Students Walk Out Against One Nation

On 17 September, Australian students are expected to walk out of school in protest against Pauline Hanson and One Nation. I think they are right to do so. Not because One Nation represents some uniquely terrible aberration in Australian politics, nor because every person who supports it should be dismissed along with it, but because the movement concentrates several problems already spreading through contemporary politics: manufactured division, performed competence and a communications environment extraordinarily well suited to populism.

The question of competence matters. Whether Pauline Hanson possesses the intellectual depth demanded by complex governance is ultimately less interesting than the grotesquery of the machinery surrounding her. Contemporary politics allows competence to be distributed behind the politician. Researchers, advisers, consultants, lawyers, lobbyists and communications professionals can supply expertise while the public figure supplies identity, certainty and performance. Ask a sufficiently difficult question and understanding can be replaced by the prepared line, the familiar enemy, the anecdote, the slogan or the pivot. Donald Trump is the canonical contemporary example. His political success demonstrates that mastery of complex policy is no longer a prerequisite for acquiring extraordinary political power, if indeed it ever was.

One Nation makes this arrangement particularly interesting because its political identity is built around the ordinary Australian standing against elites, institutions and professional political classes. Yet a national political organisation cannot operate on ordinary intuition. It requires money, lawyers, researchers, administrators, policy development, media strategy and professional political expertise. The useful questions are consequently concrete: who supplies that expertise, who develops the policy, where does the money come from, which interests obtain access through those dependencies, and what happens when the public performance of anti-establishment politics depends upon an increasingly sophisticated establishment of its own?

Then there is the contradiction sitting directly inside the name. One Nation promises unity while practising a politics that repeatedly requires division. An Australian “us” becomes politically meaningful through the production of a threatening “them”: outsiders and insiders, ordinary Australians and elites, legitimate citizens and whichever group presently occupies the position of social problem. These divisions are not merely collateral damage. They generate the grievance from which the promise of restored unity obtains its political force. One Nation must continually discover a divided Australia in order to keep offering One Nation as the answer. The cure depends upon the persistence of the condition it claims to cure.

None of this belongs exclusively to the political right. Contemporary communications technology rewards conflict across the political spectrum. Anger captures attention, certainty suppresses complexity, grievance sustains engagement, and enemies provide an organising focus for all three. Careful explanations of difficult systems fare considerably worse. Political communication consequently selects increasingly for communicative fitness rather than governing competence. One Nation is particularly well adapted to this environment because division is simple, grievance is repeatable and outrage keeps the political signal circulating.

That is why I think the students walking out on 17 September are right. A walkout will not resolve the conditions producing One Nation, and the students themselves will hardly agree about every political question. They do not need to. Refusing a politics that derives its coherence from repeatedly dividing the population is itself a legitimate political act. The larger problem will remain after everyone goes back to class: we have built communications systems increasingly capable of making division profitable, simplification persuasive and the performance of competence difficult to distinguish from the thing itself.