What the anti-Hanson movement of the 1990s achieved — and what it didn’t

First published at Revitalising Labour.

The current issue of Marxist Left Review (MLR), Socialist Alternative’s theoretical journal and the space where Australia’s largest far-left organisation presents its most considered public intellectual work, contains two articles arguing that the anti-Hanson movement of the late 1990s won a decisive victory against One Nation, and that the left should draw on that experience to confront the current surge in One Nation’s support. 

Mick Armstrong’s piece draws explicitly on an earlier MLR article by Tess Lee Ack, presented as the authoritative record of the campaign. Armstrong is a founding member and leading theorist of Socialist Alternative. Tom Bramble’s editorial covers similar ground. Bramble is a founding member of Socialist Alternative and a retired academic whose research at the University of Queensland focused on the Australian labour movement. Both pieces contain important truths. One Nation’s current rise is serious, the left needs to respond, and the movement of the late 1990s was real and significant. But both pieces get the history substantially wrong in ways that produce wrong lessons for now.

I am not a disinterested observer of this history. I came into activism directly through Hanson’s rise. I was in the local leadership of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and its youth organisation Resistance in Perth throughout the movement, on the national council of Resistance in 1998, on the national executive of Resistance in 1999, and later a member of the DSP’s national executive. Both the DSP and Resistance subsequently dissolved into Socialist Alliance. 

I was a founding member of Action Against Racism (the main far-left anti-racist coalition in Perth for several years), which brought together Resistance and the DSP, the International Socialist Organisation (now Solidarity), the Socialist Party of Australia (now the Communist Party of Australia), Militant (then the Australian section of the Committee for a Workers’ International, a tradition that has since fragmented significantly), anarchists, and independent anti-racists. 

I was part of the political debates the MLR pieces don’t mention, in a state those pieces don’t discuss, doing work those pieces write out of the history they’re constructing. What follows is an attempt to correct the record, not to argue about which tendency deserves credit for what, but because the strategic lessons drawn from the wrong history are inadequate to the actual situation we face.

The victory that wasn’t

Armstrong’s central claim is that the mass protests of the late 1990s broke the back of One Nation and prevented the consolidation of a serious fascist organisation. He points to One Nation’s poor performance in Victoria as the key evidence of the movement’s impact, arguing that wherever protests were most intense, One Nation performed worst.

The specific electoral evidence Armstrong offers for this claim is revealing: or rather, its absence is. He gestures at a Melbourne by-election in mid-1998 where One Nation performed poorly, without naming the seat. From the context and timing, the election he means is almost certainly the August 1998 by-election in the state seat of Northcote, where One Nation received 6% of the vote in a safe Labor seat with no Liberal candidate, where Labor held 60% and the two-candidate preferred contest was between Labor and the Democrats. 

The contemporaneous Green Left Weekly (GLW) coverage of the Northcote campaign shows the DSP and Resistance organising a sustained series of events in the electorate in the lead-up to the poll, not a single protest but a programme of community engagement including public meetings with candidates. One Nation were not in the final count. They came sixth.

Using Northcote as evidence that the movement had driven One Nation back requires not mentioning that Northcote was never a seat One Nation would be expected to win. One Nation at 6% in an inner-Melbourne Labor stronghold is not a movement victory. It is One Nation performing exactly as demographic and political logic would predict in the seat least likely to produce a different result. The vagueness about which election is being cited is itself telling: if the result demonstrated what Armstrong claims, there would be no reason not to name it.

More importantly, it requires not mentioning what was happening elsewhere at the same moment. The Queensland state election took place on 13 June 1998, two months before Northcote. One Nation received 22.68% of the vote and won 11 seats. In Barambah, once the electorate of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, they polled 43.5%. At 22.68% statewide, One Nation’s vote comfortably exceeded the quota required to elect members. 

The result sent shockwaves through the entire political establishment. Seven of those 11 seats were won with the assistance of Coalition preference flows: a decision by the national Liberal organisation that overruled the Queensland branch’s own preference to put One Nation last, and which backfired catastrophically, delivering seats to Labor and nearly destroying the Coalition in the state.

These two results, Northcote and Queensland, were happening in the same political moment. Armstrong’s account treats one as evidence of movement power and barely mentions the other except as a footnote about the Coalition’s electoral tactics. An honest account of where One Nation stood in mid-1998 would have to hold both results simultaneously: 6% in Northcote, 22.68% in Queensland, 11 seats won. The movement that Armstrong celebrates had no discernible impact on the result that actually mattered.

