“I haven’t flip-flopped. I said no originally, then I said yes, then I have said no and I’ve stuck to it!”

Pauline Hanson’s 2018 ‘Schrödinger’s denial’ that she ‘flip flopped’ on supporting the Turnbull government’s proposed company tax cuts exists on the outer rim of the collective memory of Australian politics.

Both known and unknown, and so humorously expected it barely rates remembering.

It has, however, also been the guiding principle for how the Coalition has handled this election campaign.

That ground is now so well trodden that even The Australian’s Greg Sheridan muddied his boots trudging along it, taking on the mantle of the disappointed dad who handed the tank keys to his eldest son who promptly drove it into the ocean.

We have reached the point in the election cycle where the Coalition is claiming to anyone who will listen that the polls are wrong, that internally they just KNOW they are doing much better and if only people stopped demanding detail then everything would be going their way.

The Coalition’s campaign has been reduced to moaning ‘if you just remembered you hate Labor, then this would all be fine’ at any pensioner, Gen Zer or Millennial they encounter (everyone forgets Gen X).

Meanwhile Angus Taylor’s acolytes run around claiming they would never have run a campaign this way and he was always uncomfortable with the populist route Peter Dutton flirted with (ignoring of course, that he was just fine with it under Scott Morrison and indeed joined up to it under Tony Abbott). 

Perhaps political parties are like childhoods – you don’t know you’re having a bad one, until you see how others live.

This past week, Dutton said yes to keeping the electric vehicle fringe benefit tax exemption Labor put in place, then said no the Coalition wouldn’t, and claimed he said yes because he misunderstood a question, despite his original answer clearly being tailored to the yes/no question of ‘would you keep the fringe benefit tax exemption for EVs’.  

Dutton visited his 14th petrol station, but the Liberals couldn’t be bothered sending a representative to a forum Women’s Agenda was holding to discuss women’s issues.

The Coalition couldn’t explain their migration cut policy, with at least three different versions this week, ending with ‘we’ll cut the number of backpackers’ (bet the Nationals are thrilled with that answer) which will do nothing to improve the housing availability crisis which is the reason Dutton keeps saying we need to cut migration.

Dutton announced $21 billion in additional defence spending over the next five years, but seemed annoyed reporters wanted to know where that money would be spent. 

He doesn’t know – the defence shop?  Lots of things that go bang there and he’s pretty sure $21 billion will get you a few more bangs that will deter….Chi….someone. 

He made that announcement next to his scowling shadow minister for defence – who has spent the campaign as far as humanly possible from any of his colleagues, including his party’s branding and colours – and who seemed annoyed that his portfolio responsibility would mean standing next to his leader at some point. 

In that same press conference, Andrew Hastie tried to pretend he supported the Coalition policy of allowing women to apply for combat roles in the Australian Defence Force, while simultaneously outlining all of his personal experience as justification for why he doesn’t believe any woman would be up for it.

But hey – those women sure are great at teaching the men who make the things go bang.

David Littleproud doesn’t think we need policy to be guided by statistics, but does ‘believe’ in climate change (huzzah – we are still treating climate change like it’s something you either believe or don’t believe in, much like the tooth fairy or a major Australian political party thinking beyond the next election cycle) and will take the science on board – as long as the science doesn’t impact fossil fuel interests. 

Oh, and yes actually, all the 41,000 public servants the Coalition wants gone WILL come from Canberra, and who cares what that does to the local economy.

And yes it’s a very pesky detail that a lot of Canberra public servants work in national security and defence and those other roles that the Coalition said they wouldn’t touch, but these creatures live in Canberra and therefore should barely be considered human, you know?

One Nation effect

The Coalition’s campaign has become so synonymous with fiasco (it remains unclear as to whether my editors will allow f*ck up) that it almost went without notice that One Nation and the Coalition took their situationship public and made it preference official.

It’s one of the great myths of Australian politics that John Howard took a moral stand against One Nation in 1998 when he ordered the party to put Pauline Hanson last.

As Margo Kingston writes in the seminal Hanson bible, Off the Rails, Howard was at first unbothered by Hanson’s surge in the polls and was “not uncomfortable” with the Queensland LNP government giving One Nation its preferences in 1997. 

That was on the back of Howard’s war against the High Court’s Wik native title decision, where he threatened to call a double dissolution on race, on the back of the Senate knocking back his discriminatory 10-point plan to counter the plan. 

Back then, Howard had accused the Sydney Morning Herald of ‘pro-black bias’ and as Kingston writes, some Liberals took to calling the paper the ‘Aboriginal Morning Herald’ for its defence of the law and Indigenous people’s rights.

So it wasn’t a moral standing that led to Howard declaring Hanson persona non grata, it was pure politics. 

By the time the 1998 election rolled around, Hanson’s popularity had won One Nation 11 seats in the Queensland Parliament and Howard saw how the party was cannibalising the Coalition vote. 

If Howard didn’t take a stand, One Nation would have taken the federal Senate, at the Nationals’ expense.

Howard compromised on Wik and backed away from his double dissolution threat – and then went about reframing his One Nation opposition, which decades later became part of the Australian political myth framework.

Howard’s reasoning for blockading One Nation still stands, but the politics have shifted so far to the right it can be hard to distinguish between a One Nation candidate and a Liberal. 

Hanson doesn’t have to appeal to the inner-cities and the Teals it’s true, but then Dutton is doing nothing to win back those seats and the party has seemed content to follow him on that road to obscurity, rather than even pretend to try and appeal to young people and/or women.

After the One Nation/Coalition preference deal became public, Coalition figures began running around briefing it had rejuvenated the party and the prospect of taking Hunter and Bendigo from Labor was “a live possibility”, which is rather like saying you’re going to win the 100m sprint by gnawing off your own leg.

Which brings us back to Hanson’s firestorm arrival on the federal political sphere and former pig farmer and Ipswich One Nation branch president Tony Price’s comments to Kingston on the eve of the 1998 campaign.

“Do you know the Solzhenitsyn thesis – that you have to experience things to understand them?” he asked.

Perhaps the Coalition needs to experience its own political gulag archipelago to understand what it has now done.