The new Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor, gave a speech at the Sydney Institute on Thursday night saying that voting for One Nation would bring an "eternity of pain." He was blunt: "To those who feel like lighting a match, believe me when I say that a moment of satisfaction isn't worth the eternity of pain that will follow."

He also called One Nation "a column of smoke" and "a one person show." What he meant: the party depends almost entirely on Pauline Hanson rather than having other strong leaders or a proper structure. He didn't hold back on the numbers either, claiming One Nation's promises would cost about a trillion dollars over ten years — a very large number designed to grab headlines.

Timing mattered. Hanson wasn't even in the country. She was in London meeting with a far-right British activist. That played straight into Taylor's message that One Nation is really just Hanson, not a proper party.

Why does this matter now? One Nation is polling at 29 per cent — higher than the Coalition or Labor. For someone who's only been Opposition Leader for five months, that's a serious problem. The ground under his feet is shifting.

Taylor became Opposition Leader in February after the previous leader, Sussan Ley, lost a party-room vote. Since then, he's been worried about One Nation. In May, One Nation won its first seat in the House of Representatives — a big deal, because they'd been stuck in the Senate before. The Liberal Party then made Tony Abbott party president, trying to shore things up on the conservative side.

So Taylor faces a classic problem: attack One Nation too hard and they look like rebels standing up to the establishment; ignore them and the voters keep drifting away. By calling them a "column of smoke" and putting a huge price tag on their policies, Taylor is clearly choosing to fight. We'll see if it works.

But here's the thing. Taylor didn't actually tell voters what the Coalition would do differently on cost of living or migration — the two issues that are driving One Nation's rise. A warning that voting for someone else will hurt isn't the same as giving people a reason to vote for you instead. When politicians rely only on scaring voters away from the other side, that scare message usually doesn't last as long as the voter frustration does.