australia are on the back foot while heightened concerns about border security and Islam are the order of the day.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University. john.warhurst@anu.edu.au
