The 1998 Queensland election: How One Nation nearly changed history

David Oldfield brims with unfinished business.

Even fierce political rivals regard Oldfield as “the brains” behind One Nation’s stunning success at the 1998 Queensland election.

In its first campaign, the rightwing nativist party he co-founded with Pauline Hanson and the late David Ettridge won 11 seats and secured nearly 23% of the primary vote – higher than the National and Liberal parties, which directed preferences to the new party in an attempt to retain power.

Yet as the historic results came in, amid his elation and excitement, Oldfield felt disappointment – even “distress”.

“The plan was to form minority government,” he says.

Instead the role of kingmaker fell to a newly elected independent from a previously Nationals-held seat, who backed the Labor leader, Peter Beattie, into office.

Beattie says Oldfield’s plan, which came “within a whisker” of fruition, could have proved “an absolute watershed”.

“Had Peter Wellington not backed us, God knows what would have happened,” he says.

Divine omniscience he may not claim but the former premier does proffer a few educated guesses. Had Labor failed, Beattie himself – and his hardline stance against One Nation – would have faced severe internal recriminations.

“Everyone will deny it now,” he says, “But there were sections of the Labor party who thought we should exchange preferences [with One Nation].”

According to Beattie, had Rob Borbidge been reinstalled as premier on the back of One Nation support, the Nationals leader would have set about wooing the minor party. Borbidge would have supported the 11 One Nation MPs in their electorates and given them the opportunity to play a constructive role in government.

Borbidge says if he had won the 1998 election he would have accepted confidence and supply from One Nation, but that any minority government formed with that crop of MPs would probably have been “short lived”.

“They were not what you would call mainstream people,” he says.

“They would have been incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to work with.”

That year proved a fork in the road between excluding or accommodating the conservative insurgents – and not just in Queensland.

At the federal election months later, John Howard reversed the approach taken there and preferenced the party last. It did not win a seat.

The political commentator George Megalogenis wrote in August that Howard’s “great fortune as prime minister was seeing the Coalition lose” the 1998 Queensland election, and using it as “a crash test for his plan to treat Hanson as a fellow political traveller”.

Oldfield believes the conservative parties came agonisingly close to power in Queensland.

He says his plan for One Nation preferences to help the Coalition hold two seats south of Brisbane – Springwood and Mansfield – were frustrated by One Nation candidates who rejected his suggestion that they direct preferences to the Liberal incumbents.

Both seats fell narrowly to Labor, with the latter the most marginal seat in the state, won by 83 votes, giving Beattie a path to form government.

“Had we been able to [influence the results in those seats], then One Nation would have held the balance of power in Queensland in that election,” he says.

Oldfield and Hanson have not spoken in more than a decade. But his public assessment of her character and intellect in the decades since she booted him from the party has at times been scathing.

In 2019 he sat in the swivel chair of a Channel Seven chatshow to spruik his “explosive new memoir”, Being David, in which he wrote that Hanson had “failed miserably, day after day”.

The One Nation leader was “frustrating to work with”, he said, because she would not take “any type of constructive criticism” – “or, quite frankly, read anything”.

On the campaign trail in Queensland, the rightwing firebrand would “talk about crazy ideas for policy”, he said, ideas that “were just not even jurisdictionally possible”.

“So I’d have to come up with pretend policies – and then she’d forget about it the next day,” Oldfield said. “And so it wouldn’t matter.”

Seven years later, with Hanson and One Nation resurgent in opinion polls, Oldfield strikes a different tone when discussing his former boss.

In April he created a social media account to offer his opinions on matters “socio-political”. Among them is his contention that “modern people” in western nations are being replaced by “millions of savages”.

Also that, as prime minister, Hanson would usher in “quite extraordinary” change – change that he would “certainly vote for”.

After being booted unceremoniously from the party, why has Oldfield so enthusiastically returned to cheer it on from the sidelines?

“For me, there is a level of hope that One Nation can now achieve federally what it might have achieved decades ago,” he says. “Change the landscape potentially forever.”

Oldfield is not the only high-ranking former One Nation figure to have fallen out with Hanson who is now revelling in her resurgence.

Jeff Knuth was the party whip when One Nation swept Queensland in 1998.

When he rose before parliament for the first time in July of that year he railed against “firearm grabbers”, “disarmament freaks” and the “new-age fantasies” of globalisation that had wrought “economic devastation” upon the Australian people.

The hope of Queensland was bound up in just two momentous words, he said – “fresh words, clean words, words that spell salvation for all”.

“Those words are ‘One Nation’,” Knuth declared in his maiden speech.

Within seven months Knuth had quit the party. He went on to join a different, short-lived splinter party: the City Country Alliance, led by his former One Nation parliamentary colleague Bill Feldman.

When Knuth and his fellow 10 One Nation MPs entered the state parliament, he says the media and political establishment of the day placed “a target on our faces”. But he does not absolve Hanson of the disaster that followed the party’s breakthrough election.

“We had a very angry Pauline – she didn’t take anyone’s advice and then she took her anger out on us,” he says. “It was just doomed.”

But today, from his home in Townsville, the semi-retired industrial chemist is “proud of Pauline” and “happy for her”.

“We hugged and kissed. We made up and everything’s cool between us,” he says.

Knuth sees strong parallels between Queensland in 1998 and the political environment today but says One Nation in 2026 has a major advantage it lacked three decades ago.

“Pauline is the same Pauline as back then but just wiser and smarter – and she’s got the joys of social media.”

Feldman also sees advantages for the party today that it lacked when he served as One Nation’s leader in the Queensland parliament in 1998.

The problems that plagued it then, he says, were “all internal party stuff” – issues related to branches, its fledgling constitution and, as many One Nation MPs of that era agreed, “the two Davids” – Oldfield and Ettridge.

But the retired police officer from Woodford says labels including “racist and homophobe and xenophobe” conspired to “drive a lot of people and a lot of support back underground”.

“They’re wearing names like that these days, mate, as a badge of honour,” he says. “Those things just don’t wash any more.”

His social media feed, which includes posts asserting – contrary to overwhelming scientific consensus – that the planet is cooling, not warming, is full of anti-Labor and pro-One Nation posts.

“I’m enjoying it at the moment, mate,” he says. “All I hope and pray now is that Pauline and her staff have a better vetting procedure for people that are selected as her candidates – that’s all they need.”

On this, Feldman strikes something of a chord of agreement with Beattie, his old political foe.

Because while 1998 could have been the year in which One Nation “established themselves”, the former premier says this was ultimately cruelled because it was a party of individuals – all against something but not for anything.

“Disunity killed them in Queensland,” he says. “And, to be honest, I think it will kill them again.”

But Beattie says history cannot be counted on to repeat. A focus on attacking Hanson will only weld on her support, he says. Instead, the major parties must recognise that “the overwhelming percentage of her supporters are actually good Australians who are doing it tough”.

“They are looking for answers for their kids,” he says. “That was exactly [the same] in Queensland in 1998.”

Borbidge also sees “history repeating itself” – but this time, he says, “it’s One Nation on steroids”.

“This time One Nation is a bigger threat to all the major parties, simply because it is smarter, it is better resourced and its campaigning techniques are far more sophisticated,” he says.

“It’s very much a recurring nightmare.”