What's Happening to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party?

Among all the surprising and predictable outcomes of the 2016 Australian federal election, one of the most (or least) shocking was the reemergence of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party.

Just like the villain in a slasher franchise, or gonorrhea, we were never going to get rid of Hanson completely. And because it's too much effort to dive into the complex social, economic and political reasons that contributed to her return, I'm just going to say "Brexit… Trump… Hanson" and nod knowingly until you stop asking follow-ups.

Hanson's party won a commanding four Senate seats, just enough to control the balance of power in the upper house whenever Labor and the Greens sided against the Coalition. But before we start celebrating One Nation as the true third party in Australian politics, we should make sure they can survive the first year of their comeback without imploding. With the party currently embroiled in controversy—a condition we can safely call its default state—what will the future hold?

Last week, One Nation dropped its Bundamba candidate Shan Ju Lin after public backlash to a number of homophobic posts she had made on Facebook. Hanson released a statement saying that Lin's views were not shared by the party. Without context, we can assume she means "shared" in the Facebook sense.

This disendorsement must be confusing for Lin, who can only have assumed she was following Hanson's cues. What she failed to realise was that there is a Goldilocks zone of homophobia that one must occupy in order to be a successful One Nationer, but Lin accidentally went in a little too hot. Equating homosexuality to abuse and suggesting medical treatment for gays? Too homophobic. Acknowledging homosexuality? Not homophobic enough.

This past September, Hanson suggested that anyone who wanted to get gay married should move to a gay country. "If you feel so strongly about it, well then I'm sure you can move to that country and then you can have the marriage," she told Joy FM, citing all those historical progressive movements in which proponents simply move to a country that already has the law they want. "I've come from a time when there was no discussion about gay marriage or gay and lesbians living together, or whatever. That's my background and that's what I've grown up with."

Consistent with this "what I grew up with" rule, Ms Hanson also refused to discuss the internet, mobile phones, post-Robert Menzies politicians, or any episode of Bonanza after season nine.

Although publicly kicking out a candidate because her off-brand homophobia doesn't quite gel with the specific brand of homophobia you've established for your homophobic political party may seem like a bad news day for most, it helped distract everyone from the adventures of Rod Culleton.

Culleton was the One Nation candidate who successfully ran for Senate despite awaiting sentencing for a larceny conviction. Before we even reached Christmas he'd resigned from One Nation after a very public spat with Hanson, who declared him a "pain in the backside". On December 23, the Federal Court declared Culleton bankrupt, which automatically removed him from his Senate seat under section 44 of the Constitution. Culleton claims he is not bankrupt and can continue to act as a Senator, and intends to launch a High Court challenge to the ruling.

One Nation's only real success story—and we use that term so loosely we're prepared to call it irony—has been the rise of Malcolm Roberts, a man whose excessive self-confidence more than makes up for his lack of knowledge or understanding in really any area of the world or human experience.

Roberts, who soared to a democracy-questioning victory with 77 personal votes, believes that climate change is a hoax manufactured by a "tight-knit cabal." He also seems to think that the Rothschilds banking family killed JFK, and once called himself "Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts." in line with the "sovereign citizen" movement which believes that grammar is used to enslave citizens. So, on the One Nation scale of crazy, he ranks about a six.

A small number of hairline fractures have appeared in the Hanson-Roberts alliance, and it's only a matter of time before a disagreement on whether Australia should place sanctions on any country controlled by secret lizard people causes him to splinter off and form his own "Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts. Austrou'lio First P0litic4l P&>~∆rty." (It's safe to assume that any such party will be doomed to failure the moment his How To Vote cards recommend voters set fire to their ballot rather than place them in the ballot box, lest the government get control of their DNA and create a more sedate, pliable clone.)

And although a Malcolm Roberts departure is purely speculation at this point, it has the ring of inevitability to it. It would bring us full circle to a precedent that Hanson herself helped set. Her origin story was forged in the 1996 election when John Howard, whose sense of timing was so bad it presaged Jimmy Fallon by twenty years, disendorsed Hanson from the Liberal Party just before the election, but when it was too late to change the ballots. Her views had proven too controversial for a Liberal Party that was years away from normalising the likes of Cory Bernardi and George Christensen, and she stormed in with LNP name recognition and a reputation that ensured plenty of media coverage.

With Culleton gone, a potential Roberts departure would leave One Nation with only two Senators: Hanson and Brian Burston. Burston is fiercely loyal to Hanson, which doesn't mean he won't quit as much as it means that if he ever does split, he'd probably call his party "Pauline Hanson's One Nation II: Electorate Boogaloo".

The question is, why this has happened so quickly after what was ostensibly a successful election for One Nation?

There are distinct echoes of the Palmer United Party, a political force that centred on the personality of a blusterous public figure and also won four seats in 2013 off the back of voter dissatisfaction with the major parties. Over the three year term, Senators Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus quit the party to become independent senators, Senator Dio Wang failed to win re-election, and Palmer himself, facing an inevitable defeat, announced he would not contend in 2016. Any hopes that PUP had of rising like Lazarus were pipped when Lazarus himself formed his own party and then lost.

What PUP and One Nation illustrate is that any party built on the idiosyncratic preferences of a single politician is destined for failure the moment they decide to let other candidates, each with their own idiosyncratic preferences, into the fold. And the Queensland candidates fielded by One Nation prove that "anti-establishment" isn't a policy; it's a permission slip for lunatics.

Lee Zachariah is journalist, TV writer, and author of Double Dissolution: Heartbreak and Chaos on the Campaign Trail, out now from Echo Publishing. You can also follow him on Twitter.