The Western Australian Election was a stunning success for One Nation. I mean, the political party, not Australia… Or any other nation, for that matter. No, they did really, really well. Fantastically well! Just ask Pauline. She said it was a great success.
Or ask Malcolm Roberts who seemed to think that they’d be winning three upper house seats.
Ok, some of you pedants may point out that going from one to three is a three hundred percent increase while going from zero to three is impossible to calculate because there’s nothing on the bottom line, but Malcolm Roberts is good at Maths because well, he is, and he has empirical evidence for that, because he does and it’s not made up like NASA graphs! Of course, others may simple wish to point out that it doesn’t actually look like they’ll get three seats, so I guess that could be considered a 33.33% decrease!
Yes, it was disappointing that they didn’t get the twenty percent of votes that one poll forecast, or even the ten percent that many others predicted, but that’s ok, because, well, as Pauline said, it was a fantastic result because if it hadn’t been for that “scare” campaign about their preferences going to Liberals then many people would have voted for them. Well, that’s what she told us. But Labor ran a dishonest campaign and pointed out that her party was preferencing the Liberals, and this somehow led people to think that One Nation was supporting them. “Let’s be clear,” she told us. “Colin Barnett was like sour milk and just because we were telling you to vote to keep it in the fridge, that doesn’t mean that we didn’t think that it smelled bad and should be thrown out, but somehow Labor twisted the fact that our how-to-vote cards were helping the Liberals, and tried to suggest that I was just a Liberal Party stooge who supports their policies on penalty rates and screwing those bludgers on welfare, whereas I actually think that the Liberals haven’t gone far enough on penalty rates because I know what it’s like to be a small business owner and when the milk in your fridge goes off, it’s really hard to sell it! And this had the effect of putting many of our potential voters off, because let’s face it, they’re pretty gullible and believe what they’re told.”
She also told us that the media is “not letting you know the results we have got.” No, it’s all “fake news” and One Nation actually won the election and Pauline is now Premier but you won’t read that anywhere because of that conspiracy between Rupert Murdoch, NASA, The Greens, pharmaceutical companies, Labor, Rod Culleton and voters in WA to stop the truth from being told.
While some are wondering exactly how accurate those poll figures were, I can say with certainty that the polls were completely accurate reflection of the people who were polled. The fact that they were so different to the actual votes on the day doesn’t mean that opinion polls have no validity when it comes to minor parties like One Nation. No, it simply means that either something like two-thirds of the people changed their minds about voting for PHON at the last moment or by a remarkable coincidence, all the polling companies just happened to get a disproportionate number of Pauline supporters owing to the fact that they did their polling outside One Nation party meetings.
Meanwhile the Liberals have decided that the idea of swapping preferences is really good and that it was only the fact that Pauline’s party got so few votes that caused Mathias Cormann to make it clear that just because he helped set up the deal, doesn’t mean he was the only one who should take the blame. In fact, he hardly had anything to do with it. Probably it was someone involved in the Essendon scandal who came up with the original idea. Or Kevin Rudd. But swapping preferences is a good idea and next time we hope that not only do One Nation get more votes, but we also hope that fifty percent of their preferences don’t leak back to Labor. Maybe next time, they’ll try to swap with Labor. They got plenty of votes!
Yes, a “fantastic” result according to Senator Hanson. Of course, it’s unclear whether Pauline meant the word in the sense of “extraordinarily good or attractive” or whether she meant its other meaning: “imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality”!
