Hanson’s hard sell
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may be surging in the polls, but it still faces many of the same structural and personality hurdles that have long held it back.
One Nation’s polling surge under Pauline Hanson is sparking alarm among Coalition MPs, but translating momentum in the polls into votes will be no easy feat.
Hanson was bullish about the prospect of further Coalition defections in an interview with us this morning, but accepted the result “puts a bit more pressure on” the party as it tries to convince Australians it’s more than a spoiler.
While the DemosAU poll, conducted exclusively for Capital Brief, puts One Nation in an unprecedented position — a minor party drawing level with the Coalition or Labor — history suggests Hanson has good reason to be cautious.
Jill Sheppard, a political scientist at ANU, says minor party surges years out from an election tend to “be a blip” before major parties “find a way to regress to the mean”.
