In the two years since the annihilation of One Nation at the 1998 election campaign, despite attracting more than one million first preference votes, the effects of the Hanson phenomenon have intensified. I believe its impact on Australian politics and society will not be understood for at least ten years.But it is high time that we in the media think through what is happening in our society from the perspective of the forces unleashed by Hansonism, and respond better than we have to date in exploring and interpreting their impact.
In my view, the cargo cult of Pauline Hanson triggered the rusting-off of rural and regional Australians voting traditions. Through Hanson, they saw the raw power of their vote, and have put it on the block for sale to the highest bidder, not only for cash but for reassurance that their experience and concept of being Australian is incorporated into our emerging national identity.
Five months after the federal election, the New South Wales election saw the National Party lose its safest seat, centred on Dubbo, to the independent, Labor-leaning Dubbo mayor. New South Wales now boasts three rural independentsall respected local identities, none of them rednecks. They represent three large, proud regional cities: Dubbo, Tamworth and Armidale. Their needs are being well catered for by the New South Wales Labor government, because if the rural independents hold their seats, Labor has a buffer against losing government. Meanwhile, New South Wales Labor has established Country Labor, with its own spokespeople and policies.
Who can forget the extraordinary climax of election day in Victoria, the home of small ‘l’ liberalism, in September 1999? Victorian regional and rural voters had given the thumbs down to Hanson. But then they did something no one who ruled or reported on Australia dreamed of: they put their traditional enemy, the Labor Party, into office. Victorian premier Steve Bracks worked hard for that result, but even he was shocked by the extent of his success. Jeff Kennett is still in shock, the Victorian National Party has split from the Coalition in opposition, and the rural seat of its former leader has fallen to Labor in a by-election.
On the federal level, the Victorian election loss has seen the Coalition fall over itself to cash up the bush. Daily press releases announce rural specific programs on everything from domestic violence to rural transaction centres. The Adelaide to Darwin railway is on the agenda, yet again. The Coalition and Labor believe that if they win over the bush (and the blue collar workers also attracted to Hansonism) they will win government, and any useful political analysis will filter all major political plays until the next election through that lens.
John Howard and Kim Beazley are still as one on the core issues of globalisation. Beazley differentiates himself only on Telstra, where he is playing to the bush’s conviction that a privatised Telstra will mean fewer services. Howard’s differentiation play is insidious, potentially disastrous for the nation, and means the trashing of the small ‘l’ liberal tradition of the party he leads. He is deliberately pushing the bush’s socially conservative buttons, and has rolled-gold credibility with the bush on these matters because he too is unashamedly socially conservative.
Howards downgrading of our commitment to United Nations human rights treaties feeds off the widespread feeling in the bush that one-world-government is the ruin of us all. It is intellectually dishonest and destructive of our established identity as a tolerant nation and a world leader on promoting international human rights standards. It works because Howard is blatantly appealing to prejudice and not doing his duty in informing the public of the facts. He is abusing country Australians, not helping them. And he knows it.
In reality, the civilising of the forces of economic globalisation – in which there is already a strong one-world regulation through groups such as the World Trade Organisation (strongly supported by Howard) – will only occur with the parallel development of world human rights standards. Human rights mean rights for country people too, such as the right to a decent education and accessible medical services. In addition, the fight for protection of the environment, child labour, and the wish of many countries to preserve unique economic/social traditions will only come through engagement with global economic forces, and again, this can only come through the mechanism of the United Nations.
Yet Howard does not chose intelligent, engaged debate. He does not respect the citizens he is appealing to, he exploits them. He chooses social populism, and refuses to argue his case on the merits to equally informed citizens. He has rejected rational debate and opted out of conversation with the informed, which in my view is the most dangerous game any political leader can play.
By the end of the 1998 election, I hoped that the two nations of Australia would begin a conversation. I saw rural and regional Australians as a minority in their country, like many ethnic groups are. I thought what they were really demanding were special benefits just like other minorities, and not equal rights for all Australians as they claimed. I thought they deserved special treatment. But the opportunity for conversation and consensus was not taken. Instead, Hansonite social concerns have become central to Australian political debate.
When Labor leader Kim Beazley ended Labor’s commitment to Aboriginal land rights by backing the Queensland Labor government’s modification of the right to negotiate for purely political reasons (that One Nation vote again) and then ran dead on the United Nations human rights debate, I felt that the worm had turned. Now the politically correct Australians, those who saw tolerance and acceptance of difference as central to Australia’s identity, are the new oppressed minority. Neither major party represents us any more. We have been forced to the Democrats and the Greens. So much for engagement. Instead of talking and working together after the Hanson shock wave, the political establishment has just replaced the hegemony of one group with another.
I want to go back to the beginning.
In launching my book on Pauline Hanson’s 1998 election campaign last year, Jana Wendt noted that the general havoc the Hanson phenomenon caused in the community was more than matched by the specific chaos she caused in the media.
“How to deal with her? Should she be laughed off the stage or was she a serious political force? Should she be reported in the same way that John Howard and the rest are, or was she a subversive who had to be flushed out of the works for fear that she might undermine a civilised polity? Back in 1996, many media outlets opted at first to ignore her in the fervent hope that she would implode or more conveniently just fade away. The others, who found her simply irresistible, felt the need to justify their fascination with her by crash-tackling Hanson at every turn. Few dared to authentically engage with her. Fewer still were prepared to write anything other than what their left liberal journalistic peers expected of them.”
