This week, Robert Borsak — leader of the NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party — took aim at NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet… and missed magnificently.
Missed Perrottet, at least. If the target was Borsak’s foot, or the Shooters themselves, then bullseye.
Borsak’s decision to try to get Perrottet into official trouble over revelations he wore a Nazi uniform to his 21st birthday backfired spectacularly. Borsak has been threatening to report Perrottet to police for the offence of making a false declaration, by making no mention of the incident on legally binding candidate vetting forms in 2003.
Labor had already signalled it wouldn’t be pursuing the Cabaret cosplay angle, given it served as a distraction from skewering Perrottet on the NSW economy. The Greens might have done what Borsak did, if he hadn’t first, so they swung against too.
That left Borsak, head of a party dedicated, in part, to challenging political correctness, the policing of behaviour, etc, holding the Klaus Barbie. Borsak looked like a fool, tactically speaking, but he also may well mark the end of the Shooters as a real force in Australian politics.
Borsak might have thought things would be looking up for him last year, but it was an annus crappus for him and the Shooters. Despite having taken the party to a good result in 2019 — holding two NSW upper house seats and the lower house seat of Orange while also adding Barwon and Murray — Borsak has managed to lose most of his colleagues.
Helen Dalton, in Murray, quit the party after the upper house members ducked a vote on Murray-Darling issues. Borsak then went on a charm offensive, saying Dalton should be “clocked” (punched in the face, not Fitbit-timed, for younger readers), which prompted the two remaining lower house members to leave too.
Putting the Shooters behind an attempt to make Perrottet’s 21st birthday knobhead stupidity into an actionable offence is chef’s-kiss anti-genius from Borsak, a man who represents a community whose B&S balls are a sort of miller shirt walpurgisnacht. It’s a measure of pure desperation, which is reasonable enough because, under Borsak’s reign, it looks like the Shooters could well go out backwards after 20 years of trying to be a thing.
This is good news for Australia, and represents a further indication that the hard right has still been unable to make any sort of real gains, due principally to the actual stupidity of leaders such as Borsak and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, and the sheer repellent oddness of people such as David Leyonhjelm. With that, they’ve also been afflicted by the problems the hard right has everywhere. Since the political overviews of their members are a series of overlapping paranoid fantasies, their organisations come apart when the fantasies diverge, and they end up hating each other more than they hate the left.
Hanson, it must be said, is less stupid than many of the people she commands, and I have seen, live and on TV, a look of despair cross her face at whatever latest disaster has befallen. It is the look of “Who are these people? Why does this keep happening?”
That is a question that can be asked about the Shooters more than most. They had a real chance of becoming a rural force to undermine the Nationals and steal from them a whole slew of seats.
The party was founded by John Tingle — father of Laura (and thus begetter of one-half of the Megalogenis Tingle: the little thrill an op-ed editor gets at receiving the 800th article saying that with better leadership of the Hawke-Keating type, Australia’s great days are ahead. Having too many of these articles is known as being in a Bramston pickle. I digress) — and with its initial construction, the Shooters had great possibilities.
By the 1990s, the National Party was on its way to becoming a client of the resources industry, and losing any interest in addressing the steady decline of the independence, and sense of such, of rural Australia. The Shooters managed to bang a class wedge into right-wing rural politics, with Philip Donato’s victory in Orange in 2015 managing to detach a whole bunch of rusted-ons who would have otherwise voted Liberal or National as an anti-Labor vote.
The Shooters had good prospects in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, where there were ongoing battles over national park use, regulation of land use, and the like — essentially a culture war, with many of the Shooters’ potential recruits being people of fairly low income and modest means.
Preference whisperer Glenn Druery was involved early on. Druery had got into politics in the 1990s as part of a campaign to resist the Greens’ attempts to limit the use of various vehicles in national parks. Druery, with a little help from his close personal friends, devised the preferencing-harvesting strategy that created the “tablecloth” ballot for the NSW 1999 upper house election.
Druery’s entry to the national parks debate arose from his obsession with long-range cycling, developed after illness caused him to have one-third of his bowel removed (a spokesperson for the bowel segment told Crikey that it asked to be removed). Druery, whose partner was a professional mathematician, turned it into a career as the “preference whisperer”.
The Shooters had Druery for a while, but they couldn’t keep him. Nor could they keep Leyonhjelm, the rambling country vet and gun nut who defected to the flat-tax comb-over Liberal Democrats. No one emerged among the Shooters as a charismatic figure or leader, and the party was too reasonable in its politics to get the primo right-wing crazy.
When Pauline Hanson’s One Nation got back in the game, conspiratorialists and cookers had as an option a party even crazier than they were. In Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie grabbed many votes the Shooters might have had (and threw them away in the 2017 state election), and Clive Palmer mopped up the rest. In the 2022 federal election, they were barely a presence in Tasmania or Victoria.
The failure of the hard right to gain more than a toehold in Australian politics has spurred many explanations. The most common and least convincing is that the Coalition, and then Labor, took over all the policies that the hard right had run on. But that doesn’t fit. In places like Italy and Greece, the mainstream right has acquiesced to everything the hard right wanted, to the point of leaving boat-borne immigrants to drown and declaring Roma citizens to be a “social problem”.
The hard right simply demanded more. Much as a certain section of progressives wants to characterise us as a genocidal nation, the mainstream right has resisted a lot of harder-right demands. The principle reason is probably that we simply did not have the crushing mini-depression the world got in 2008, a decade of non-recovery simultaneous with the QE inflating of capital fortunes and inequality (which we did get), and now the prospect of another global recession as QE is decisively ended, for the purposes of financial restabilisation.
Despite Peter Hartcher’s magnificently ill-timed and clueless interpretation of fascism in Australia in yesterday’s SMH and Age, the hard right has never been able to spark a political movement of any size here for any length of time. This was so even in the 1930s, when other settler nations saw the populist “Social Credit” movement electorally displace Labo(u)r in whole provinces and states.
The reason was not hard to see (except for Hartcher): the ALP’s “white Australia” policy made it a party as much of the corporatist right as of the political-economic left. When it split in 1931, the largely Catholic right of the party did not start an explicitly corporatist party, as well as it might have, but simply joined the mainstream right.
Never say never, but if the shooting starts, it won’t be by the Shooters, who have somethinged their bolt (can’t think of an expression here). Can anything, or anyone, regroup Australia’s virtual Little Chef factory of cookers into a force capable of reproducing itself politically? My guess is that the only thing that could do it would be a big global crash that killed our export markets, and a government that responded with an austerity budget.
Any leader who emerged would be a worker — maybe but not necessarily a tradie — rather than the sinister and obsessive accountants and other professionals who have plonked themselves at the head of these movements. Such a figure would be to the right of the mainstream right, but at the centre-side of their own movements, both their representative but also their interface and container, a daddy figure into whom the hard right can pour all their rage and hurt, and tribute.
Such a figure might emerge from the grassroots. If they don’t, the right-wing think tanks would have to invent them. When they do emerge, the tanks and their donors will pour in vast sums of money, training and advice. This, if it occurs, will be one side effect of the collapse of the Coalition as a viable agency of right-wing politics (witness business and mining peak bodies telling the Coalition to accept Labor’s carbon credits do-over. The Coalition is nothing for them, for the next while).
Sad for the Shooters, to go out, trying to dob someone in, like some hick squaddist outfit, an alfalfa antifa. Tomorrow doesn’t belong to them.
