Despite myself, I’m still thinking about the Hanson legacy, an exercise made more pointed by the news that now welfare recipients will be “profiled’ to detect their cheating hearts, as are potential drugs importers at airports.
Here’s something I wrote for the Herald today, then the thoughts of Les Bursill, Richard Goodwin, Suresh Rajan and WQ Ming.
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Many Australians hate Pauline Hanson to their very core. To them, she’s the dark underbelly of our identity, the bit they’d thought was buried forever until she hit them in the face with it.
Yet upon her retirement six years after voters in the safe Labor blue collar seat of Oxley in Ipswich swept her into parliament with the biggest swing in the nation, who of these is dancing in the streets with a “Hey Ho, the Witch is dead”?
There is no relief among those who hate her for her attitudes to race, to cultural difference, to pluralism, to welfare and, I suspect, there may even be unexpected feelings of regret. Better for her to speak those views, perhaps, than for them to be swallowed whole by a major party – with the power, money and the manipulation skills she never had – the one which won back her people and the federal election? Better her representing those views than a freaked-out, policy-constipated Labor Party now also busily moving to the conservative right on social policy?
For these Australians, there is also the shocking recognition that they have replaced the Hansonites as the new oppressed minority – demonised, labelled un-Australian, stereotyped, damned as whingers, and, most strikingly, disenfranchised by the major parties. The Hansonites got their way. We turned the boats back, just as Hanson wanted. We gave refugees who applied onshore three year temporary visas, not permanent residency, an even tougher policy than that of Hanson, who called for five year visas in 1998. We vilified international human rights norms which didn’t suit us. What a journey! What a phenomenon! And what a `conversation’ (read screaming match) she’s inspired over our national identity. Now anything goes.
It’s a more honest place, Australia, thanks to Pauline Hanson. Her victims are Australia’s `minorities” who now not only sense resentment and disapproval but are told all about it, verbally and sometimes physically. It’s a meaner place for the underclass, too, but at least the downward envy prejudices of some once forgotten people are being indulged. I hope they feel better for it.
So let’s dismiss the glib, self-serving denial of Hanson’s influence from people like John Howard’s former chief adviser Grahame Morris, who said of Hanson on Monday night: “She was a media creation and at one stage there everyone thought she had every blinking answer. Well, it was idiotic. She was one voice with no answers and essentially just a spoiler and a whinger.”
First, Hanson was a creation of a significant group of Australians who reacted with glee to her maiden speech. The media played catch-up with public opinion. It also put enormous resources into exposing the flaws of One Nation’s structure and the excesses of her support base.
True, the media was seduced by Hanson’s style, because it was the very antithesis of standard political discourse and rules of engagement. She didn’t speak in code. She opened herself up to scrutiny from any Australian who chose to do so, through public meetings open to all around the country. She did not stage manage events, creating the excitment of never knowing what would happen next. She was political reality TV, and she rated.
The Hanson phenomenon exposed chronic failures in media practice, particularly its increasing tendency to turn its back on the public to play insider games with the powerful. The Hanson shock has triggered many attempts to reconnect with the public.
Second, leaving aside the hard-core five percent of hard-right One Nation voters, the rest, in general, did not believe Hanson had the answers. They believed she asked the right questions – questions they’d asked and which had never been addressed in language they could comprehend, let alone answered. She was a means to scream.
Hanson was a peculiarly Australian version of ultra-nationalist populism – female, amateur, exotic. Her visceral appeal, the sense she engendered that she had the guts to stand up to the big boys and take them on, inspired many Australians in the regions and the bush to rust-off from their traditional vote, particularly for the Nationals.
Once that happened, Victorian country voters voted Labor in 1999 to oust Jeff Kennett, and NSW regional voters increasingly turned to rural independents in the State election the same year. The reason was simple – the Hanson scream brought big dividends.
After the 1998 federal election and the Victorian election, money flowed like honey to the bush. John Anderson admitted we were “two nations” and called a rural summit. Telecommunications services, doctors and lots else was rushed to the bush. In academe, regional politics and policy landed on course lists for the first time. Compensation packages for deregulated rural industries burgeoned. Most importantly the government, Labor, and even the Productivity Commission admitted that competition policy needed overhaul to take into account more elements of the “public interest” than the circular definition that more competition was by definition in the public interest.
Hanson proved how moribund the economic left had become. While the left around the world lobbied hard to expose the secret Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) being brokered among OECD countries to give multinationals the right to compensation if their bottom lines were affected by new environment, health or labour laws, it was Hanson who exposed the plan in Australia.
