My neighbour hails from India, and he tells me One Nation will help him buy a house which is why he’s going to vote for Pauline at the next election.
My eyebrows still haven’t fully descended since hearing him say this.
Like us, my neighbour is forking out over half his weekly income in rent. He and his family are trapped in a vicious cycle of trying to save while being hammered at every turn by mind blowing price increases. Groceries, fuel, water, electricity, rego, insurances, medical, education, streaming subscriptions and, well, every bloody thing are seeing price hikes.
We live in the electorate of Flynn in central Queensland. It’s a massive electorate, stretching from industrial Gladstone on the coast to Emerald in the west and to the south it covers a lot of farming and mining communities that are closer to Kingaroy and Gympie.
We wear hard hats and Akubras, steel caps and R.M. Williams round here partner. Some of us, the few coastal hippies, wear straw hats, board shorts, sandals or bare feet. It just depends on where you’re standing.
Any MP wanting to represent Flynn had better like spending a lot of time behind the wheel of their 4WD, and it will be a 4WD because the roads outside of our state capital are a tad, ‘diabolical’.
The recent-ish redistribution of the boundaries of Flynn means my hometown of Gladstone, a traditionally safe Labor seat, is now lumped in with a lot of communities who would vote for a hollowed out, roadside ‘roo carcass if someone pinned a National Party badge on it.
Which is a tad annoying for those of us who lean toward the political centre, or centre left.
The current MP is National Party’s Colin Boyce and he’s pretty much got a job for life thanks to this electoral cartography. So, I was even more stunned when rumours popped up earlier this year that he was toying with ‘doing a Barnaby’ and shuffling further to the right and signing up to play on Pauline’s team.
He hasn’t… yet. But Colin’s sniffing the wind and it’s definitely blowing from the direction of the One Nation camp.
I see it every day. It’s there on Facebook, in conversations, radio commentary and letters to the editor, on roadside signs, chats with shop owners, workers and NDIS participants. The big parties aren’t connecting anymore.
When people like my Indian neighbour and a lot of my friends, workmates and colleagues are telling me One Nation’s the only party listening to them, I panic.
One Nation has developed the same kind of loyal following that Trump enjoys in America. Supporters tend to forgive almost anything because they believe she’s the only one listening.
Pauline has built a following around being ‘one of the little people’, she knows our pain. She might know it, but I’m fairly sure she doesn’t share it. Also, I wonder if her stint behind bars made her more, or less, compassionate.
Speaking of law and order, I have several mates who are going to vote One Nation because they feel they’ve been totally screwed over by the Family Law Courts and most of them will be lucky to see their children while they are still children. They’ll be even luckier if they can move out of their parents’ homes thanks to the crippling alimony payments.
Pauline’s going to fix that.
My Indian neighbour drives a taxi. His friends drive taxi’s or Ubers. His fellow countrymen own nearly every fuel station and convenience store in our region. My One Nation mates don’t like seeing their brown faces behind the counter but they need the cheap fuel.
Pauline’s going to fix that too.
They’re all watching the same ‘news’ and spewing the same talking points. They don’t trust government at any level anymore. Their world is becoming, increasingly, more black-and-white. Government is stifling business. Dole bludgers are rorting the system. Immigrants are taking our jobs. Renewables are a con. Coal is King until we go nuclear. There’s Right and then there is Wrong/Left.
And those angry voices are getting louder.
Look, these are not bad people. They are often the first to volunteer in community groups, help out a mate or stranger, and can be relied upon to pitch in an emergency. They work hard. They’re doing the best they can. I like them. I play music and socialise with them. But they’re going down a path I can’t follow.
Trying to reason with them DOES NOT work. Likewise, ridicule only makes them dig in deeper, like a tick. Pauline can do no wrong.
Here in Flynn, we want what the rest of the country wants. The right to buy and pay off a home without going into generational financial slavery. A fairer, kinder community. We’d like a bit more certainty. To feel safe. We’d like to see homes in our street sold to a local family not another interstate investor. We want to leave something for future generations. We want a hospital that isn’t basically a M.A.S.H unit without Hawkeye, care homes for our retirees that aren’t run by Ned Kelly corporations.
I’ve spent decades living and working in central Queensland. Like most tradies here, I’ve worked in almost all of the big industrial refineries and dabbled in the mines (before they had nice accommodation and paid big dollars). I was made redundant during ‘the recession we had to have’ and spent six years in Brisbane working a poorly paid but fulltime job in hospital maintenance until, yep, we were all made redundant.
I came back to Gladstone and worked as a contractor, a machinery operator and in other maintenance roles. Hell, I even did a stint as the oldest cadet reporter at the local Murdoch owned paper, until it too closed down.
Now I work as an independent support worker for the NDIS (and kind of bracing for that to implode soon too…).
I turn sixty next month and looking at the number of times I’ve been tossed onto the unemployment line I could have a big axe to grind, but I don’t. I listen to the people who do though. From just about every walk of life, when we catch up at shopping centres, parks, the beach and worksites, in cafés, pubs, community halls, to play music or natter over the fence between shifts.
My Indian neighbour works six days a week (lately he’s started putting in half days on Sunday day off too). They’re long days. He loves his family. He wants to spend more time with them. He wants them to live in a house where his daughters can hang a picture on their bedrooms walls without having to ask permission from their landlord. And right now, he’s not seeing any hope outside of a party who would cheerfully deport him and his family at the drop of a safety helmet.
That’s a worry.
Cheers from Flynn!