One Nation’s byelection win at Secret Harbour on the weekend can be dismissed as the result of the politics of anger and exclusion, but if we are serious about understanding the surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s party, we should also recognise a nostalgia for belonging and shared identity. At a time when people are feeling more distant from their leaders and each other, the party’s name seems to offer a patriotic resistance to the status quo.
Like other populist movements around the globe, One Nation is rising at a time of social atomisation and isolation. This week’s Guardian Essential report shows this plainly: fewer people are joining things. One-third of those surveyed have never joined anything, ever.
The last time we asked this question was a decade ago in the shock and fug after Trump’s first election win; at the time, I noted that the shift away from membership was undermining our faith in an increasingly remote political system.
These trends have only been accelerated by technology: the growth of the gig economy, algorithms that reduce citizens to universes of one, and now emerging applications of AI such as personal agents and intimate companions.
One Nation is dismissed as divisive, discriminatory and dangerous, but there is an alternate narrative running through their disarmingly effective “Please Explain” propaganda cartoons: progressives are the ones dividing the nation into warring identities and turning people against each other. One Nation is here to unite the common people against the elites.
Take away the red hair and you could be describing the mission of the Australian trade union movement, which emerged as a response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution (and for its first 75 years displayed a similarly nativist bent).
The Australian union movement was built on the struggles of shearers and miners to first resist the oppressive power of the bosses and then to shape the political system through elected representatives.
At its peak in 1975, the movement represented about 60% of the workforce; today it is in the low teens with private-sector coverage in the single digits. The reasons for this are varied: structural shifts from large blue-collar factories, active deunionisation drives, and the shift from permanent to contract labour.
Despite this, the majority of Australians still see unions as playing an important role, with 60% saying unions are important for working people today (more than four times the actual membership levels).
As a new wave of technological disruption hits, the leadership of the Australian union movement is in its own transition with Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil handing over power to a new generation after close to a decade of fighting the good fight.
They leave a movement in a contradictory state, with deep institutional influence within a centre-left government that has a strong hold on power but a membership density at historically low levels.
The battle over AI adoption will be fought on multiple fronts, including the workplace, and the different approaches of the union movement and One Nation will be decisive. Whether its wages, job security or the actual deployment of these tools, Australians are already on red alert.
Early legislative skirmishes are already emerging; from routine worker surveillance to the wholesale theft of creative works to new forms of worker control and exploitation.
Each demands a level of support for workers’ rights absent from Hanson’s parliamentary voting record over 30 years where she has reflexively sided with big business and those holding the levers of economic power.
Whether it’s nurses or retail workers, home-delivery drivers or teachers, workers will be the canaries in the coalmine when the technology is dangerous, destructive or just plain dumb.
The good news is unions are not alone. The Catholic church, buoyed up by Pope Leo’s intervention, is entering the fray, gender advocates are demanding control of their algorithms and the environment movement is waking up to the energy demands of datacentres. From here we can see the beginnings of a broader national movement that is neither nativist nor reactionary.
When we last polled attitudes to membership, I argued the first act of resistance is to join something. Ten years on, that project is even more urgent.
From there comes the power to organise and engage and, where necessary, demand governments intervene, such as with Meta’s “pervert glasses” which have finally prompted real progress this week on privacy law reform.
The final challenge is not to cede our future to those with authority. As Pope Leo stresses in his encyclical: the source of power comes from the ground up, what he calls “subsidiarity”, an idea that resembles the network of workplace delegates, shop stewards and elected organisers that were the hallmark of the union movement at its zenith.
The future is not going to write itself. If we didn’t have workers with enforceable legal rights, we would need to invent them. Unions are the bedrock from which a real resistance to oppressive power can grow.
If not, we will cede the common ground to the likes of Pauline and Barnaby, sponsored by a billionaire, with no unifying principle apart from a sense of grievance and a track record of voting against the interests of the people they claim to unite.
