Pauline Hanson’s mark II maiden speech was not just a clarion call to the disengaged and disaffected; it was also a wake up to progressives to confront the threat that cultural division poses to our nation.
The instinct is to either ignore Hanson and deny her the oxygen to spread her creed or to push back hard and challenge the underlying ignorance and mindless stereotypes that inform her worldview.
Both approaches are premised on the notion that Hanson’s is the voice of a marginalised rump, out of step with the views of modern, mainstream, cosmopolitan Australia.
That was the assumption I was labouring under when Hanson returned to our parliament in July with a national vote of around 4%, peaking in the high teens in some parts of outer suburban and rural Australia.
To test this assumption, Essential put her most provocative proposition, a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, into our weekly poll. The result floored me.
This not a “basket of deplorables” who sit outside the confines of polite society, that is 49% of the men and women who make up our nation.
Yes, they are more likely to vote Coalition or “other” but 40% of Labor voters and one third of Greens agree too. Look around you right now, there are people in your workplace, in your street, on your train, who agree with Hanson.
Dig deeper and those who “strongly agree” say their support is not based on overt prejudice against a religion or terrorism, it is about a more ephemeral notion of integration into society.
So here’s the challenge to everyone concerned or affronted by these findings. How do you tell half the population that they are wrong?
The answer is you don’t.
The one thing that I’ve learnt in more than 20 years around politics is that convincing people they are wrong is a zero sum game.
Look at climate change, hitting deniers with facts just hardened their positions, creating a false equivalence of two sides to the story when there was only ever one.
Entering into a battle for hearts and minds is even trickier. It is impossible to convince someone that what they feel is wrong because feelings aren’t right and wrong, they are the product of a complex mix or reasoning, emotion and lived experiences that are both deeply personal and collective at the same time.
At the centre of politics is the challenge to understand what is driving people who hold different views, to work with them from the source to win their trust.
Hanson’s support is part of a global trend in cultural isolation: Trump’s wall, the Brexit; where economic disengagement and a rejection of globalisation castes the Muslim as outsider – be they in a burka, in an Isis video or in a boat, they become the symbol that things have “gone too far”.
The common thread through UK, US and Australian societies is a rising sense of economic insecurity, a sense that the deal we thought we had struck with our society has been broken.
In western democracies, that deal has been pretty consistent for more than a century: work hard, pay your taxes and you will have a steady job, access to health and education and a decent quality of life when you are older.
But as this week’s Essential Report shows, one quarter of voters expect their jobs to be less secure in the next two years, while just one third expect to be working with the same employer in five years time.
This lack of job security undermines everything certain about someone’s life – their ability to plan for the future, invest in their home, support their kids.
What is even more interesting is the disconnect between the elites and the rest of the population in the reasons behind this growing insecurity.
While the political insiders see rising insecurity as the natural consequence of technology and our economic affluence, the majority of Australians see it as the outcome of conscious decisions made by their leaders.
Someone feeling insecure does not cheer for free trade deals or see the spread of labour hire and contracting out as the way to reduce costs and make businesses more productive. They endure these decisions and then when they are personally affected, they resent them.
When they learn that half of all Australian companies earning more than $100m per year have found a legal way to pay no tax at all, they don’t marvel at their smart tax advice, they are filled with righteous indignation.
And if they were to stumble across a report showing the levels of inequality in Australian society were rising, it would merely confirm their suspicions that globalisation has gone too far.
And if politicians can’t bring back the manufacturing industry or guarantee wage rises, at least they can do something symbolic like turn back the boats or build a wall or ban Muslim immigrants.
That’s the real truth about the political outsiders who are attracting an increasing share of the vote with every election – whether they are Green or One Nation, Xenophon or Hinch – they are not making this stuff up.
And my point? There is a progressive political agenda that can resonate with all these disengaged and distrustful people, while at the same time taking the heat out of their fear and insecurity.
It’s about such unfashionable ideas as income distribution, workplace bargaining rights, industry development and corporate responsibility.
That’s the political challenge to responding to Hanson and her supporters: not to call them names that may make us feel superior but to listen and harness their sense of protest to more constructive ends.