William Bowe is like a kid, rushing back to the old sand pit with new energy to play with a just-opened Christmas or birthday toy. The Perth brains behind the long-running website, Poll Bludger, Bowe’s sand pit is election analysis, and the new toy is the rush of recent polling to suggest One Nation is more popular than either of the traditional “big parties” in Australian politics.
Two-Party Dominance Under Threat
“They’ve completely dominated Australian politics going back to 1910,” he says of Labor and the various versions of the Coalition that have controlled the centre-right. “Now (they) barely command half of the vote between them.”
“This moves us into a radically new world electorally … We are in an electoral universe that is utterly unrecognisable from the one that we’ve lived in all our lives.”
Bowe sat down for an interview with 7NEWS podcast The Issue as Pauline Hanson stepped up campaign fundraising. The One Nation leader made high profile visits to Perth and Melbourne.
“I’m not that little woman that came out of the fish and chip shop. I’m smarter. I’m wiser. I’m up to their dirty tricks,” she told her Melbourne crowd. “There is this underground movement that’s happening. People saying, ‘we’ve had enough. We’ve had a gutful. We want change’.”
Polling Confirms Shift
Recent polling suggests she is right. The latest Newspoll confirms earlier surveys that suggested, in an election now, One Nation would win a larger primary vote than Labor, let alone its rival on the right, the Coalition. According to Bowe, the threat is still far greater for the Coalition.
“While One Nation (is) taking a chunk out of Labor support, they are eviscerating the Coalition,” he said.
But the scale of the change implied in the polls is enough to terrify those who relied on the dominance of two old rivals. It’s also enough to make Bowe chuckle as he thinks about the fun to come making sense of it all. It may be that the new kid on the block, One Nation, falls into line in a way that makes sense.
A New Political Landscape
“I think going forward … it’s not a two-party system. It’s a two-coalition system,” he said. Bowe sees a likelihood that One Nation joins - and maybe even leads - the old Coalition of the Liberals and Nationals.
Left of the political centre, he expects Labor will look to the Greens if and when its support sinks to the point where a 76-seat result in the House of Representatives - the smallest election majority - is beyond it.
“Election night in 2028 is going to be something else,” Bowe says with barely hidden delight. “Very few seats are going to be structured along the usual model of Labor versus coalition in two party terms.”
How many of the 150 seats might still follow the old pattern? Bowe expects it will be “about a third of the seats. The other two thirds (will be) in this new world.” A new world indeed; same old sand pit, but there is a new toy to break things up.
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