Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech exposed the weakness in the old right-wing politics of subtraction: in an age of scarcity, promising to take things away no longer lands on someone else, but on the voters she needs.
For decades the Australian right has won by taking things away and calling it discipline. It worked because the loss always fell on someone else, and because good times left a buffer to absorb it. Pauline Hanson has just reached for that same move in an age of scarcity, when there is no buffer left and no one else to blame, and aimed it squarely at her own base.
Every politics is, at bottom, a transaction. You offer people something and ask for their vote in return. No matter how hard some of the commentariat attempt to suggest it’s something more pure. The interesting question is what you offer, and for a long time one of the most reliable offers in the western democratic repertoire was not a gift but a removal: vote for me and I will take something away – I will cut the tax, shrink the state, wind back the entitlement, discipline the bludger, end the waste.
This is the politics of subtraction, and to understand why it is failing now you first have to understand why it ever worked.
It worked despite a fact that should have killed it in the cradle. Human beings hate losing things. The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky measured it precisely: a loss is felt about twice as keenly as an equivalent gain. Take a hundred dollars from someone and the sting outlasts, by a wide margin, the pleasure of having given them a hundred. A politics built on taking is therefore swimming against the strongest current in the voter’s mind, in their DNA, built into humans’ primal survival instincts. That it succeeded at all is the puzzle. The answer is that successful subtraction was never sold as taking from you. It was always sold as taking from them.
This is the trick at the heart of the whole tradition. Reagan did not campaign on cutting the incomes of working Americans; he campaigned against the welfare cohort, the undeserving other, living on your taxes. Thatcher rolled back the state by naming the union boss and the scrounger as the ones who would feel it. When Joe Hockey stood up in London in 2012 and declared the age of entitlement over, the entitlement he meant was always someone else’s.
The architecture of winnable subtraction is a line drawn between the deserving and the undeserving, with the loss falling on the wrong side of it and the majority reassured that it falls on someone else. Do that, and you can take a lot, because the voter experiences it not as their own loss but as the correction of another’s unearned gain.
It helped, too, that the tradition did most of its work in ‘good weather’. In a growing economy the household carries a buffer, and a buffer can absorb some adjustments. When wages are rising and the house is appreciating, people will tolerate a little austerity at the edges because the centre still feels secure. Optimism discounts the pain. The take is survivable because there is something left over to take it from. Or of course, someone else gets something taken away from them, not you.
Australia has run this experiment, and it has also run the control. In research, the control is the case you hold up for comparison, the version where the thing you are testing is absent, so that when the two diverge/differ, you can be confident the difference is real and not by chance. The control was WorkChoices. In 2007 John Howard presided over a roaring economy, low unemployment, the tail of a mining boom, every condition that should have insulated a government, and he was thrown out, losing his own seat, because he had taken something from workers directly. WorkChoices threatened to strip conditions and protections from people who could not see the loss as anyone’s but their own. There was no undeserving other to absorb it. The take landed on the deserving, in their own estimation, and prosperity did not save him.
The 2014 budget repeated the error in a harsher key, and Robodebt drove it to its grotesque conclusion, an automated machine for taking money from people who did not owe it. Each was defended as responsibility. Each was punished, because the line between deserving and undeserving had been drawn straight through the middle of the government’s own voters.
Which brings us to the present, and to why subtraction has stopped being merely risky and become something close to disqualifying. Scarcity has dismantled both of the conditions that once made it work. The buffer is gone: when rent has outrun wages and the grocery bill is a weekly negotiation, there is nothing left over to absorb a loss, so the loss lands at full weight on the majority. And the out-group trick has collapsed with it, because in a cost-of-living crisis there is no comfortable majority watching the take fall on someone else. The worker on a decent salary now feels as exposed as anyone. When everyone is the deserving, there is no one left to be the undeserving, and subtraction has nowhere to point but at the voter himself.
Pauline Hanson has just walked into this wall at full speed. Picture the test facility. The car is loaded onto the rail, a dummy belted upright in the driver’s seat, sensors wired to every joint. It is accelerated to a fixed speed and driven, deliberately, into a fixed barrier, the whole thing filmed at a thousand frames a second so the engineers can study the moment of impact one slice at a time: and we got to see something similar, as every word left Pauline Hanson’s mouth as she mistook an old tradition as a modern tactic.
Her rise is grievance, and grievance is, in its essence, a demand for restoration. The people who carried her to thirty-one per cent believe something has already been taken from them: the secure job, the affordable house, the sense that effort is rewarded. They came to her because she promised, in feeling if not in detail, to give it back. That is the entire transaction.
At the Press Club she offered them the opposite. She called workers lazy and promised to make them easier to sack, which is to say she promised to take their job security. She would abolish the SBS and put the city ABC behind a paywall. There was no give anywhere in it, no relief for the rent or the power bill, only removal dressed as strength. She had reached, by reflex, for the right’s oldest move, take from the undeserving and let the majority applaud, without noticing that in this economy, and with these voters, the undeserving she was describing were her own base. The lazy worker she sneered at is the mortgaged battler who put her where she is.
That is the oversight, and it is enormous. Subtraction was always a bet that you could locate the loss in someone else. But there is no one else left; there is only the voter, with an empty pocket and a long memory, and a politician reaching into it while calling it courage.
The movement that wins this era will be the one that grasps the reversal, that offers people something they can feel rather than something taken away and rebadged as discipline. Hanson offered the take. She stood on that stage and offered no hope, only less, and she handed it to the people with the least left to lose. They will remember the threats long after they have forgotten the speech. Though her political opponents will make sure they never forget either, because those twenty-odd minutes handed them more ammunition than a year of opposition research could have bought. Every clip is a gift that keeps giving: the worker called lazy, the promise to make the sacking easier, the public broadcaster put behind a paywall, each one a thirty-second advertisement she wrote, performed and paid for herself. They will not have to caricature her. They will only have to quote her. And in the seats where her lead is rented rather than owned, that footage will run and run, until the late movers who came to her for hope finally hear, in her own voice, exactly what she was offering them instead.
Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.