By NEMESIS
The recent federal election (August, 2010) gave us something that had not been seen in this nation for a very long time, a hung parliament. To be more precise, the electorate had voted that neither the Labor Party nor the Liberal/National coalition were worthy of government in their own right.
But what brought this ‘cliffhanger’ of an election about? What were the issues that caused the Australian voter to not re-elect the previous Labor administration outright or endorse the coalition?
I guess the astute reader could blame the Labor government’s poor performance over nearly three years in office as the reason that nearly lost them government. But, if the Labor government’s performance was indeed the main concern for an increasingly skeptical public who perceived it as a government on the ‘nose,’ why wasn’t the coalition then given a clear majority by the voter?
For the answer to that question we need to take a little history lesson.
Let’s cast our minds back to 1998 when Tony Abbott was then Health Minister in the Howard government. The established One Nation Party at that time had nearly one million voters behind it and was no doubt seen as a political threat by Howard, his ministers and the Liberal Party hierarchy. While I hate to use the word ‘conspire’ as it conjures up images of criminal activity, Howard and his senior ministers nevertheless conspired to eliminate the One Nation threat by setting about to discredit the party’s leaders. Through Tony Abbott, a trust fund was established called ‘Australians for Honest Politics Trust’ to counter the influence and effect that the One Nation Party was having on the electorate. By bankrolling civil court cases against the One Nation founders, Pauline Hanson and David Ettridge, both founders were eventually prosecuted and spent some time in jail.
Regardless of the legality of the prosecution and criminality, if at all, of the One Nation founders, or the ongoing divisions and machinations by some within the One Nation hierarchy which eventually – and helped very significantly by Abbott’s political interference – resulted in One Nation virtually ceasing to exist as a main stream threat to the Canberra Elites, the nearly one million voters who had supported One Nation were effectively left without a political voice, and most of those now silenced, and indeed alienated voices, now choose to direct their displeasure at Tony Abbott who was seen as the architect of One Nations demise.
The history of One Nation reads a little like a John Le Carre novel. And the behind the scenes machinations employed by people in power to destroy a political rival that managed to muster a significant proportion of the voting public behind it should stand as a stark reminder of what those in power are now capable of doing in order to preserve the status quo.
Tony Abbott in effect, stifled the opinions of one million voters who were patently concerned about where this nation was heading. He used all legal means at his disposal, and some say, illegal means as yet unproven, to silence those very valid concerns which have not diminished since then and have in fact multiplied into the problems today that most political thinkers can readily identify.
Tony Abbott, in my opinion, has alienated himself from a fair proportion of the conservative voting public which has not forgotten his political activism in killing off a legitimate political party which did not fit the ‘progressive’ mantra that is continually uttered by todays Canberra elites. Whether he realizes that he has a lot of ground to make up with those voters who he effectively silenced or not, the fact remains and will remain, that he has alienated a lot of voters by what he did against One Nation, and that is why he is not prime minister today!
