Lion’s Den Politics: Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club

Pauline Hanson has been a fixture of Australian politics since 1996, when she appeared with piercing, shrill bravado as the federal member for Oxley, having been disendorsed for making remarks about Aboriginals by the Liberal Party that may, in time, be slain by her current fortunes. Since then, she has been attacked for her bigotry, her class, her sex, her shock of red hair, her speech, her general crassness, her fantastic imperviousness to reading (she is napalm to libraries, a virus to erudition), and any claim that she would ever engage, at any length, with something resembling the grand idea. Her views, roughly expressed, were deftly purloined by the conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who shared a good deal of her sentiments without ever explicitly stating so. But plagiarists are never generous about their borrowings.

In politics, however, none of this need matter; to be a representative is to be the conduit between sentiment, the representative and the vote. This is a link she has in spades, buckets and any other body of measure. She has survived for three decades in a line of work that many shrivel in after a term, time decaying them with heartless indifference. She has been a slow burn to the trends of the world: the right-wing paroxysms of Brexit Britain, anti-immigrant Europe, and the United States of Donald Trump; the anti-establishment rage that is merely masquerading as an establishment under another name.

Having seized the day with social media, her messages can come across, not so much as polished gems as the unfiltered mediations of a person unworried by the shaping interpretations of the traditional media stable. One Nation, observe media analysists in The Conversation, “was the first political party in Australia to launch a website, an early adopter of social media, and now the first with its own animated satirical series on YouTube as well as a feature-length film.” The fat, as it were, remains intact; consuming it can be done in the knowledge that the eggheads have not added unwanted gristle. Forget whether the assertions are accurate or not; what matters is that they are untampered, the authentic voice of the alternative saviour.

Hanson has positioned herself as a vessel and cipher. The current times of political grievance have seen such figures thrive. They signal the coming of a new dawn, the next great cleansing, catharsis, if you will. The problem becomes more critical when she hopes to become a figure of substance. If she is a figure for the workers, as she claims, it becomes rather strange to then speak about how lazy they are, and how they should be easily sackable by employers with greater legal powers to do so. Her own record on attending parliament also suggests a pattern of sloth she abominates in others.

To go to the desert dry confines of the National Press Club in Canberra was just the ticket. People only go to that dull place of constipated address once their heart slows, and the brain has gone on a sabbatical that may prove permanent. It is the lion’s den and a hack’s preserve, a place no radical, reactionary or genuine thinker would dare venture. But Hanson is on to something. She smells blood and wants to order the books. In her address, she could announce that she had arrived as a political force, having been previously regarded as a caricature on the periphery. Every attack on her could be seen as adding votes. By all means scrutinise me, she declared with some menace, but only in the way I want it.

Nothing shocked in her presentation. She was the anti-politician’s politician, not one of those who “are good at talking but not listening”. She spoke of those vulnerable Australians who scour rubbish bins for food or skip meals or can’t see an optometrist or a doctor. Or had to use candles and torches for lighting homes given high electricity prices. Renewable energy was a demon that had to be slayed or at the very least discouraged; carbon neutrality was a “net zero hoax” draining the Treasury. The young were being punished by capital gains tax changes. Civil debate had been “paralysed”, the frank Australian muzzled. The country faced a “transgender insurgency” aided by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody and the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Hugh de Kretser. Artificial intelligence needed regulation. The national broadcaster, the ABC, would be reduced to a subscription service, while the ethnic broadcaster, SBS, would be abolished. (We are all only English speakers now.)

Hanson’s primary argument – and in that sense much else fans out – is immigration. “Undeniably immigration or immigration policy has our country in the state of crisis. At the centre of this crisis is the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism.” Australia was “a multiracial society” but had to be “monocultural. Australians must live under one cultural umbrella.”

Under this contrived umbrella, Australian universities would have fewer international students. The country would have a lower percentage of people born overseas and would speak English at home. (Monoglots never know anything but their poorly mastered language, but Hanson is particularly set against the speaking of Mandarin and Arabic in the Australian household.) The Babel of tongues rapidly becomes a problem of Islam, which she does not see as a religion but a “political movement” engendering a radical variant that “must be destroyed”. “Western civilisation and its values are under siege. The people to whom I speak are fed up with hate preachers in some Sydney mosques.” From there, it becomes easy to blame the housing crisis on suspicious, accommodation pinching immigrants.

The groan about wanting Australia to be a monoculture affixed in time is as hackneyed as any dusty vision of fish and chip shops, artery hardening spam, undrinkable coffee and a hatred of olive oil. It is also a fiction, since no society can ever be hermetically, proudly monocultural with any degree of dedication. Australia’s utter lack of mooring in a language of fine ancestral food, rituals and living, is exactly the environment where terms such as ‘multiculturalism’ come to roost. Like monoculture, that term is also inherently meaningless, since it cannot be defined in any meaningful way.

Hanson hates immigration because she has never quite understood it. Were she to fall ill and find herself in hospital, she would be tended by immigrants, fed by immigrants, her health invigilated by immigrants. She would heal because of immigrants. Fortunately for Hanson, when it comes to many voters, impressions are always mistaken for ideas, and the anti-establishment outsider poking fun at the decrepit, failing establishment will serve the cause. But watch the show unravel when One Nation starts winning seats. To defeat opponents at the ballot box is one thing; being a functional member, something else. That will be a parliament worth watching.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]