One of the under-reported dynamics during the coronavirus pandemic has been the collapse of One Nation’s vote. The reasons for this are likely multi-factorial. But a serious public health and economic crisis, and the responses to it from commonwealth and state governments, seems to have nudged some “protest” voters back into the major party fold.
This drift is likely highly conditional, and realpolitik says the Coalition would like to keep the new pandemic recruits in its “vote one” column rather than rely on the vagaries of One Nation preference flows or see those votes bleed to Labor.
If representation and recruitment is an objective, self-styled mavericks like Kelly and his Queensland sidekick George Christensen have some utility. This duo operates like an extended wink and a nudge; they tell voters the Coalition is a broad enough church to be a home for fringe views.