Why is One Nation so fragile?

And then there were two: One Nation is down to just two senators after NSW senator Brian Burston apparently spent recent days ringing around trying to find a political party to take him, discovering in the process that even the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party of NSW have standards. Pauline Hanson, left with just WA ring-in, Peter Georgiou, duly cried foul. It always starts with election night cheers and hugs; months, or at most a couple of years, later, it ends with tears and florid, even more incomprehensible than usual rhetoric about betrayal. Everyone predicted it, and it happened exactly as we all thought, although the spectacle of Malcolm “Rothschilds conspiracy” Roberts being booted by the High Court along the way was a left-field delight.

It’s worth picking apart exactly why a party like One Nation is so friable, and what it says about both the electorate and the political system. The first reason is that all small parties are fragile. Small parties don’t have the capacity or resources for administrative structures that can address internal tensions. Labor’s caucus organise themselves, with a couple of exceptions, into state factions and sub-factions, which have a little bit to do with ideology and more to do with powerbrokers, unions and sources of party votes. The Liberals have an informal factional system partly along ideological lines in each state. Small parties can’t afford factions. And they’re also more exposed to inter-state tensions. Many of the Greens’ internal problems stem from the Trotskyite faction in the NSW branch and its opposition to the “Green Tories” it sees in the traditional environmental movement. The other problem is a version of Kissinger’s comment about academic politics: micro parties only have a small amount of seats, power and money, so battles for control of them are far more cutthroat.

Thus, One Nation 1990s version, the Democrats, the DLP (2000s version), Family First, the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, Palmer United Party (another outfit we all expected to break apart), Jacqui Lambie Network. Even NXT, a model of stability, lost Tim Storer. Only the Greens have kept it together.

One Nation, however, is the extreme version of the form. No minor party other than the Greens in 2010 has had more stunning electoral success, and no other party fragmented so rapidly so often. That’s because there are special characteristics to the party. The obvious one is that the party is a vanity project of Pauline Hanson. Being able to effectively manipulate and appeal to Hanson is the key to success within One Nation; personal slights end up having political consequences.

But Hanson’s personal and intellectual flaws aside, One Nation has always traded on political disaffection. It is a party composed of people alienated from politics, who see the entire political and economic system as having been turned against them. Not people who really have been the targets of existing power structures — minorities, Indigenous Australians, women — but, generally, older white males unhappy that a political and economic system that they believe should serve their interests above others has been tilted economically away from them via globalisation, technology and neoliberal economic policies, and socially away from them via gender equality, family law reform and anti-discrimination laws.

The defining belief of One Nation is nostalgia: for a past whiter, maler, more manufacturing-dominated and more heterosexual than the present; where women, Indigenous people, the disabled and minorities are kept out of sight and a bloke could get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. But as a policy agenda, this can be all things to all people — thus you end up with a Rod Culleton-type (whose real beef is not with immigrants but with the banks) sitting with a pack of racists. And it’s a magnet for conspiracy theorists — Roberts believes in conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, the UN and more besides; Culleton holds to weird theories about the constitution and the monarchy; Hanson has peddled a range of conspiracies including anti-vax nonsense. When you see one conspiracy, you tend to see more, including in your own party.

What unites One Nation is resentment toward the 21st century, not a coherent policy agenda. Is it any surprise that the candidates it manages to get elected end up going their separate ways as the political agenda forces them to actually take a position on policies?