The federal election in October 1998 confirmed the picture. One Nation received 8.43% nationally: 14.35% in Queensland, 3.72% in Victoria. The Victorian figure is presented as evidence of the movement’s success. The Queensland figure, which shows One Nation winning roughly one in seven votes despite three years of sustained protest activity, is not discussed.

What the movement actually was

The most significant popular expression of opposition to One Nation was not the protests outside her meetings. It was the national wave of high school student walkouts in mid-1998, described by Armstrong himself as part of one of the most sustained and militant protest movements since the end of the Vietnam War. These walkouts mobilised young people across every capital city and into regional centres in a way that no other element of the movement achieved. There were significant protests in Brisbane and Perth as well as Melbourne and Sydney, a national movement that the MLR account consistently flattens into a Melbourne story.

Armstrong mentions the walkouts in a single clause. He does not explain who organised them or how they spread nationally. Lee Ack’s piece, presented as the definitive historical account of the campaign, is similarly vague. This vagueness is not incidental. The organisations that called and coordinated the walkouts had their own political traditions, their own ongoing existence, and their own claim to the movement’s history. Acknowledging them would require engaging seriously with a left that existed and did significant work outside the organisational networks the MLR pieces draw on. 

The GLW archive (fully digitised, freely accessible, searchable) documents what those organisations did in ways that are publicly available to anyone who looks. The MLR pieces don’t look, and don’t cite it. This is not a limitation of access. It is a choice, and the effect of that choice, whatever the intention, is to maintain an account that engagement with the contemporaneous record would substantially complicate. 

It is also worth noting that across both MLR pieces, Armstrong cites only two contemporaneous articles from within his own tradition’s publications: a piece from August 1997, before the Queensland state election, before the walkouts, and before the movement’s most significant actions, arguing the protests were working; and his own mid-1998 Queensland electoral analysis. The 1997 piece was written before the evidence was in, and the evidence that subsequently came in, from Queensland and from the policy terrain, did not straightforwardly support the claim. 

There is also a logical problem with the claim that the protests worked that neither piece adequately addresses. You can only make that case by arguing things would have been much worse without them, a counterfactual that is asserted rather than established and that is in any case unfalsifiable. Lee Ack herself acknowledges it is “next to impossible to evaluate the impact of the demonstrations,” before proceeding to evaluate it and declare it decisive. That acknowledgment of methodological impossibility followed immediately by confident causal attribution captures the circularity of the argument. 

There is nothing cited from their own publications covering the period after mid-1998 (the Hawthorn action, the Bendigo protests, the federal election campaign) when the movement’s most significant actions by Armstrong’s own account occurred. The tradition’s own contemporaneous record of the movement’s decisive period is absent from the account claiming authority over it. That the Lee Ack piece is presented as the definitive historical account of the campaign, and that both Armstrong and Bramble treat it as such, is difficult to reconcile with an evidentiary base this thin, particularly when the contemporaneous record that would complicate it is freely available and simply not consulted.

The GLW archive is unambiguous: the socialist left called the initial round of high school walkouts in Sydney and Canberra on July 2, 1998, and then organised the biggest ever national secondary school walkout on July 24, mobilising 14,000 students. A further national walkout was called for August 28. The coverage was national: every major television network, capital city dailies, ethnic community papers. A 2001 GLW article directly attributes the walkouts to Resistance while making the same causal claim about their political impact that the MLR pieces make, but without the organisational attribution the MLR pieces omit.

The timing is significant. The Queensland state election was June 13. The first walkouts were July 2, nineteen days later. The walkouts were not an expression of a movement winning. They were a response to the shock of Queensland, to the sudden realisation that One Nation had won 23% and 11 seats and that the political mainstream had no adequate answer. You do not organise a walkout when you are winning. A walkout requires urgency. The walkouts were an emergency response to a genuine crisis, called by specific organisations with specific political traditions doing specific organised work that the MLR account renders as spontaneous community upsurge.

This rendering matters beyond questions of historical credit. If the walkouts just happened, if they were an expression of spontaneous mass anger rather than organised left work with a coherent political method, then there is nothing to learn from how they were built. If they were the product of specific organisations with specific political traditions doing specific work, then understanding what those organisations did and why is essential to understanding whether and how something similar could be built now. The spontaneity framing is more comfortable for an account that needs to centre one set of organisations. It is less useful for anyone trying to actually build a movement.

