Progressive groups shift strategy to avoid personal attacks on Pauline Hanson ahead of Victorian election

The message from strategists was blunt: do not, however tempting, personally attack Pauline Hanson or call her a racist.

The request has been made to progressive campaigners and unionists who have been asked to start one-on-one conversations with One Nation supporters before the Victorian election in November.

It is also indicative of a strategic rethink in response to One Nation’s sustained surge in public support and the party’s recent wins in state and federal byelections and in South Australia.

Separate training sessions run by the peak body for unions in Victoria, the Trades Hall Council, and the progressive campaign group GetUp, have warned members they may be inadvertently pushing people to One Nation by not respectfully engaging with their legitimate economic concerns.

“As best as you can, I know it’s hard, don’t make it personal,” a GetUp strategist told hundreds of members on a Thursday night Zoom call.

“Going after Pauline Hanson personally and calling her a racist, or going after her character, although very tempting, just confirms what people already believe: that she is an outsider and the establishment is attacking her.”

This is a change of approach for the progressive group, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads personally attacking Hanson and her deputy leader, Barnaby Joyce, during the Farrer byelection. The ads, which linked the pair to Donald Trump, had little impact. One Nation comfortably won the seat.

The reset, based on research conducted by the polling company Redbridge after the Farrer byelection, brought GetUp in line with advice from Trades Hall, which has been hosting training sessions for major unions in recent weeks.

Oscar Kaspi-Crutchett, a senior researcher at Trades Hall, says people thinking about voting for One Nation shut down when they perceive personal attacks on the party’s leadership that do not acknowledge their legitimate concerns.

“For many people, simply ignoring her racism is not going to be possible or desirable,” Kaspi-Crutchett said. “It’s what drives them to get involved in the fight against One Nation.

“In these cases, we need to make it very clear that Hanson’s racism isn’t merely a character flaw but a sophisticated political device. It manufactures differences between groups which have none.”

GetUp has also told campaigners to not personally attack Hanson’s billionaire benefactor.

“Pauline Hanson is closely tied to Gina Rinehart, and it’s a problem, but it’s not what the research says should be in focus,” GetUp told campaigners.

“It can be effective if it is raised organically by the person you’re speaking to but leading with it reads as a standard partisan attack, which triggers the same defensiveness as going after her character directly.”

This advice marks another change for the group, which in the weeks after the Farrer byelection published ads describing Hanson as a “wannabe billionaire” flying around in “mummy Gina’s” private plane.

Senior state and federal Labor sources, who declined to be named so they could speak freely, say these changes makes sense. They argue the group’s personal attacks on rightwing figures, including Peter Dutton during the 2016 and 2019 federal elections, were not helpful.

GetUp’s decision to unveil a banner behind Hanson during her National Press Club address in June caused disquiet among Labor ranks, with some arguing it was unproductive. While the banner’s message focused on her record on wages, it also included cartoon images of cash flying around her.

‘Listen to the beat, not the lyrics’

Kaspi-Crutchett and his colleagues at Trades Hall are telling unionists to listen carefully for any hint of economic concerns that may be underpinning opinions about immigration, crime or culture wars.

“Pauline Hanson’s greatest weaknesses and the policy areas where she is the most vulnerable are the ones where the Labor movement has the highest trust from the public: working conditions, entitlements, maternity leave,” he says.

He says campaigners should resist the urge to fact-check conspiracy theories. Instead, conversations should be respectfully redirected to the economy.

“Don’t listen to the lyrics, listen to the beat of what they are saying,” he says. “What is consistent is their dissatisfaction with the status quo so get them to tease out what that looks like and how it makes them feel.

“There might be a spiel about Bill Gates but, eventually, you get to them saying ‘my kid can’t afford a house’.”

In June, the head of Trades Hall Council, Luke Hilakari, rebuked 23 state Labor MPs and candidates for having “zero conversations” with their constituents in the past two weeks, saying they needed to “work their ass off” to stop One Nation.

Kaspi-Crutchett said one-on-one conversations are vital because the politicians that once persuaded people against voting for Hanson had “lost credibility with the people she is targeting”.

“A nurse on the doorstep can do infinitely more than a legion of cabinet ministers and press secretaries.” Kaspi-Crutchett said.

“The trust has been exhausted.”