Longstanding Coalition supporters have jumped ship to One Nation. Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce is the most high-profile defector. Sweaty, red-faced, possibly drunk, Joyce has been the mascot of agricultural capitalists since assuming office in 2005. For One Nation, Joyce is a prized link to the establishment, a well-connected powerbroker among Australia’s right for decades, having served twice as deputy prime minister.
Joyce will be at home in Pauline Hanson’s party. He is an extreme misogynist and homophobe, opposing everything from abortion rights and same-sex marriage to vaccines for cervical cancer because they would, he claimed, encourage girls to be promiscuous. During the 2023 Voice referendum, Joyce was one of the strongest proponents of voting “no”, labelling it “racist” (against white people) to amend the constitution to establish an Indigenous advisory body. A defender of farmers, miners and gun owners, Joyce is a borderline climate denier, using “net-zero” as a bogeyman to attack the left.
So when Joyce, as a One Nation member, blamed immigrants for crime, the housing crisis and expensive groceries in an 8 February interview with Karl Stefanovic—saying, in a nod to Donald Trump, “If you pine for where you came from, and say ‘I really want Australia to be like the shithole I came from’, you go back there”—he was singing from a well-worn hymnbook.
Former Liberal Senator Corey Bernardi is another high-profile get for One Nation, now serving as leader of the party’s South Australian branch. Bernardi was a conservative faction fighter within the Liberals throughout his membership, and a supporter of Tony Abbott-era university fee deregulation—an unpopular and ultimately defeated measure that could have led to degrees costing $100,000. Bernardi helped lead the “no” campaign in the 2016 same-sex marriage referendum, notoriously comparing equal marriage to bestiality. Bernardi left the Liberal Party in 2016 after failing to lead what he described as a “conservative revolution”. He spent his final years as a senator in the short-lived Australian Conservative Party.
Also trying their luck with One Nation is Victorian Bernie Finn. A Liberal member for 41 years, Finn was expelled from the party in 2022 for anti-abortion positions that were unpalatable even for the Liberals. In a 2022 radio interview on station 3AW, Finn explained why he opposed abortion in all circumstances, including for victims of rape, saying that “babies shouldn’t be killed for the crimes of their parents”. After being expelled, Finn joined Family First before announcing last month that he is now a “proud, card-carrying member of One Nation”.
Alongside political defectors, important financial backers of the Liberal Party are making overtures to Pauline Hanson, adding to her existing financial base, largely from retailers’ and developers’ associations.
Chiefly, Gina Rinehart, a long-term supporter of the Liberal Party and backer of Barnaby Joyce, has been publicly and lavishly courting One Nation. Rinehart has been an overt supporter of Donald Trump and encouraged the Liberals to adopt a more Trump-like posture after losing the last federal election. She has been providing private jet rides to Hanson.
On 23 January, the Australian reported that Rinehart has been working to flip stockbrokers from the Liberals to One Nation, in exchange for taking them to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Rinehart apparently secured $100,000 donations from Doug Tynan of GCQ Fund Management, Ben Cleary of Tribeca Investment Partners and Angus Aitken of Aitken Mount Capital Partners.
Financiers are usually ghostly figures in politics, wielding power behind the scenes. What is known about Rinehart’s trio is unseemly.
Cleary lives in a $23 million house in Brisbane’s wealthy Ascot and boasted to the Courier Mail on 27 January that Tribeca’s employees “can’t be woke”. Following Trump’s military attack and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Cleary sent a team of bankers to Caracas. In a 5 January interview with Cleary, Bloomberg wrote: “For portfolio manager Ben Cleary, Venezuela in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s controversial attack is one of the greatest money-making opportunities ever”.
Aitken is a classic dummy-spitting right-winger and a vocal supporter of Rinehart’s far-right lobby group Advance Australia. In 2024, Aitken ranted to the Australian Business Review about the Greens being “a huge threat to the country ... a dangerous and divisive activist machine led by Marxist radicals”.
It is likely that others will join One Nation, none of them better. Some names regularly mentioned in the media are Northern Territory former National Adam Giles and South Australian independent Senator Alex Antic.
These are Pauline Hanson’s grotesque new friends.
