It would
appear that the resurrection of Pauline Hanson is now complete. How did it come
to this? A washed-up failed politician who has stood at just about every
election since she lost her seat in the House of Representatives in 1998 after
just one term. A peddler of ignorance. Denigrating of academic expertise. An
undoubted racist. A homophobe. Anti-intellectual. An individual who did more
damage to Australia’s international reputation than almost anything or anyone
before we started incarcerating refugees indefinitely on Pacific islands in
more recent years. A purveyor of White Australia Policy sensibilities, long
renounced by the nation. And now she has won a seat in the Senate.
As she once
draped herself in the Australian flag for an election photo, she will now be draped
in the legitimacy that being a member of the Senate will bestow her. She will
be addressed by the honorific ‘Senator’ and she will enjoy these privileges and
this platform for either three or six years. Three or six years to contaminate
the nation with falsely legitimised lies. Three or six years to be a power
block in negotiations with the government of the day. By any standard, having
Pauline Hanson with this much influence and power is a nightmare scenario.
I do not want to speak exhaustively about how this came to be. There will be a plethora of analysis on that question over the coming weeks. Suffice to say, the two major parties are struggling for traction with a lot of people and there are a lot of disaffected electors who are moving their votes to other places. On the left side, the disaffected are moving from the ALP to the Greens, to Xenophon and to other minor progressive parties or individuals. On the right, the more centrist of the disaffected are moving from the Coalition to Xenophon, while the even more right are moving to Hanson.
These Hanson voters are the people who, generally speaking, are less educated, more locally fixated, and who yearn for a past Australia where everybody is white, straight and Christian, and where Australia is not so intimately connected to the rest of the world. They unhesitatingly ‘other’ and then demonise any individual or group who doesn’t fit this mould. It is easy for them intellectually to scapegoat such people for the ills and lack of progress in society. They have a very negatively skewed vision of the nation and see little good in the progress that Australia has made over the last decades. They eschew complexity for simplistic populist answers that are often associated with either their own hip pocket or when they fear their world is moving too fast for them. Of course, the others they pick on the most are non-white immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, people of colour generally, Australia’s indigenous people, people who have different religions other than Christianity, even if their own allegiance to Christianity is barely nominal at best, people who don’t fit in to their worldview: white, straight, Christian.
A summary of some of One Nation’s most objectionable policies, all found in detail on their website, makes for depressing reading. No-body could quibble or argue with intellectual honesty that they are not racist to the core, mean-spirited, inward looking, backward looking, anti-intellectual and homophobic.
- Install surveillance cameras in all mosques
- Hold a royal commission into the corruption of climate change science
- Stop Muslim immigration and the intake of Muslim refugees
- Oppose Marriage Equality as it could lead to adults marrying 9 year old children
- Abolish multiculturalism and the Racial Discrimination Act
- Ban Halal certification
- Opposes taking guns from law abiding citizens
- Ban the burqa and the niquab in public places
This is the
platform Hanson ran on. This is the platform Hanson won on. With regard to her
supporters, it really does mean that the major parties have a lot of work on
front of them to not only counter such outrageous ugliness, but also to win
back her supporters from such extremism.
Hanson’s
overt racism is actually a throwback to earlier twentieth century forms of
racism. After the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, racism tended to
become more covert and serpentine, as racists were reluctant to wear the stigma
that was becoming associated with its overt expression. But with the beginning of this new century, there has
been a resurgence of more open and public racism. It is actually a nineteenth century phenomenon
that views so-called ‘inborn worth’, ‘differential genetic capacity’ and ‘cultural
development’ as ways of ranking people, and it coincided with the rise of nationalism. It appropriated the prestige of
nineteenth century science as its authority. But twentieth and twenty first century
science, especially in molecular biology, has found that the concept of race
has no basis in fundamental biology and should be abandoned wholesale. In fact,
it has found there is more genetic variance within
racial groupings than between them.
Negative views about a group, ethnic, religious or otherwise, eg., LGBTI, are
typically made up of stereotypes and are very difficult to budge regardless of
evidence to the contrary. Typically, a counterexample to the stereotype will be
viewed merely as an exception to the rule, and the prejudice will remain.
