Big Tent

“Do we have a seconder?” asks the woman chairing the launch of One Nation’s branch in Canning, a sprawling electorate south of Perth held by Andrew Hastie. An orange card stub is flashed by a man I was standing next to moments before the start of this surprisingly formal procedure. “OK, Parminder.” In a few days time Barnaby Joyce will have to condemn some extremely out there views about gay people Parminder Singh volunteered to Perth’s premier purveyor of street talk interviews, but for now he’s just an Indian migrant in a turban helping elect One Nation’s latest branch secretary (having previously run third on their upper house ticket last year.)

“We’re going to need a bigger tent,” someone said to me as we filed in to the packed gazebo in the beer garden out the back of the waterside bistro on the Mandurah estuary, and he’s not wrong. “Feel like it’s pretty big already,” I reply. Although the hundred or so punters there on a Saturday afternoon, as the Dockers play Melbourne on screen inside the pub, are largely what you’d expect - older, white and suburban - those speaking during the surprisingly formal branch launch present a diversity of grievances.

There’s a press conference beforehand with One Nation’s candidate for Secret Harbour, the nearby state electorate currently in the midst of a by-election campaign ending on August 29. After that, the WA leader Rod Caddies respectfully asks media to exit the tent, but given that proceedings are amplified on speakers throughout the venue it’s not hard to follow along - except when Rod’s got the mic, because he holds it so close to his mouth that the speakers absolutely pop. It’s the human touch that punters love, and Rod’s a real character - a bloke who grew up in group homes before working for Child Protection, then started a rodeo business and ran for Parliament last year just in time to slip into a massive national tailwind and become perhaps the most powerful politician in Australia pound for pound. Now he rolls around in the One Nation branded ute and seems to put up most of their roided up roo corflutes himself.

Rod cold opens with a routine about a recent Parliamentary vote on surrogacy for trans men before segueing to the taxpayer cost of a transitioning prisoner. He contrasts that “woke rubbish” with mothers living in tents. “This is middle class working Australians,” he says, establishing a motif that every speaker returns to. Not far up the road from here, just the other side of Secret Harbour, a homeless camp has been gradually gaining political attention in Perth, as up to 200 people camp in tents and caravans strung along a quiet road running towards the coast. It just happens that at the end of that road is HMAS Stirling, the latest addition to America’s strategic overseas bases, which is seeing an influx of 2300 US troops and their families to the area.

Caddie’s upper house colleague Phil Scott MLC doesn’t mention AUKUS but he does make it clear here he doesn’t want to watch what happened back in the UK happen here in his adopted country. “You never forget your roots, like you never forget your family,” he says as he emphasises the pride his party takes in new migrants and Aboriginal people. “The canary in the cage is people sleeping on the streets,” he finishes, adding that he’s one of only two tenants in the WA Parliament.

Next up Senator Tyrone Whitten gets on a tear about the Australian war memorial dropping half a billion dollars on commemorating the frontier wars. He’s shocked to learn that the First World War wasn’t the first war this country saw. “Nobody denies bad things happened back then, but I didn’t do it,” he says. Things like this are why “Pauline has opened up all the branches around the country.”

This particular branch happens to be a direct assault on Hastie, the Coalition’s great white hope who has previously refused to “bend the knee” to Pauline’s band of insurgents. Hastie defied the Dutton wipeout to be re-elected in Canning with an increased margin last year and, whatever they think of his economic and religious views, most locals appear to view him as a person of integrity. One Nation’s Canning candidate last year, who looks somewhere between a stage magician and an undertaker in his grey suit and slicked back hair, is elected the inaugural branch coordinator today (although Caddies clarifies that all appointments are subject to the final imprimatur of the national executive).

It feels like Hastie’s hold is less likely to be broken at the ballot box than in the public contest beforehand, however. His claim a couple of days earlier that he’d still like to receive One Nation preferences at the next election (they polled 11% in Canning last time before the surge started) was framed by the West Australian as Hastie bending the knee after all, but that’s nothing compared to what’s gone before. The West cancelled him a long time ago for flouting the company line on Ben Roberts Smith, a former Seven executive and one of Kerry Stokes’ surrogate sons, but since Gina took a public 10% share in the paper (after quietly bankrolling it for years prior) they’ve decided to do him out in the open. 

Aaron Patrick is a hack they picked up from the AFR primarily to execute hits against anyone thinking of testifying against BRS in a war crimes trial it appears, and he’s pursued his quarry so enthusiastically that federal prosecutors had to request urgent suppression orders to stop what effectively amounts to witness intimidation by WA’s media monopoly. Entirely unabashed, Patrick got five pages one recent Sunday to character assassinate Hastie on the front page of the paper. No wonder Hastie has reported he is now getting increased security at home and work (he’s also just gone through a strange defamation case also involving a couple of former journos from Nine’s local outlet). Hastie’s experienced tougher battles, one supposes, but the WA News beatings must make him wonder whether he wouldn’t be better off going back where he came from. 

Parminder Singh’s homophobia was notably absent from yesterday’s paper, which instead splashed with PAULINE’S GST BATTLE (“Hanson backs WA in Federal Fight”). It remains to be seen whether this latest meltdown has an impact on the Secret Harbour by-election, where pre-poll opens Monday and internal polling on both sides allegedly shows One Nation in poll position (meanwhile Rod Caddies reckons they could win it on primary.) I’d be surprised if they pull it off given the torpid atmosphere I’ve experienced in the electorate recently, but whatever happens Labor are surely sliding and the size of the swing will simply mark the current momentum. Labor’s candidate, notably, is a current Woodside exec whose only other job was working for Resources Minister Madeleine King.

The last question from the crowd in the tent comes from a Syrian man in a grey knit sweater, who gets the day’s biggest clap for saying he doesn’t want his new country ruined the same way Islamists ruined his first country. His second query is how Australia’s health system will survive if we cut immigration, which Rod Caddies agrees is a good question. I’ve heard a couple of people describe Pauline Hanson as the Stephen Bradbury of Australian politics, and it feels like a pretty apt metaphor after three decades circling on the ice. The Canning faithful don’t have a problem with capitalism, they just want an earlier version. Surely someone, somewhere, can organise a better alternative than this mob.