1 June

Pauline’s big attraction is the same as all populists. They promise to ‘take down the elites’. Populists are always actually just an alternative elite, wanting to take over the top of social status hierarchies from existing elites. They always claim to be ‘the people’ acting, it’s just spin. Pauline is funded by Gina the mega-billionaire, who’s a prominent local Trump (another mega-billionaire, and friend of Gina). Trump, the ‘man of the people’, has a gold-plated toilet. Gina owns half of Australia. She buys her mate Pauline multi-million dollar planes as passing gifts. It’s always the same mechanism. They tap into, and/or generate, anger in a wider population. Sometimes that’s because of genuine hardship people are experiencing, but can also just be manufactured anger, which is easy to do. Talk about ‘sticking it to the man’, it always wins you votes. Turn politics into a State of Origin game, between the populist team and the ‘incompetent and corrupt’ existing team, people foam at the mouth when you turn it into a team sport. It’s all the same social mechanism. Anyway, here are all of One Nation‘s policies, which few will bother to read. What we call politics is always just social team sports, the policies are only incidental and rarely change anything.