It's very hard to focus on Australian politics when the world keeps getting tipped off its axis like this.

But with voting now having commenced at pre-polling stations around Australia, let us not overlook the historic, all-Australian union that was consecrated on Tuesday morning.

BY Annabel Crabb

After nearly 30 years of unresolved tension, the Coalition and Pauline Hanson's One Nation have finally — decisively — tied the knot.

It was a registry office affair. The parties did not post a happy photo.

We know because when pre-poll voting began on Tuesday, the "how to vote" cards issued by the Coalition place Pauline Hanson's One Nation candidates at number two in the vast majority of lower house seats.

And — after insisting that One Nation would advocate for "parties of freedom" and "conservative independents" over both major parties — leader Pauline Hanson pulped and reprinted her preference suggestions in a number of seats at the very last minute to place Coalition candidates second.

The seats included Dickson, the marginal Queensland electorate held by Liberal leader Peter Dutton. The first version of the One Nation how-to-vote cards had Dutton at number four. The new ones have him at number two.

One Nation chief of staff James Ashby explained to the Daily Telegraph that the last-minute reversal was intended to counteract the effect of Clive Palmer's preference guidelines, which in some cases urged a vote for "teal" independents.

"If it means saving Peter Dutton by shifting a 'how to vote', then we will do so," Ashby said.

If the world wasn't already so full of gobsmacking events, this development surely would be commanding more attention.

Think of it: Hanson is a political figure who owes her 30 years of fame to the fact that John Howard disendorsed her as a Liberal candidate way back in 1996, then placed her candidates last on Liberal how-to-votes in 1998.

Since then, Ipswich's most famous daughter has been in and out of the House of Representatives, in and out of prison, and into the Senate, where her term runs through to the next election.

It's been a wild ride.

Hanson was chased out of politics by Tony Abbott, before he became a Liberal prime minister. She brought former federal Labor leader Mark Latham back into politics in 2019, when he was elected to the NSW Upper House under the One Nation banner.

And for most of that time, the Coalition has struggled — sometimes miserably — with the unique challenge Hanson has posed to the conservative party of government, at whose right flank she has relentlessly nibbled.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-23/pauline-hanson-one-nation-preferencing-deal/105200748

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.