The Labor and Liberal parties have been overrun with the kind of people who annoyed us at school. By David Penberthy in The Australian.
Many Australians clearly have concluded that both the Labor and Liberal parties have been overrun with the kind of people who annoyed us at school, priggish prefect types in love with the sound of their own voice and only in it for themselves.
The stage-managed nature of mainstream politics, the stultifying cliches and question avoidance that infect mainstream political discourse, is a world away from the appealingly ocker stylings of the One Nation team. …
Authentic grit:
By way of both compliment and criticism, Hanson is the only person in politics whose views have not changed since she delivered her explosive maiden speech in 1996. She still speaks the same way, she still acts in the same way and she still has a quality of which others in mainstream politics can only dream: an innate ability to relate to ordinary people because she is the ultimate ordinary person.
She has never had polish and never sought to have polish, and it is political genius because where some see polish, others see slickness and insincerity.
The derision she endured from the elite media and her tactically challenged political opponents as being some drongo fish and chip shop owner has made her both a martyr and a heroine in the eyes of low-income people who have had limited educational opportunities. …
This earthiness manifests itself in human form with pubs in Eudunda and Kapunda in SA’s rural Mid-North having to bring on extra staff when she and Barnaby Joyce arrived for politics in the pub chats during the SA campaign. People were tripping over themselves to get in. …
It’s the same earthiness that has the party making headlines in SA with its four lower house and three upper house MPs, only one of whom in Cory Bernardi is a political professional, the remainder being a ferry driver, prison guard, farmer, make-up artist, carpenter and small businessman.
Democracy is still working, on the fringes. But can the people get the bureaucracy to change course on mass immigration and net-zero?