one nation: grievance politics surge down under

If Pauline Hanson becomes prime minister, an electoral victory would still leave the harder question of governing unresolved. Winning support is one achievement; managing a complex modern state is another. The danger I see is a political environment that elevates frustration above demonstrated competence, performance above administration, and symbolic conflict above the difficult work of governing.

The deeper concern is the selection mechanism. The office requires strategic judgement, institutional literacy, economic understanding, diplomatic subtlety and the ability to manage systems whose complexity exceeds any one person’s intuition. Popularity, recognisability and the capacity to articulate grievance are politically useful skills, but they are not substitutes for statecraft. One Nation should face the same test as every other party: how its proposals would work, what they would cost and how their consequences would be managed.

A democracy begins to wobble when it mistakes the expression of dissatisfaction for the capacity to govern its consequences.

There is a further irony. People are feeling challenged because life is becoming more complex, more expensive, more unstable and harder to interpret. Populism offers simple answers to that complexity. When those answers leave the underlying causes unresolved, the resulting frustration becomes more fuel for the same political tribe. The failure reproduces the conditions of its own political usefulness.

In seeking self-determination and control, people risk becoming more dependent on a commercial machinery that rewards grievance, repetition and recurring frustration. Attention is monetised, conflict keeps circulating, and the promise of escape becomes another means of sustaining the loop. An electoral victory is no guarantee of escape from the machinery that helped produce it.