One Nation fancies itself as ‘the real deal’. At least Pauline’s party has a sense of humour

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One Nation is not without a sense of humour. How else to explain The Real Deal, the ironic choice of title for a state election manifesto that offers so little detail as to how any given policy might work, let alone cost.

To set the scene, imagine Pauline “The Real Deal” Hanson in a wrestling tunic and a sequined cape, biceps oiled and bulging, strutting to the ring for a tag team match with Warren “The Warrior” Pickering.

That is the feel of the politics-meets-sports-entertainment, championship wrestling-style campaign launch that accompanied the release of a policy document which sets out One Nation’s plans for governing Victoria.

All of which would be fine – if the contents of the document, like the political theatre, were not so unreal.

From the opening Shutterstock image of a pearly white family who look like they live in an Ikea showroom, to AI-generated phrasing that, among other things, advocates greater use of AI in policing, the policy platform leaves you wondering whether One Nation is run by people or a flame-haired avatar lifted from a 4Chan message board.

As my colleague “Rowdy” Kieran Rooney complained between pages, the more you read, the less you understand.

That doesn’t mean One Nation isn’t putting forward some reasonable ideas.

If we stick with the party’s area of greatest focus – the state’s criminal justice system – it would be wonderful if everyone charged with violent offences could progress to trial within 90 days and the Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP) and Legal Aid Victoria were properly funded to run and defend all cases.

There is also something to be said for the idea of holding parents legally responsible for the damage caused by their under-16 children who become roaming, recidivist offenders. As one senior Labor official remarked under his breath, he would have liked to have come up with that one.

But if we accept the adage that an uncosted policy is just a slogan, pledging unspecified “additional funding” to the OPP or a “proportional funding boost” to the Drug Court doesn’t raise these promises above the status of wistful aspiration.

There are further promises to build new magistrates courts in Melton, Epping and The Warrior’s marginal electorate of Pakenham and to expand from 140 to 170 the number of magistrates currently active on the court lists.

The Wyndham Law Courts that opened last year cost $270 million to build but, as we know from the short history of that facility, it is easier to build a new court than staff and operate it. One Nation won’t get change from $1 billion if and when its new courts put their first 10-year-old child in the dock – one of the less palatable “community safety” measures in The Real Deal.

The deeper problem here is less what One Nation is advocating than its misunderstanding of Victoria’s sentencing laws as they are currently written. Remember, this is the party that will very likely hold the balance of power in the next parliament’s house of legislative review.

In its policy document, One Nation claims judges, when passing sentence in Victoria, are not required to consider anything other than the rehabilitation of the convicted person, and that competing sentencing principles within the act – deterrence, denunciation and community protection – are routinely ignored, resulting in the “lightest possible” sentence.

This is a nonsense reading of how judges balance sentencing principles. Having confected a fictional problem, the party proposes to solve it by requiring judges, whenever dealing with violent criminals, to consider every sentencing principle in every case while prioritising community safety.

One Nation would also compel judges to impose cumulative sentences on anyone convicted of violent crimes against multiple victims and to “benchmark” all sentences against the maximum penalty for any given offence.

Monash University Emeritus Professor Arie Freiberg, a former, long-serving chair of the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council who reviewed the Sentencing Act for the Bracks government, has looked at One Nation’s policies. He says they misunderstand the aims of sentencing.

“The basic common law principle is that the sentence must be proportionate to the offence taking into account both harm and culpability,” he explains. “Rehabilitation is an aim but just deserts and deterrence rank much higher.”

One Nation’s reference to the “lightest possible sentence” is lifted from a section in the act that sets out the principle of parsimony – doing no more harm than necessary to achieve the purpose. This idea, which dates back to the Enlightenment, serves as a check against excessive punishment in common law jurisdictions.

Freiberg says that One Nation’s suggested changes to sentencing, when considered together, are a recipe for unjust outcomes. “There are already many provisions in the act regarding concurrent and consecutive sentences,” he says. “However, the basic principle is totality – the total punishment should be proportionate to all the offences that the person has been found guilty of.

“If One Nation wants sentences of hundreds of years to be imposed, it would be both unjust and require building thousands of new prison beds.”

One Nation wants to make Victoria the “toughest state on crime in Australia”. It advocates adopting police pursuit policies from Western Australia and Serious Crime Prevention Orders from NSW. It would also up the Carroll government’s ante on bail laws, with an exceptional circumstances test to be applied to all “repeat offenders”.

Finally, it wants to arm ordinary folk with pepper spray and provide greater legal protections for home owners who confront intruders.

One Nation are not without a sense of humour, but there is something darkly unfunny about their approach to this election. They didn’t take questions at their campaign launch and since then, have refused to answer any posed by this masthead about their election manifesto.

The complete 64 pages of The Real Deal are published on the One Nation website. If you have trouble finding it, you’d do just as well to ask ChatGPT to write your own.

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