after a backlash from political opponents and the farming industry<\/a>.<\/p>\nA more recent example of a politician harbouring qualms about being seen to be too closely associated with a billionaire was Peter Dutton.<\/p>\n
A little more than two years ago, the Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window column detailed how the Liberal leader dashed to Perth one Thursday after Question Time to attend a birthday party for Rinehart.<\/p>\n
The trip wasn’t disclosed by the opposition leader, but the paper reported that Dutton had “travelled commercially at his own expense”.<\/p>\n
Hanson has revelled in her ties to big money<\/p>\n
These anecdotes point to a time when perceptions over ties between well-heeled donors and, in this case, conservative politicians mattered. At the very least it was considered bad PR.<\/p>\n
One Nation’s dramatic return to the national stage seems to have dashed any sense of restraint or shame about such things.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Pauline Hanson has positively revelled in her ties to big money.<\/p>\n
In April she boasted about having received a “sexy” Cirrus G7 private plane.<\/p>\n
The Guardian reported that a spokesperson for Hancock Prospecting confirmed the donation to One Nation came through one of Rinehart’s companies, not from Rinehart personally.<\/p>\n
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Pauline Hanson was donated a plane by Gina Rinehart. (X: Pauline Hanson)<\/p>\n
On Thursday \u2014 a day after Hanson went head-to-head with Canberra’s press gallery \u2014 Australia’s richest person presented the One Nation founder with “a beautiful, big, fat” toy orange bulldozer at a News Corp-hosted conference in Townsville, having told the crowd she was giving Australians hope.<\/p>\n
“I want some bulldozer noise,” Rinehart said in an attempt to rev up the crowd.<\/p>\n
She said the gift was inspired by an Elon Musk chainsaw-wielding stunt, where he led an effort to slash US government spending.<\/p>\n
The chuckling, cosy interaction will no doubt birth a thousand memes.<\/p>\n
But it’s a striking piece of political theatre, indicative perhaps of new promiscuity creeping into donor politics.<\/p>\n
If anyone is embarrassed, it’s hard to spot<\/p>\n
This week The Australian’s Jack Quail noted that Joyce, Hanson and other members of their entourage and staff frequently appear clad in apparel from S Kidman, an RM Williams-style label owned by Rinehart.<\/p>\n
The billionaire was wearing an S Kidman hat when she handed over the novelty bulldozer on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The newspaper reported that One Nation wouldn’t say whether the clothing was a donation and that, aside from a “few shirts gifted more than a year ago, the party’s representatives are so enamoured with Kidman they have been footing the bill themselves”.<\/p>\n
Voters will have to await official disclosures to determine how deep the ties are between One Nation and Rinehart.<\/p>\n
And if anyone’s embarrassed by it all, it’s hard to spot.<\/p>\n
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The polls of recent months, and evidence from the US and UK, suggests such perceptions have little impact on supporters of One Nation, Donald Trump or Nigel Farage.<\/p>\n
Hanson’s defenders could argue that other parties accept money from all kinds of sources under a disclosure system that is slow and murky.<\/p>\n
Labor has the unions and the teals have the Climate 200 movement.<\/p>\n
The conservative parties have business and well-heeled individuals.<\/p>\n
Though One Nation claims its recent viral “fire the liar” campaign is driven by smaller donations, big money would merely be a way to level the playing field.<\/p>\n
Many commentators are predicting big things for One Nation even though the next election is still nearly two years away.<\/p>\n
How enduring is the current One Nation model? Hanson is having a moment now, but older heads remember how she flourished in the late 1990s before collapsing.<\/p>\n
One Nation’s prototype in the 1980s, the Joh for Canberra movement, was equally doomed, collapsing when it tried to go mainstream.<\/p>\n
Like now, those waves of populist anger had real catalysts.<\/p>\n
When Hanson first emerged, she was partly propelled by disaffection over the Hawke\/Keating economic reforms and globalisation. Immigration was the locus.<\/p>\n
“Economic rationalist” policies like the Hilmer reforms were blamed for hollowing out communities and eroding living standards.<\/p>\n
Loading\u00a0Gradual change is the mantra<\/p>\n
John Howard eventually saw off the Hanson threat, in no small part because the Nationals and the Liberals refused to preference One Nation ahead of Labor.<\/p>\n
But Howard also had the benefit of a China boom to fund entitlement politics that ground down the sharpest spikes of voter anger, and a global war on terror that helped push voters back to the Coalition.<\/p>\n
It’s significant that Hanson largely vanished from the political scene during the resources boom of the 2000s and early 2010s, contesting and losing at eight federal and state elections.<\/p>\n
ABC Politics in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\nSign up to the ABC Politics newsletter with Courtney Gould<\/p>\n
It was only in 2016, as the post-boom slump and productivity crisis began to drag on living standards, that she won her Senate spot.<\/p>\n
In 2026, Anthony Albanese has no easy cash to sling around, and the government’s instincts are to run a steady managerial strategy.<\/p>\n
There are still the Howard-like handouts, only this time many of the recipients are in feminised care industries and rusty manufacturing hubs.<\/p>\n
The government will need to figure out, in the words of one prominent Labor figure, who the “ordinary people” are that have drifted to One Nation.<\/p>\n
Gradual change is the mantra.<\/p>\n
That’s a brave political bet in a world of political insurgency, social media lightning storms, and god-knows-what kind of foreign interference campaigns might be lurking beneath the surface.<\/p>\n
Jacob Greber is political editor of ABC’s 7.30 program.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the LNP was formed in Queensland back in the late 2000s through an amalgamation of the Nationals…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":879172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[38602,4740,157446,185997,301709,309002,50,162361,357258,56443,46184],"class_list":["post-879171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-anthony-albanese","tag-australia","tag-barnaby-joyce","tag-bulldozer","tag-gina-rinehart","tag-jacob-greber","tag-news","tag-one-nation","tag-one-nation-donations","tag-pauline-hanson","tag-political-donations"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116779128931092630","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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