Paterson’s Panic: When the Uniparty Feels the Ground Shift
James Paterson has sounded the alarm. The senior Liberal senator warns that populism, especially of the Pauline Hanson variety, risks trashing the institutions that underpin the Australian way of life. Universities must open their doors to conservatives, judges must reconnect with public expectations, and voters must be cautioned that backing anti-establishment parties comes loaded with conspiracy theories and radical baggage. The subtext is clear: One Nation is closing in, and the established order is rattled.
What Paterson presents as a defence of civilisation reads more like the nervous reaction of a political class that has spent years treating large parts of the electorate as a management problem rather than a constituency. The Labor–Liberal uniparty continuum has delivered stagnant living standards, high immigration without corresponding infrastructure or cultural confidence, energy policies that punish households, and a cultural atmosphere in which dissent from progressive orthodoxy is treated as a moral failing. When the same voters who once formed the reliable base of both major parties begin drifting toward One Nation, the response is not self-examination. It is a lecture about the dangers of populism.
This is the uniparty instinct in action. The major parties differ on emphasis and personnel, yet they have converged on the big questions that matter most to ordinary people: the scale and pace of demographic change, the prioritisation of net-zero over energy reliability and cost, the soft handling of crime and disorder, and the institutional capture of universities and parts of the public service by a single ideological outlook. One Nation's rise is not the cause of institutional decay. It is the antibody response to it. When the body politic is subjected to prolonged pressure, economic, cultural, and political, something eventually reacts. Calling that reaction the disease is a classic elite manoeuvre.
Paterson's prescriptions are telling. He wants universities to tolerate classical liberals and conservatives. Fair enough. Yet the deeper problem is that those institutions spent years actively sidelining such views while enjoying public funding and social prestige. He worries about the politicisation of the judiciary and lenient sentencing. Again, the concern is legitimate. But the erosion of public confidence in the courts did not begin with One Nation voters. It began when large sections of the public concluded that the system no longer shared their basic priorities on law and order. Lecturing the public about institutions after those institutions have already lost legitimacy is not leadership. It is denial.
The senator is careful not to name Hanson directly in every breath, yet the target is unmistakable. A Hanson-influenced or One Nation-supported government is framed as alien to Australian political culture, a foreign import of cultural uniformity. The irony is rich. The progressive monoculture that has dominated universities, the public service, and large parts of the media for a generation is treated as the natural order. Any pushback is pathologised. Two things can be true at once: Australia is a diverse country, and it is reasonable for citizens to demand that diversity operate within a coherent national culture rather than dissolve it. Pretending that only one side of that argument is legitimate is precisely why trust has collapsed.
One Nation's advance in places like Victoria is not a sudden outbreak of irrationality. It is the predictable result of a political settlement that stopped delivering for the people it claimed to represent. Cost-of-living pressure, outer-suburban discontent, and a sense that the major parties are interchangeable have created the opening. Paterson's speech is the sound of the uniparty noticing that the opening is no longer theoretical. The panic is understandable. The diagnosis is not. The threat is not that voters are looking elsewhere. The threat is that the established parties spent so long assuming they had nowhere else to go.