The movement in Melbourne was real and significant. The Victorian Trades Hall Council and ethnic community organisations built the December 1996 rally of 50,000, and there were sustained confrontational protests across 1997 and 1998 that gave confidence to communities under attack. But the movement was larger, more politically complex, and more organisationally diverse than the MLR account suggests. It involved multiple left tendencies, trade unions, ethnic community organisations, churches, and independents in different configurations in different cities. The account that centres Melbourne and one set of organisations within it misrepresents what the movement actually was, and in doing so misrepresents what lessons can honestly be drawn from it.

The confrontational model (follow One Nation wherever it holds meetings and demonstrate that it’s not welcome) has real limits that the movement’s own experience revealed. Venue-chasing is exhausting and demoralising: One Nation moves the meeting, activists scramble across a suburb or suburbs, the energy burns on logistics rather than politics. In regional areas the model breaks down more seriously. 

I was part of protests in regional Western Australia in the lead-up to the 1998 federal election including one in Northam, in the Wheatbelt, where One Nation had genuine organic support. We were scared driving home. In hindsight it was a mistake: people from Perth arriving in a regional community to tell it who was welcome there. The same problem recurs today when inner-city activists travel to outer suburban or regional communities to protest One Nation events. They arrive as outsiders declaring who is welcome, confirm every suspicion One Nation cultivates about who the left represents, and go home having built nothing.

The Dandenong protest in July 1997 pointed toward something better, despite being reactive to One Nation’s calendar. The local community (residents, multicultural organisations, the Greater Dandenong City Council) were involved in organising and taking action on their own terrain, not simply mobilised to an event called by outsiders. That character, the community having a genuine stake and a genuine role, is what made it more than venue disruption even though it was also that. It is closer to the model the walkouts expressed and the current moment requires.

The walkouts understood something the venue disruption model didn’t. Rather than following One Nation into terrain where it had the advantage, they built on their own terrain: schools, communities, the lived experience of young people who had their own reasons to be alarmed by what Queensland had shown. 

That’s the model worth recovering: not just the reactive disruption that needs the other side to provide the occasion, but the independent organising that builds its own momentum from its own roots. The left that organised the walkouts wasn’t building a community of struggle by following One Nation around. It was building one by reaching people through their own conditions and connecting their existing political instincts to each other.

Counter-mobilisation still matters. When One Nation attempts to build a visible street presence, when fascist organisations march, communities under direct attack need to see organised opposition. But it cannot be the primary strategy, and it cannot substitute for the sustained community organising that is the only thing that actually builds the capacity to contest One Nation in the places where it’s winning.

Why Hanson really declined — and why she never went away

The standard account of One Nation’s decline in the MLR pieces identifies three factors: Howard stealing her policies, her organisation’s internal dysfunction, and the pressure of the protest movement. The third factor is presented as decisive. The first two are acknowledged but subordinated. The actual sequence of events suggests the weighting should be reversed, and that even then, the framing of decline obscures what actually happened.

The Queensland state election in June 1998 demonstrated to Howard that One Nation posed an existential threat to the Coalition in its regional heartland. Howard’s subsequent insistence that the Coalition put One Nation last on preferences at the federal election was not a response to anti-racist movement pressure. It was a response to the near-destruction of his party in Queensland through the Coalition’s own electoral tactics. The movement gets credit for a decision made entirely on the basis of Coalition self-interest in a state where the movement had almost no presence.

Accompanying the preference switch was something both Armstrong and Bramble acknowledge but do not adequately reckon with: Howard moved sharply to absorb One Nation’s policy agenda. He cut immigration, especially family reunion categories. He implemented mandatory detention and temporary protection visas. He abolished ATSIC. He extinguished native title on pastoral leases. As journalist David Marr later summarised it: “Howard made Hanson redundant.”

Hanson herself, speaking to ABC Television in July 2005 (at the nadir of her political fortunes, two years after her jail conviction had been overturned, studying for her real estate licence, recently featured in a television dancing series, and saying she had no plans to return to public life), offered her own assessment of what had happened:

“The government has taken up a lot of the issues that I’ve spoken about over the years. I think John Howard was very clever, very clever indeed. He never put me down... what he did was allowed me to go out and raise the issues, gathered the public response by it and then came in later and did something about it... I felt I must have been the minister for everything.”

