Topher Field
9.7K posts
@TopherField
2x Australian Libertarian of the Year, Award Winning Director of Battleground Melbourne & Author of Good People Break Bad Laws.
Most of the commentary on One Nation's under performance in Nepean is about demographics and the broader ideological mood, but the real story here is that ONP's campaigns are not very good, and this needs to change. If you were to rank all election campaigns on a spectrum of advanced technological complexity, where the most advanced is a GOP/DEM presidential and the least is a Nigerian campaign where the candidate stands on the back of a Hilux dressed as Spider Man, One Nation sits somewhere far south of the middle, think Italian local government election. Their collateral was messy, their design principles are non existent, they were slow to react to attacks, where they reacted at all, they relied on legacy campaign methodologies and printed content. They had a lot of warm bodies but nothing salient for them to say beyond vague grievances. It was like a major party campaign from the early 2000s with half the energy. One Nation has significant strategic advantages that they never leaned in to. Try and remember a single thing their candidate said in the whole campaign. A party with a reputation for frank speaking and controversy courted none of it. Strategically, it seemed like ONP was trying to prove a point that they could run a "serious" "professional" campaign, and this was the wrong strategy. If voters want serious and professional they'll vote Lib/Lab - they want chaos, they want to punitively punish the major parties, they want rogue outbursts and drama. The other advantage is having never been in Government, there's no practical limitation to policy output, there's no legacy of failure to debate - they could conceivably say anything. Build a new hospital. Build two. Cut a tax. Tax someone you don't like. The only limit is the number of zeros you can arbitrarily shave off another budget line item. "We're going to build three hospitals by cutting all Vic Gov funding to Pride Month" done, click send. These are fundamentally, tactical problems that are actually very easy to resolve. There's a reason why the major parties call their rapid reaction content teams "tactics units" and not "strategy" units. Because a good tactics team can win a campaign with a bad strategy. The issue stems from the fact that ONP's talent pool is either too young to have worked at the tip of the campaigning spear previously or so old the last time they were on the tools in a major campaign, none of the modern methodologies even existed. With two years to go until the most important election in Australian history, everyone with a shred of influence over One Nation administratively has to be pushing this message. My advice - sell the dinky plane, buy two tickets to Washington and start meeting firms. There aren't any in Australia that will take the job (yet). Spend 12 months building real infrastructure so you don't have the baggage of seppos lurking around closer to polling day. Start spending money on data instead of cartoons. Renovate the entire party aesthetic, and start coming up with a 100 policies in 100 days document. I strongly suspect that if the performance issues aren't resolved, the growing Australian radical/populist right vote will end up dispersing away from ONP to the fringes or back to the LNP. And that will be a disaster.
A Melbourne YouTuber-turned-political puppeteer is threatening to hijack November's state election. He is planning to establish a Free Palestine party just to redirect left-wing votes and help One Nation. @paul_dowsley
