By Paul Malone
If you listen to talkback radio and pay attention to the views of those who tell us they are swinging voters you'll notice a strange phenomenon – many such voters believe independent and odd-bod politicians are more honest than the professional politicians from the major parties.
Typically the callers say the independent or minority candidate is "genuine," "honest," "says what she thinks," "is not afraid to say what needs to be said."
In contrast politicians from the major parties are described as "self-serving," "career politicians," "only in it for what they can get."
But rather than being independently minded thoughtful voters, those who vote for the odd-ball politicians are more often than not lost souls, wandering hither and thither.
Supporters of Pauline Hanson distinguish her from the major party politicians while surely knowing she's been a professional politician for a long, long time.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Take Queensland for example. In the last two elections about 70 per cent of the electorate voted in the Senate poll for either Labor, the Liberal National Party, or The Greens.
Most, but not all of these voters will have stuck with the same party for both the 2013 and 2016 elections.
But in 2013 about 10 per cent of the electorate voted for the minority Palmer United Party.
In 2016 PUP's vote virtually disappeared, but up popped Pauline Hanson's One Nation which won 9.2 per cent of the vote.
With a secret ballot there's no way of saying for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that a fair number of the people who hopped on the PUP bandwagon in 2013 jumped over to the Hanson cart in 2016.
Supporters of Pauline Hanson distinguish her from the major party politicians while surely knowing that she's been a professional politician for a long, long time.
Hanson's first political post was as a member of the Ipswich Council in 1994.
She made national headlines when she was dis-endorsed as a Liberal candidate in the 1996 federal election but went on to win the seat of Oxley as an independent. After losing her seat in the 1998 election she contested state and federal elections, finally winning a Senate seat this year.
That makes her as much of a professional politician as anyone on the Coalition or Labor side of politics.
But with her quivering voice she still plays the "non-professional" card and her supporters swallow it.
They also tell us she's straightforward, even though much of what she says is inconsistent.
As everyone knows, in her first speech in 1996 she said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians. Now she says we're in danger of being swamped by Muslims.
Twenty years after the 1996 speech, Asians make up less than 10 per cent of Australia's population.
That's hardly swamping. And to get to this figure we need to add together all sorts of people who have nothing in common with each other and never see themselves in the same category – Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Malaysians, Koreans, Indonesians and Nepalese to name but a few.
These people not only have different religions, speak different languages and have vastly different cultures, many of them come from countries that have been at war with each other in recent decades e.g. India and Pakistan and China and India.
There is no Asian brotherhood to swamp us.
But Hanson makes other contradictory statements that attract no critical examination from her voters.
In her recent first Senate speech, she complained that "farmers are screaming out for workers and small businesses have difficulty in finding people who want to work."
But she also called for a cut in immigration.
Now you can't have it both ways. Migrants fill many of the low paid, less attractive jobs farmers and small businesses advertise.
Hanson wants to "solve" the problem employers have by cutting welfare. She says welfare is not a right, unless you are aged or sick.
She wants to stop school leavers going immediately onto welfare. She believes single mums are having more children just to maintain their welfare payments. She proposes that taxpayers only support a woman's first child.
"….if they have more, there will be no increase to the welfare payment. Get a job and start taking responsibility for your own actions," she cries.
Most of her voters would be unaware of such policy proposals.
Even on her now favourite subject of Muslims she is misleading, telling the Senate that the Grand Mufti was deafening in his silence on terrorism, when in fact he has condemned terrorist attacks on numerous occasions.
Despite all her years in the game she is still extraordinarily ignorant about Australia.
In her speech Hanson also asked, "What major projects have we had in this country for the past 30 years?" implying that there had been no major infrastructure projects in that time.
Apparently she is not aware of the mining investment boom.
She hasn't heard of the $43 billion Gorgon LNG development in Western Australia, or for that matter the $16 billion one in Gladstone in her home state of Queensland.
Perhaps she doesn't count giant foreign-owned gas projects.
But what then of Gina Rinehart's Roy Hill iron ore mine, rail and port development?
The purpose-built port for this mine is capable of receiving, stockpiling, screening and exporting 55 million tonnes of iron ore a year and the new railway runs for 344 kilometres from the mine to the port.
Maybe she doesn't believe in counting any private sector development?
But can she have missed hearing about the National Broadband Network?
There is some debate about exactly how much this will cost, but $50 billion worth of expenditure and workers digging trenches across the country are hard to miss.
She also asked: "How many dams have we built in the past 50 years?" apparently forgetting that some of the Snowy River scheme dams have been built in that time.
The Australian National Committee on Large Dams website lists more than 300 large dams built in this time, including the enlarged Cotter Dam in the ACT that Hanson could easily visit. She also hasn't noticed the 218,300,000 cubic metre capacity 490 metre long Wyaralong Dam that was completed in 2011 in the south east of her home state of Queensland.
It's easy to play to populist ignorance by making statements that suggest that nothing is happening in this country, especially if you're playing to an audience that can't be bothered checking the facts.
It's also easy to promise all things to all people if you know that you'll never be in a position where you'll actually have to develop and implement policies.