This is Hanson’s own account of what happened, at the moment the MLR pieces would consider her most thoroughly defeated. She doesn’t describe herself as having been broken by the anti-racist movement. She describes herself as having been so influential on government policy that the media saw her as a de facto cabinet minister. The movement that Armstrong and Lee Ack celebrate as decisive does not appear in her account of why her influence waned. Howard implementing her agenda is the explanation she gives, and she’s right.

The pattern is visible again now. When Liberal leader Angus Taylor announced a policy restricting welfare access to citizens in his May 2026 budget reply, Hanson publicly denounced it as the Coalition stealing One Nation policies. The minister for everything, still claiming her portfolio.

Both MLR pieces acknowledge these facts in passing. Neither confronts the implication: if One Nation’s decline coincided with the implementation of One Nation’s policy agenda by the federal government, with the acquiescence of an ALP opposition that refused to mount serious resistance to any of it, in what sense did the movement win? One Nation as an organisation declined. One Nation’s politics won. Those are not the same outcome.

The left tried to shift part of the movement’s focus onto Howard in the later walkouts, attempting to name the Coalition’s policy agenda as the real terrain of contest rather than Hanson’s organisational presence. It didn’t get traction. In organising the subsequent walkout, students who had participated in the first two expressed doubts. The framing of the third walkout as being against both Hanson and Howard sounded, as several put it, too political — the step of naming the governing party as engaged in the same racist project was further than most were prepared to go. One Nation was a clear target with a clear moral valence. Howard required a more structural analysis of Australian racism than the individual politician framing demanded. 

The movement’s own framing had shaped what felt like legitimate political terrain. One Nation was racism; Howard was a different kind of problem. This wasn’t primarily a failure of organisational capacity. The obstacle was the political conclusion the framing required: to indict not just Hanson but the system that was implementing her agenda. The movement had been built around a politician as the target. Moving to the government required indicting the system itself, and the movement’s own political formation made that step difficult to take. 

The left also lacked the organisational weight to help the movement reach it even where the conditions might have been more favourable. But it was a genuine strategic failure with real consequences: the communities the movement had mobilised to defend were about to experience the most sustained assault on their rights in decades, and the movement had no framework for contesting the terrain where that assault was being prepared.

The movement contracted after the 1998 federal election because the threat as the movement understood it, One Nation’s electoral performance, appeared to have diminished. It narrowed to those most directly under attack and those most committed to defending them, losing the broader political character it had at its peak. It had been built around Hanson as an organisational target rather than around the policy terrain she was shifting. When her vote fell, the mobilising logic dissolved, even as Tampa approached, even as the Pacific Solution was being constructed, even as ATSIC was being prepared for abolition.

A movement powerful enough to influence the Coalition’s electoral tactics but unable to prevent the implementation of a single One Nation policy is a strange kind of powerful movement. The honest accounting is that the movement successfully contested One Nation’s organisational presence in inner Melbourne and may have limited its capacity to build in Victoria more broadly. This is not nothing: preventing the consolidation of a fascist street movement with a mass base matters, and the protests gave confidence and solidarity to communities under direct attack. But it is not the defeat of One Nation that the MLR pieces describe.

The electoral record tells the rest of the story. One Nation did not disappear after 1998. They won three upper house seats in Western Australia in 2001, at a moment when the MLR account has the movement having already won. I was in the public gallery of the WA parliament the night those members took their seats, part of an organised protest of a few hundred people. That is what the movement’s victory looked like from Perth in 2001: three One Nation members taking their seats while a few hundred people in the gallery marked that it was not normal, in a state where the movement had never had the presence or numbers the Melbourne account implies was universal.

The electoral data across the following decades (Western Australia 2001, Queensland 2017, Hunter Valley 2019 where coal miner Stuart Bonds took 21.6% in a heavily unionised seat running explicitly on protecting his industry) shows an organisation that declined, fragmented, rebuilt, and has now surged to levels that dwarf anything achieved in the 1990s. That trajectory is not consistent with a movement victory. It is consistent with a movement that addressed one expression of a problem whose roots were never adequately contested.

The real challenge now

The British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the founding organisation of the International Socialist Tendency (IST), from which Socialist Alternative traces its origins, tells a structurally identical story about the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front in the late 1970s. The NF declined organisationally, Rock Against Racism and the ANL get the credit, victory is declared. David Renton, who spent twenty-two years in the SWP and wrote what became the semi-official history of the ANL, has since reflected that he had absorbed the SWP narrative “in which the Anti-Nazi League was the most important part of the anti-fascist coalition”, the kind of account that the IST tradition treats as proof of concept for the counter-mobilisation strategy. 