At the time, a staffer to a senior Liberal minister confided that on hearing Hanson’s MAI speech, she asked her department if it had ramifications for his portfolio. The department knew nothing – everything was handled secretly in Treasury, and Treasury said everything was fine. The light of day saw MAI negotiations collapse.
I relate this anecdote to show how those whingeing questions of Hanson’s served to open up an economic debate which had become – by bipartisan consensus – closed, self-referential, deeply ignorant of the costs of its policies in human terms, and unforgiveably arrogant.
The tragedy of the Hanson phenomenon is not that it existed, but that neither the politicians or the media responded constructively to its cultural challenge, to genuinely discuss answers to pressing problems unforseen by the transformers, like the continuing disintegration of many Aboriginal communities and the rising tensions in big cities against new migrants. Her threat to their, and our, certainties were too big, her challenges to their, and our, power, too disturbing. So we got appeasement from Howard and many Nationals, search and destroy by Jeff Kennett and the liberal media.
The result: a violent pendulum swing from the transformative vision of our identity begun in the 1970s to regression to an old vision founded on fear and exclusion. Now, the Hanson/Howard combo having won the culture wars, we get search and destroy of the liberal ideal and its proponents amid ugly triumphalism and the blanket replacement of one political correctness with another. What a shame.
Hanson retires with an Australia just as divided as when she burst upon us, only now the wounds are open, the divides acknowledged. We know each other better than we did before she hit the public stage, and as she leaves it, many more Australians are actively taking part in debate about who we are and what we stand for. This is the unfinished legacy of the redhead from Ipswich.
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Les Bursill
I am at the end of my tether. We are becoming the “hard men” of the world (refugees and David Hicks’ denial of rights) and now Amanda Vanstone (that’s Mandy Vandalstone) is profiling welfare cheats. Isn’t that convicting people of crimes they may commit? Perhaps we should profile pollies and anyone who fits the mold should be put into a humane detention camp in Timbuktu.
I am only grateful that history will record these buffoons and their activities and people like Little Johnny, Ruddock and Vandalstone will go into the history books for what they are. Yes I know they are reducing the value of history and other social studies, but I am sure some of us will still remember.
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Richard Goodwin
Let’s not write her off just because she’s resigned from the party. Remember how many times John Howard has been written off, including before the last election? How will she be remembered?
For me, as someone who broke open the cosy arrangement between the major parties to not discuss issues which were of importance to many Australians, eg immigration. Neither party could ignore the fact that members of the left and right were being ignored by the Lib/Labs.
I think it was important that she was a woman, because it has partially dented the boys club/male-oriented parliamentary system. Neither party has come to terms with the challenges she has thrown up.
I didn’t always agree with what she said. and she didn’t always articulate the things she was criticised for (especially in the overseas press), but she had the guts to say what was on her mind. If the political hacks in the established parties were more prepared to do the same, we might not have another x years with John Howard and a pathetic opposition who appear to be incapable of challenging the government.
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Suresh Rajan in Perth
The legacy that Pauline leaves is not, as (Western Australian One Nation MP) John Fischer would have us believe, akin to that of Margaret Thatcher, but rather one of a person who evoked the basest and most racist instincts in a number of her supporters.
The remainder of her supporters were enamoured by the glib and baseless motherhood statements that are so easy to dole out whilst not in government and hence are not accountable for delivery of promises.
The fear that I, and others in like minded mode, now have is that the power base of One Nation now shifts to “Lil ole redneck WA”, the base of such intellectual pygmies as Graeme Campbell and Frank Hough.
But let’s return to Pauline. Whatever one can say about her asinine and baseless political and economic policies, one has to have a modicum of respect for the fact that she did try and stick it out over a number of elections and through various trials and tribulations that she has endured. I don’t doubt that, as Paul Keating used to describe it, she will return, “like a dog to its own vomit”.
W Q Ming in Gosford, NSW
Peter Brain in Beyond Hanson suggests representative democracy is a good thing which we don’t have. Nor can we, since a nation that grows up with no political education, whose wages, superannuation, medical insurance are all largely determined by government fiat, and who have no way of controlling the masters of the state, are political `cows’- and cannot be represented in any useful sense.
Oz Labor was thrown onto the dust-bin in the 80s, and Pauline was the only pollie to believe a career could be made from speaking for them. She was too dim and ignorant to succeed personally. She was just a twitch of a political corpse, the last gasp of the blue singlet ozzie.