The mantra ‘voters always get it right’ is repeated after every election by winners and losers. The decision of voters must be respected, blah, blah.
Well, hello, voters sometimes get it disastrously wrong, as Hungarians did with Viktor Orban and Brazilians with Jair Bolsonaro.
Perhaps the worst example is the re-election of Donald Trump.
His MAGA fans were totally mesmerised and truly believed he would Make America Great Again.
Even his most besotted devotees are finally becoming disillusioned, as the price of petrol, health costs, and essentials rocket, and institutions are gutted.
He is stuck in a war he can’t win yet cannot afford to lose. In the process he has demolished America’s standing in the world and alienated allies.
While the rest of the world reels back in horror, Australia goes humiliatingly cap in hand to the Trump regime expressing gratitude for being permitted to buy three second-hand submarines for nearly a mere half-a-trillion dollars.
Hopefully the enquiry into AUKUS, headed by former Labor Minister Peter Garrett and supported by Labor luminaries such as Paul Keating, as well as former Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull, will expose this outrageous deal.
In the UK, Brexit has proven a disaster for the country and now everyone is talking about ‘Broken Britain’.
Voters got that terribly wrong too.
Brits were conned into leaving the EU and the key architect of this was Nigel Farage who, with his Brexit party, spearheaded the push for a referendum.
That morphed into Reform UK, and they now lead in the polls, averaging 27 per cent, followed by Conservatives and Labour on around 19 per cent each. Nigel Farage would end up PM if an election were held now, thanks to the undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system.
Pauline Hanson, like Farage, is an outspoken Trump supporter.
One Nation is also leading in the primaries, level pegging with Labor.
She was disendorsed by John Howard as a Liberal Party candidate prior to the 1996 election, because of her outspoken racism. Ballot papers had already been printed and she won Oxley as an independent.
The leopard has not changed its spots in 30 years.
The Coalition made the serious error of directing preferences to One Nation candidate, David Farley, in the Farrer by-election, thus giving legitimacy to this far-right party.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers joked that Pauline is a fully-owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart, who did after all give her a new aircraft worth over a million dollars that Pauline describes as ‘sexy’. Gina also flew Pauline to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ themed Halloween party last year.
Australia’s conservative media give One Nation an inordinate amount of coverage and legitimacy while constantly bashing the ‘communist’ Greens.
Gina campaigned against the minimum wage, workers’ rights, and unions, and Pauline opposed the recent minimum wage increase. Birds of a feather.
Her voting record shows she has never been on the side of battlers any more than Trump, plus she was excoriated for skipping Budget Estimates hearings.
The irony is much of her support comes from people feeling hard done by, living mainly in regional and rural areas. They bemoan lack of services and claim they have been neglected by Labor and the Coalition.
Pauline, like Farage, is tapping in to this dissent and sadly migrants are her easy target.
It is racist despite those who protest it isn’t. It echoes Pauline’s first parliamentary speech in 1996, ‘We’re being swamped by Asians’.
It’s easy, but fundamentally wrong, to whip up fear of foreigners, of people who are different from us.
One Nation will make promises that are impossible to keep if they ever stumble into government.
One of their proposed policies had a disastrous debut last week. Barnaby Joyce told conservative commentator Andrew Bolt that One Nation would force hundreds of thousands of permanent residents without Australia citizenship to sell their homes within two years. That caused panic and confusion in One Nation and was jettisoned within 24 hours.
Anyone considering a protest vote for One Nation should take a good look at their hardline policies.
Don’t be surprised if One Nation fields candidates in both the local government elections and the state election next March.
You can guess that one of their false promises might be to fill all the potholes in Byron Shire within a month of winning Council.
‘I’ll vote for that!’ many will say, as we all suffer from these appalling roads. That’s the first promise they will break. The money is not there, even though it absolutely should be.
As Albo and Jim discovered, breaking promises, even for a very good and valid reason, is politically hazardous. One Nation would be lucky to keep any promises, especially with a hostile Senate.
It would be chaos.
Let us all hope Australian voters don’t get it wrong and wreck the country in the process.
Richard Jones is a former NSW MLC, and is now a ceramist.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