Socialist Alternative emerged from this tradition and its MLR pieces apply the same analytical framework to the Australian experience. What the account cannot acknowledge is that the National Front’s decline coincided almost exactly with Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her explicit absorption of National Front immigration politics. The NF became marginal. Thatcherism governed for eighteen years implementing the agenda. The IST was pointing to this experience as the proof of concept for the anti-Hanson strategy in the 1990s, citing as their model an outcome whose full consequences were already visible.

The pattern is consistent: confront the organisational expression of the far right, declare victory when it declines, fail to fully contest the terrain where the mainstream absorbs and implements the politics. The MLR pieces are recommending this approach a third time, and the tradition still hasn’t fully reckoned with what the first two times produced.

The current situation is categorically more serious than 1998 in every relevant dimension. One Nation is polling at over 20% nationally on most measures, more than double its 1998 peak, and in some polls ahead of both the ALP and the Coalition on primary vote. In May 2026 One Nation won the Farrer by-election, electing its first ever directly elected member to the House of Representatives. That figure substantially exceeds union density as a proportion of the workforce, and the electorate is broader than the workforce. You cannot demonstrate that opposition is larger than support when support is at these levels. The counter-mobilisation strategy that had some logic when One Nation was polling 8-13% is arithmetically inadequate at current levels.

One Nation’s support at current levels cannot be primarily the petit-bourgeois small town middle class Armstrong identifies as its 1990s base. The arithmetic is simply wrong: the petit-bourgeoisie is not large enough as a proportion of the electorate to produce polling at these levels. Sections of the working class are in that number in significant proportions because workers are the majority of the population. The class composition question is fully developed in my articles on the labour aristocracy and the psychological wage. 

But the arithmetic alone is sufficient to establish that Socialist Alternative’s analytical framework cannot accommodate the current scale of One Nation’s support. Stuart Bonds, a coal miner, getting 21.6% in the Hunter, running explicitly on protecting his industry in a coal mining electorate with strong union density in a seat Labor had held for decades, is not explicable through the class composition argument that framework requires. He doesn’t exist in their account. That result suggests One Nation can win substantial support from exactly the organised industrial workers Armstrong identified as the bedrock of anti-Hanson resistance in the 1990s. And the distinction between voting One Nation and voting for Howard (who was implementing One Nation’s agenda through the institutions of government) was always thinner than Socialist Alternative’s analysis wanted it to be.

It is also worth noting that even accepting Armstrong’s characterisation of One Nation’s base as petit-bourgeois, One Nation speaks to that base with more consistency and more authentic presence than the Australian left speaks to the working class it claims to represent. On the terms Armstrong himself sets (organisational rootedness, sustained community presence, speaking credibly to a specific constituency) the left compares poorly. 

This is not a criticism unique to Socialist Alternative; it reflects a broader disconnection between the Australian left and the class whose interests it advances. Howard’s battlers, the working class losers of the Hawke-Keating restructuring who shifted from Labor to Howard in 1996 and then to One Nation, are the historical bridge that Socialist Alternative’s analysis cannot accommodate, just as the SWP’s account of the National Front never fully engaged with the working class composition of its support base. It is the same tradition making the same mistake. 

The danger is not primarily outside the class. It is a tendency within the class: in the outer suburbs of every major city, in the regional communities where deindustrialisation has run for over forty years without an adequate left response, in the workforces whose institutional protections have been systematically dismantled, in the communities where nobody on the left has sustained organisational presence and nobody has made a credible material offer about what a different future looks like.

What’s needed in those communities is not a left organisation extending its reach through a stall or a counter-protest. It’s the development of authentic anti-racist sentiment that does things organically: the local campaign that builds cross-community relationships, the person who finds that their existing political instincts are shared and can find collective expression. The high school walkouts of 1998 were one expression of this — students organising on their own terrain, in their own institutions. 

The model isn’t to repeat the walkouts. It’s to build communities of struggle wherever people live, work, and study, in forms that arise from those specific conditions rather than from the left’s organisational calendar. The left’s job is to inspire that kind of organic development, not to recruit people into its own activities. Some of those people will eventually find their way to a socialist organisation. That’s incidental to the purpose, not the purpose itself. The purpose is building a community of struggle with genuine roots, the kind of roots that allow real mass organisations to call masses out because they have real trust and authority built over years, not because they have turned on the mobilisation tap in response to an occasion the other side has provided.

