Fijian migrant defends Pauline Hanson on live TV: ‘She’s fantastic’
A Fijian migrant has stunned an audience on SBS’s Insight as he talked about his feelings towards for One Nation.
A Fijian migrant has thrown his support behind One Nation in a shocking new interview, claiming the party leader is “fantastic” and disregarding claims she is racist.
Ronil Prasad, a small-business owner from Melbourne, appeared on the SBS program Insight, where he was asked about his thoughts on One Nation and the party leader, Pauline Hanson.
“I reckon she’s fantastic to be honest with you,” he said.
“Someone who loves her own country so much, that’s not racist.”
Mr Prasad moved to Australia from Fiji with his family 40 years ago, following a military coup and claims he considers himself Australian.
“I call myself Australian, I don’t call myself Fijian or Indian,” he said.
“I’ve put an Australian flag pole in my front yard.”
“You come to this country and embrace the Australian way of living, or you know what, you stay where you are.”
Mr Prasad was also asked whether he believed One Nation promotes racist ideas, to which he responded that Ms Hanson was “only trying to protect her own country.”
“If you really look into it, she’s really only trying to protect her own country, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
“If someone comes into my house, I will protect my house from someone if they’re bringing different values into my house and trying to teach my kids something different.”
“Well, you know what you’re not welcome.”
Mr Prasad’s comments echo a growing number of voters who are turning to Ms Hanson’s party, with One Nation candidate David Farley securing the seat of Farrer in the by-election earlier this month.
Federal budget hands One Nation polling boost
It comes as two new opinion polls — Newspoll, commissioned by The Australian, and Nine Newspapers’ Resolve Political Monitor — suggest last week’s federal budget has been a disaster for the Prime Minister.
Newspoll found voters’ disapproval of broken promises around negative gearing and capital gains tax was worse than Joe Hockey’s controversial 2014 budget, which threatened to introduce a $7 GP co-payment.
This year’s result is the most unpopular budget since Paul Keating’s 1993 effort.
Forty-seven per cent of Newspoll respondents believe the “budget is driving a wedge between younger and older generations”, and a clear majority think Labor’s housing reforms “will make no difference”.
However Labor’s primary vote remained static at 31 per cent, despite voters’ grumpiness over broken promises and One Nation jumping from 24 per cent to 27 per cent.
More concerningly for Mr Albanese, Resolve put opposition leader Angus Taylor well ahead as preferred Prime Minister, 33-30, with 37 per cent undecided — a dramatic plunge since February when Mr Albanese held a commanding 38-22 lead.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, meanwhile, is now Australia’s most “likeable” politician, according to Resolve, pulling in a performance rating of plus 12 percentage points, ahead of Mr Taylor on plus 11 percentage points.
Mr Albanese’s net likability rating has dragged to minus 13 percentage points, down one point from the month before.
One Nation won its first federal lower house seat at the Farrer by-election earlier this month, after a similar outperformance in the South Australia state election in March saw One Nation pick up four lower house and three upper house seats.
The anti-immigration party has surged in popularity since the Bondi terror attack in December, overtaking the Liberals in a January Newspoll that marked the first time in Australia’s history a minor party has polled higher than one of the majors.
After Tuesday’s budget, Ms Hanson told news.com.au the budget backflips showed “Labor cannot be trusted with anything they say or promise”.
“It’s a Marxist, communist budget which attacks hardworking Australians who have sacrificed and saved to invest,” she said.
“Labor is using this budget to build a taxpayer-funded war chest for the next federal election. Rather than create intergenerational equity, this budget creates intergenerational poverty.
“It will drive up inflation, interest rates and mortgage payments — wiping out any relief such as the paltry $5 per week Labor is handing out from next year. The changes to negative gearing will also drive up rents, as happened the last time Paul Keating made changes to negative gearing and was forced to reverse them within two years.
‘Cascade’: Graph that will haunt Albo
One Nation’s rapid rise bears a striking resemblance to support for the No vote in the 2023 Voice referendum, polling data shows, with Australia seemingly now in the midst of a full-blown preference cascade.
Election analyst Kevin Bonham has estimated the “shadow” Labor-One Nation two-party-preferred match-up going back to June last year, showing the right-wing party closing the gap from the mid-30s to within striking distance.
At latest count, with three polls — Freshwater, Resolve and Newspoll — since last week’s Farrer by-election and Tuesday’s federal budget, Labor leads One Nation 53.2 per cent to 46.8 per cent in the estimated two-party-preferred vote.
The Coalition’s aggregated two-party-preferred vote is 47.3 per cent to 52.7 per cent.
Entrepreneur John Morgan on Sunday shared a striking chart overlaying Mr Bonham’s Labor-One Nation match-up with the Yes vote percentage, starting from August 2022.
“We now have three polls post-Farrer and post budget,” he wrote on X. “ONP is still tracking the Voice trajectory. A preference cascade unwinding the same way. Uncanny.”
A preference cascade — a term coined by Turkish economist Timur Kuran in 1989 — is a sudden shift when voters, realising others feel the same way, become comfortable expressing their privately held views in public.
In the lead-up to the failed October 2023 referendum, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament appeared all but a sure thing.
Polls showed nearly two thirds of Australians supported the Voice a year out from the vote. That gradually trended down as the Yes and No campaigns got underway, before a dramatic plunge beginning around May 2023.
The Yes campaign never recovered. The Voice was resoundingly defeated, with 60.1 per cent (9.45 million) voting No and 39.9 per cent (6.29 million) voting Yes on October 14, with a tearful Anthony Albanese telling the nation the “result is not one that I had hoped for”.