Hanson’s racism and bigotry does not value science, sociology, psychology,
history, religious understandings or any other complex medium through which to
understand diverse groups in society. Hers is a shallow world.
There is a pitfall here. Pauline
Hanson has a certain appeal to Australians on an unconscious level. She is an
uneducated single battler ready to stand up to the big guns for what she
believes. It is the stuff of one of our most beloved movies, The Castle. She
has a faltering voice while being interviewed and so she appears with a certain
degree of vulnerability. Like a lamb in a slaughterhouse surrounded by nasty
media and politicians. She’s the ordinary person, the lone female, the battler,
the working woman, the everywoman. Unlike others, she can speak honestly and from the heart.
She’s one of us. Poor Pauline. Brave Pauline. Australians since colonisation
have always lauded such people. We do not share America's admiration and lionisation of national institutions. We have our own
sensibility. Historically, we distrust authority, whether it be the government,
the police, the church, big business, or any other authoritarian entity. It’s
part of our convict DNA and we are proud of it. I happen to think that it is
not only one of our most endearing qualities, but a feature of Australianness
that has served us well by helping us to keep a check on the power elites. And
Pauline Hanson’s apparent vulnerability taps into that national psyche.
But Pauline
Hanson is not as she seems. She is not the innocent and brave lamb. Her public
statements about everything from Muslims to gays to indigenous to refugees to
scientists, all found without effort online, are both ignorant and flagrantly
egregious. Her lack of education is no excuse. She’s had twenty years since her
last term in Parliament to get herself educated. She is drowning in ignorance
and hopes to flood the land with it.
So what to do?
First, I disagree with certain columnists and LNP MPs who say that because she has been voted in by a considerable number of people, she should be respected. That we should listen to what she has to say.
Bunkum, I say. Sorry, but that is just plain wrong. I have read her manifesto. I know what’s in it. Her beliefs are ugly, divisive, disrespectful and demeaning. They are racist to the core and xenophobia and bigotry drip from her lips whenever she opens her mouth. None of this is worthy of respect. Much of it amounts to hate-speech. We should not offer respect. God, we should not offer her a microphone! Yes, she has a right to her beliefs. I will not dispute that. But she doesn’t have an automatic get of gaol free card in regards to being respected just because some other racists and bigots voted for her. Her platform is monstrous and intolerable and cannot be respected. To suggest it should be, is abusive to her victims.
Second,
after the massacre in Orlando of my gay brothers and sisters in the Pulse
nightclub, I am now disinclined to be to understanding of bigots. I am firmer
in my beliefs that bigotry is unacceptable in a caring society and should be rejected out of hand.
I think I am not alone in this. I feel now that wherever we hear it, we should
call it out for the filth that it is and not mince words.
Hanson often speaks in generalisations such as, ‘most Australians do not like Muslims coming here’ or most Australians think indigenous people are lazy’. Wrong. We should call out the generalisations and the sweeping statements and the other rhetorical errors she uses and if necessary refute them with facts and figures. These sorts of statements would not pass a 1st year course at University or TAFE. They certainly should not pass for worthy political discourse in Australia. Her rubbish opinions need to be shown up for the fatuous excrement they are. She should not be allowed to get away with a single racist or anti-Muslim or homophobic comment. Not one. The nation should descend on her utterances with a single voice. Cut her no slack. Give her not an inch. I would be happy to see her struggle for air time and media space and have to struggle for every single thing she does politically while she is in the Parliament.
The last thing Australia needs now in a world that is somewhat disjointed and untrusting is a legitimisation of fascist racist bigots, whether in the Parliament or out of it. Our multi-culturalism is a jewel in the nation’s crown. We have navigated multi-culturalism perhaps better than any other nation on earth. For decades, it has helped shape the wonderful society that we enjoy. Our country is so much richer for having had peoples from other lands join us here, and the thinkers among us know that we all came here from other lands originally and joined an ancient culture tens of thousands of years old.
While I have seen many jokes and funny memes about Pauline Hanson, I actually do not think she is a laughing matter. And really, I do not think that ridicule will make a difference. Frankly, I don’t think she’s intelligent enough to understand the satire anyhow. Hanson will be a destructive force in our nation for some years to come. We should do our level best to minimise the damage both nationally and internationally. We should hold her up to account on every occasion and call a racist a racist.
