Andrew Hastie launched a blistering public assault on Pauline Hanson this week after she called him a "traitor" in a social media cartoon, and the row between Hastie and One Nation continues to rumble. The former SAS veteran, who served three tours in the Middle East, said Hanson was a "lying coward" for failing to take responsibility and deleting the film, which called him a traitor eight times. He said her accusation was an attack on all veterans.
"The question I have for Senator Hanson is: are you calling them traitors as well? Because if you are, just own it. You don't get to redefine ANZAC. You don't get to redefine the profession of arms," Hastie said.
Who Gets Dragged Into the Fight
The row has generated plenty of online heat, but the people doing the talking are the ones with platforms, party labels and media oxygen. Tassie senator Jacqui Lambie, another veteran, was equally scathing of Hanson, who by Friday was telling everyone to take a "chill pill". As of late yesterday, the offending video was still pinned to the top of her social media feeds. The spectacle keeps rolling while the same political brands keep feeding it.
Hastie is the MP for Canning, and the article says his response is targeted and deliberate. He knows he has a difficult fight on his hands keeping his southern Perth-based seat in the face of a resurgent One Nation, and he has long ago decided that rather than work with Hanson, as some Liberals have advocated, he wants to take her on directly. That’s the game: not community power, not horizontal organizing, just rival politicians trying to outmuscle each other inside the same narrow arena.
What the Party System Rewards
The piece says Hastie has the fightback buttressed by a string of Coalition voices. It also says he is up against it because WA's insular media ecosystem is largely arrayed against him over the Ben Roberts-Smith case. So the machinery closes ranks, then calls the result public debate. Ordinary people get the noise; the factions get the leverage.
A year ago, Hastie was making headlines with a fairly hokey social media campaign that was harking back to a distant past, a sepia-coloured Hills Hoist idyll, with the line "Remember when we made big cars." Economists inside and outside the Coalition shook their heads in disbelief. The whole thing reads like manufactured nostalgia for a political market that never stops selling itself.
Hastie learnt the hard way what it means to be burnt by the flaming pit of hell that is online engagement. Originally pitching himself as a libertarian against political censorship, he was against the tide of Labor's post-Bondi anti-vilification legislation. After switching to a more centrist view that there should be limits on saying terrible things about minorities, Hastie was excommunicated by many of his previous boosters, outraged at this transgression. In response, the article says, Hastie has been busy trying to build support from different constituencies. Reform, in this setup, looks a lot like a different set of gatekeepers deciding who gets to speak.
The Limits of Conviction Politics
The question for Hastie, and those who want him to lead the Liberal Party, is whether he can make his momentum last. The article says there are many examples abroad of how such an approach has failed, particularly in the United States where Donald Trump tore down column after column of Republican opponents. It says Hanson is no Trump, but it's a dangerous fight. In the US, Republicans who couldn't beat Trump either joined him or quietly faded away, though there are some exceptions.
The article says Hastie has established that he's an institutionalist, with a clear set of values and that he's prepared to defend them, even if it's uncomfortable and may upset his own base. It says that's what genuine conviction politicians do. The phrase lands with a thud. The institution stays intact; the personalities rotate through it.
The Greens were quietly having their own internal meltdown this week over whether to support a new method for generating carbon credits from turning land that was earmarked for logging into national parkland. For many in the environmental movement opposition to this idea was hard to understand, while for others, including Bob Brown and Christine Milne, it was selling out the environmental movement to neoliberalism. The dispute shows how even movements that claim to speak for the earth can get pulled into the logic of policy bargains and market fixes.
In the end, the Greens partyroom voted six to five to support the government's policy. Three Greens then dissented on the Senate floor, the first time anyone can remember such a thing happening at such scale. The article says that in most other political parties the sight of 27 per cent of the party room crossing the floor would trigger a leadership spill, though it is not clear that will happen this time. That’s the parliamentary order: dissent gets counted, contained, and then folded back into the machine.