Jim Chalmers warns progressives not to ‘mock’ One Nation voters

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has warned those on the progressive side of politics not to “scold” or “mock” potential One Nation voters but instead to take seriously the task of persuading them away from the insurgent party.

By directly acknowledging the seriousness of One Nation’s support and advancing a strategy for tackling it, Chalmers is underscoring that the party is a threat to Labor, not just to the Coalition.

Delivering the Bernie Fraser Oration, sponsored by the Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, on Tuesday night, Chalmers also had a sobering message for straitened households.

Reserve Bank and Treasury forecasts did not expect economic conditions to get much better in the next three months, he said, although they did expect things to get “a bit better” over the next year.

Chalmers said the combination of near term pressure and transformational change had made people feel more disconnected from opportunity, and “mourning a loss of control as change accelerates around them”.

This was fuelled, politicised and catastrophised by “algorithmic rage bait”.

“In our system One Nation has been the most obvious beneficiary of all this but the political ramifications are playing out across the world,” he said.

He pointed to political churn in Japan, South Korea, Germany and France.

In Australia, One Nation’s support had doubled in a year.

Three in ten people now said they’d vote for them and they were getting a foothold in the House of Representatives and state parliaments.

Nobody expected the polls to change soon.

The far right strategy is to divide people and it’s working; their goal is to talk down our economy so that their endless negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Their core message is often clear and sometimes very appealing: let’s just go back to a more nostalgic version of the world we remember.

We have all the facts to push back on this, but facts don’t beat feelings.