Labor urges supporters not to ‘mock or cancel’ One Nation supporters

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has urged Labor supporters not to mock or cancel One Nation voters as support for the far-right party has doubled in the past year. In a speech to The Australia Institute on Tuesday, he said progressives should not turn on those who have appealed to Pauline Hanson ’s core message of grievance.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers appealed to Labor supporters. Louie Douvis “Their core message is often clear and sometimes very appealing: let’s just go back to a more nostalgic version of the world we remember,” he said. “We have all the facts to push back on this, but facts don’t beat feelings.

Feelings are as real as facts. “Our role as progressives is not to scold those who see appeal in that message. It’s not to mock them or ‘cancel’ them or talk down to them.” Instead, Chalmers called on party faithful to convince voters that returning to the past is not possible and that a progressive future is better for them.

“And you do that by starting not from a place of smug moral superiority but from a place of genuine respect and understanding,” he said. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told his party colleagues on Tuesday that they would “kick with the wind in the fourth quarter” and succeed over their political opponents when it mattered.

It was the same AFL metaphor he invoked to calm party concerns about Labor’s chances ahead of the 2025 and 2022 elections. Speaking to the ABC later that day, Albanese denied that Labor was suffering a midterm slump in the polls. The latest Resolve poll for The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age had Labor ahead in the primary vote at 29 per cent, followed by One Nation at 25 per cent and the Coalition at 23 per cent.

Albanese remained the preferred prime minister with 32 per cent favorability, followed by Hanson at 26 per cent and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor at 22 per cent. One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson. Alex Ellinghausen Speaking at the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, Hanson Labor was “wretched and corrupt” and pledged to work with the Coalition to remove them from government.

It is an offer that the Coalition has brushed off to maintain its plan to govern in its own right. Taylor, who also spoke at the conference as the first Liberal leader to attend the event previously viewed as being too far to the right of the Coalition’s voter base, made no direct mention of One Nation.

Instead, he only attacked Labor and described the government as being “deeply illiberal, radical, and power-hungry”. “Labor’s agenda is leaving us poorer, weaker, and demoralised and the sooner Australians awaken to Labor’s regressive agenda that masquerades as progressive, the sooner this terrible government can be defeated,” he said.

Albanese told the ABC on Tuesday that the Coalition are in a “race to the bottom” with One Nation. “We are now the only mainstream political party in Australia seeking to govern in our own right in the national interest,” he said.