Why Beattie is helping Hanson

It might take several elections, and it might mean allowing Labor to temporarily hold some seats, but if they are serious, they have to do it. Rushing into One Nation’s arms is not going to help the process. At this election the National Party should be selling the line that a vote for One Nation is a vote for Labor.

Their disorderly embrace of One Nation does more than endorse Hanson, it also tends to suggest that the Coalition is not a viable alternative to Labor. In these situations a protest vote for a minor party becomes more likely – if there is no opposition party that can form a government, you might as well vote for the most extreme party to underline your discontent. The Coalition will yet again help that along with its negative advertising, which seems to have started last night (5/2/01).

The advertising targets Beattie for electoral rorting despite the Coalition having research that says that not only do most people think that Beattie is the best person to clean it up, but that even more think that all political parties do it. These negative ads are more likely to drive voters to the non-party political parties rather than to the Coalition.

What the Coalition should be doing is running advertisements targetting Beattie on the issues. It also needs to target One Nation on the question of how effective it will be as an opposition to Beattie on these issues. But it won’t do that because the National Party has adopted the wrong-headed strategy of trying to win seats on One Nation preferences, even though One Nation had already said they were going to preference against sitting members, giving Nationals challenging sitting Labor members the advantage.

Beattie has been ruthless. This does represent a reverse of his previous stand, but it is a reverse that delivers large benefits to his constituency. Whether it is ethically defensible in light of his previous statements is another question. On the one hand, by making it possible for Beattie to form a government with much less than 50% of the vote One Nation is kept well away from forming government. On the other hand, by helping One Nation to stay in business it increases the chances of the Coalition adopting some of its less offensive policies (check out this press release from David Watson).

On balance, the correct ethical position is probably relative to where you stand. To a "true believer" the benefits of a Labor Government are enough to justify the survival of One Nation. Not necessarily so to the rest of us.

There is one major lesson to be learned by the Coalition here. Preference allocations are a strategic and tactical consideration, not a statement of moral positions. Next election they might wait until after nominations close, and then decide them on a seat-by-seat basis after pragmatically calculating the political advantage for each seat.