Never look a gift horse in the mouth. That should be the attitude of the Liberal and National parties towards the rise of One Nation. But instead, as is now clear, the Coalition sees Pauline Hanson and her popularity as a threat to be vanquished, rather than an ally to be embraced.

So let’s examine both strategies.

For One Nation to genuinely pose an existential threat to the Coalition, they would need to be proposing popular policies that are diametrically opposed to core Coalition values. Yet that is not the case. Although One Nation goes further than the Coalition on net zero, on immigration and on issues like Welcome to Country, philosophically there is only a narrow gap between the two on most issues the conservative-voting public really care about. Take immigration. The Coalition has stated they wish to have a values filter applied to our immigration intake. How that would be determined has not been articulated, but the implication is that only the ‘right sort’ of immigrant will be allowed in. One Nation have said ‘no immigrants from Islamist nations’. The semantics may be different, and in terms of policy formulation there would be compromises to make, but the reality is that these two positions more or less amount to the same thing. So regardless of whether the Coalition or One Nation were to be the majority partner in a conservative mega-coalition government, the end result would be an immigration policy vastly preferable to the current mess. Similarly with net zero and Paris, differences may exist, but the broad thrust away from endless renewables subsidies is common to all three parties of the right.

Although Angus Taylor maintains that One Nation’s economic policies would be ‘ruinous’, he cannot shy away from the fact that the roots of our current woeful economic predicament are due to the equally ruinous priorities of the Coalition government that he was a key minister in; the idiotic Covid splurge and the treacherous adoption of net zero by 2050.

Meanwhile, wherever differences have emerged between One Nation and the Coalition, it is predominantly because the Coalition is allowing the ABC and Labor to set the agenda – especially with pernicious and highly predictable word games.

This was most apparent this week with the juvenile nonsense that dominated the airwaves about a ‘return to the White Australia policy’. (Indeed, it was the ABC itself that forced Angus Taylor into foolishly ruling out ‘any kind of coalition with One Nation’. Such a pronouncement is as idiotic as Tony Abbott’s ‘no cuts to the ABC, no cuts to SBS’ promise back in 2013. Or Julia Gillard’s ‘there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead’.)

The evidence is clear. Every time the Coalition attempts to attack One Nation, they lose as much, if not more, than they potentially gain. It’s a fool’s errand.

An alternative strategy, and one this magazine has proposed for some time, is for the Coalition and One Nation to ride in each other’s slipstream as they take the fight exclusively to Labor, the Greens and the Teals. This is what the left are terrified of, for they know that combined the conservative forces are unbeatable – just look at the Voice referendum result.

Every moment that Angus Taylor or Matt Canavan devotes to attacking or distancing themselves from One Nation is a moment they are not attacking or denigrating Labor and the Greens. And to be blunt, the Coalition cannot afford that luxury if the Albanese government is to be torn down.

Whilst there are those within the Coalition who think that One Nation, or One Nation’s current populism, is some kind of Trojan Horse that will infiltrate and destroy the Coalition from within, the truth is much simpler. A loose alliance, or non-aggression pact, between the parties would allow the Coalition to concentrate all their firepower on Labor’s disastrous economic policies whilst leaving One Nation free to use their formidable skills to prosecute the culture wars in hand-to-hand combat with the left. All the parties of the right need to do is to refuse to fight each other’s policies, and focus on attacking Labor. A simple preference deal and agreement to campaign on the joint slogan of ‘Put Labor last’ is surely what the left fears most.

The oddity here is the inability of the Coalition leadership team to recognise what a one-eyed cyclops can see: if the forces of the right are locked in mortal combat, the only winner will be the forces of the left.

And Australia can ill afford another three years of Labor’s catastrophic cultural and economic devastation.