There is a deeper discontent in Australian society than the version One Nation is currently exploiting.

What we might call an egalitarian anger exists too, a sometimes inchoate sense that the economic transformation of the past 50-odd years has created such a concentration of wealth that the “fair go” we once saw as defining has gone forever.

People might not frame it in terms of “neoliberalism” or “financialisaton”, but they can see in their rents and their debts and their kids’ prospects that the game is rigged in favour of people who aren’t them.

The politics of grievance that has emerged is instead being owned and operated by Pauline Hanson almost exclusively, and that needs to be challenged. She is speaking to something real and has had 30 years to perfect her schtick, but it is time for progressives to counter it, to start screaming that she is not the only one who gets to lament the loss of an idea of the country many of us still want to build.

The first thing to note is that One Nation is no longer a grassroots party, and is increasingly used by vested interests to push an extreme right-wing agenda. The party infrastructure is entwined with a network of conservative think tanks, lobby groups, media outlets and individual donors whose core business is protecting wealth and hierarchy, not redistributing it, and flattening it. Along with her overt alignment with Trump’s MAGA-ism, Hanson is little more than a delivery mechanism for a worldview that originates in boardrooms, mining companies, and reactionary churches, all laundered through her alleged authenticity and “plain speaking”.

She channels anger into dead-end bigotry and conspiracism and sells........

© The New Daily