The reactive model has a specific problem at current polling levels: you need meetings to counter, and One Nation polling at these levels is not primarily building through public meetings. It’s building through media infrastructure, through digital organising, through the absence of any credible alternative in the communities where it’s winning. A strategy that depends on the other side providing the occasion is not adequate to contesting an organisation that has moved well beyond the need for public meetings to build support.

You cannot speak to the Hunter Valley coal miner through a counter-mobilisation. You need a believable just transition policy that delivers for those communities, a policy that starts from where those communities actually are, that takes seriously what they would lose, that makes the case not just that transition is necessary but that it is possible in a form that doesn’t abandon the people living it. 

One Nation is not being subtle about what it is offering those communities. It is explicitly promising to save the coal industry, in the same way the right has always offered dying industries a promise they don’t need to change, followed by abandonment when the change comes regardless, and money for capital as it transitions out. The timber industry is the most recent completed example of that pattern in Australia. A Getty Images photograph from the period shows Howard being warmly embraced by a CFMEU timber worker whose white power tattoo is clearly visible in the frame. 

Union membership and racial politics coexisting in exactly the way the labour aristocracy thesis predicts, and in exactly the way Socialist Alternative’s analytical framework requires not to exist. The IST tradition’s insistence that organised workers are the bedrock of anti-racist resistance may be a comfortable position, but that photograph is the reality it has to look away from. There has been genuine effort on just transition work within the union movement, and it is genuinely difficult, resource intensive work that requires sustained presence and detailed policy development in specific communities. 

But the honest assessment is that what has been produced hasn’t yet been sufficient for the communities where One Nation is winning, and that gap is a collective failure of the broader left, not a failure of the individuals doing the work. That work is unglamorous, produces no dramatic victories to celebrate, and requires sustained presence in communities the left currently doesn’t reach sufficiently. It is the only work that matters for the communities where One Nation is actually winning.

Addressing the current challenge requires knowing honestly where we are, which means not declaring a victory in the 1990s that the evidence doesn’t support. It requires knowing where we are trying to get to, which means specifying what success looks like when One Nation is polling at over 20%, not gesturing at a repeat of a movement whose account in these pieces is limited primarily to inner Melbourne. 

And it requires building the bridge between those two points through patient, sustained work that the Situationist slogan (”be realistic, demand the impossible”) captures better than any amount of organisational schema: starting from where people actually are, demanding what their situation actually requires, and trusting that the process of organised struggle for real demands develops the consciousness and the capacity that transformation requires.1 

The anti-Hanson movement of the late 1990s was real, significant, and in many respects genuinely inspiring, particularly the high school walkouts that demonstrated the political agency of young people across the country in a way nobody predicted, built by parts of the left the MLR account passes over in a clause while claiming the movement’s authority. Those of us who were part of it, in Perth and Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne and in regional centres, did something worth taking seriously. 

We were hopeful that the 1998 federal election would defeat both One Nation and the Coalition. One Nation was reduced to a single Senate seat, largely because the Coalition cut preferences against them, and Howard won anyway. The preference system continues to limit One Nation’s immediate electoral ceiling, but as argued elsewhere, the real danger is normalisation and the rightward drag on political discourse that One Nation’s growth produces regardless of its seat count. The movement did not sustain after that. We would be in a better place today if we had something approaching it now.

But you cannot look at the last thirty years, the Tampa, the Pacific Solution, the NT Intervention, the abolition of ATSIC, One Nation’s continuous electoral presence across multiple states, and now polling at over 20% nationally, and describe what happened as a victory without doing violence to the communities who experienced what came after the celebrations. Hanson herself, in 2005, didn’t describe it as a defeat. She described herself as the minister for everything.

A movement that can be declared victorious while the politics it was fighting are being institutionalised by the government is not a movement that won. It was a movement aimed at the most visible and immediate threat, and one that was unable to reorientate to the more imminent and real threat as the terrain shifted. 

I was part of that movement and part of that failure. We did not convince enough people that the Liberals were the real terrain of contest. We lost, and that was a collective failing. Not recognising it as such deepens the failure, because you cannot learn from a defeat you have declared a victory. Getting the direction right this time requires starting from an honest account of what happened last time, and saying we won last time fails that task.

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  The fuller strategic argument about what the current moment requires, including the ALP’s structural limits in responding to One Nation and the question of what an adequate left response looks like, is developed in a three-part series on One Nation’s rise and a separate piece on the ALP’s progressive patriotism response.