However, once we’d acted out our instincts on Hanson, we realised that our input only intensified her support; that the very fact that she was under attack by the media became an essential element in her appeal.
That shocking realisation triggered a rare self- consciousness in the media. In some media, news judgement was replaced with political judgment – would running a story help or hinder Hanson? If the editor judged it would help her, it was run small or not run at all; if it would hurt, it was featured, sometimes without the usual checking. This attitude, not only anti-democratic but also self-defeating (the public really aren’t that dumb and wed better get used to it) led to an extraordinary judgment by Brisbane’s daily, The Courier-Mail, in the last week of the federal election campaign. An unprecedented attempt by One Nation to have police arrest the media was run in a single column on page eleven. While most media outlets believed the incident would help One Nation, itself a startling acknowledgement of the odour in which the media is held, the TV news led with it and the Herald and the Age ran the story on page one. Laurie Oakes, in accord with conventional wisdom, said in his report that the media had played into One Nations hands.
The Courier-Mail, after burying the story, then grotesquely ran a comment piece predicting that because of the medias behaviour One Nation would win six to eight Lower House seats. In other words, the paper openly admitted the importance of the story it buried, and chose to lecture the media on how it should have made a political judgment not to demand access to the costings document it was promised. As it happened the Courier-Mail’s judgment was wrong, and Hanson’s support remained stable. But then, the media so often gets it wrong in picking public reaction, don’t we? Weve become specialists at it.
I don’t want to single out The Courier-Mail for criticism here – my paper was as guilty as any other of being caught out on Hanson. When Hanson made her maiden speech in September 1996, I was chief of staff at the Herald Canberra bureau, and unsuccessfully argued that her speech should not be reported at all. I also had a personal policy of refusing to speak to Hansons then adviser, John Pasquerelli, and not to write news stories about Hanson or her party. I even quietly cheered when watching violent protests at formation meetings of One Nation.
I was wrong. Most of us were wrong. The shock waves of the Hanson phenomenon had lessons not only for the political establishment but also the media. The media’s roller-coaster ride with Pauline Hanson was a perfect starting point for our industry to engage in a most unusual exercise – self-reflection. It could, if we so chose, be used to focus the vague, cloudy certainty of all of us that the media isnt quite doing its job, that our readers, listeners and viewers arent happy with what theyre getting from us, and that we are losing relevance as a result.
Dick Morris, former spin-doctor to president Clinton, said in his book The New Prince: Machiavelli for the 21st Century that the media play the key role in bringing the private pains and needs of real people to public attention. This role, along with its corollary, to scrutinise the powerful to ensure they are telling the people the truth, is the reason we have a privileged role in a democracy. The Hanson phenomenon exposed it as unfulfilled.
Why did the media and the politicians get such a shock at the appeal of Hansons populism? And even after the bombshell she threw at us, why was the media again caught embarrassingly short at the recent Victorian election, when the country moved so strongly to Labor?
The incident that first pricked my conscience on this point was a letter from a listener to Late Night Live, Ms Susan Leembruggen. She was responding to my passionate advocacy of an independent Fairfax on the ABC program Late Night Live.
My advocacy focused on the need for diversity of news and views, and for the freedom of some parts of the press from ownership by big businessmen with their own barrows to push. Ms Leembruggen attacked my argument on the basis that none in the press – independent or otherwise – were doing their real job anyway.
I quote from my book:
“You have lamented the so-called Pauline Hanson phenomenon, saying that Queenslanders are mostly good, tolerant peopleamongst other such patronising comments. Both you and Phillip expressed your contempt and dismay over the consequent rising tide of social discontentinter alia racism and its perceived concomitant, unemployment. On Monday night you spoke with passion and conviction about media ownership and the importance of maintaining the Fairfax newspaper as the last chance for some kind of impartial freedom of speech.”
Yet what was the point of a free press, she asked, when the media had not addressed the real issues of the day – anxiety about unemployment and the disenfranchisement of large sectors of society through diminution of standards of living?
‘This media neglect is a significant factor in the rise of Hansonism, she wrote. Instead of academic arguments about Aussie tolerance and fair play (remember tolerance really means apathy, not acceptance) and the sense of abhorrence which goes with racism, you could more productively question the status quo in this country that gives rise to division and bigotry.”
In short, Hansonism was partly the medias’ fault for failing to act as the interface between the people and the powerful, and for turning our backs on the public to become just another part of a complacent establishment.
I was sufficiently disturbed to reply to Ms Leembruggen, and I wish I’d kept a copy so I could remember what rationalisation I used. But what finally pushed me into focusing on Hansonism was the Newspoll halfway through the 1998 Queensland election campaign, which showed that Maryborough, my hometown, could fall to One Nation. Had I really lost touch with my roots to such an extent that I could not understand, let alone empathise with, the mood of Maryborough? Studied avoidance of Hansonism became an obsession to work it out.
After a unique experience covering Pauline Hansons campaign, my views on journalism and its future will never be the same. In the 1996 campaign, I was depressed at its studied stage management – it was an exclusive pantomime in which only the politicians and the media could play. On Hanson’s campaign in 1998, the media became chasers and had to fight for its right to be present, as all the rules of etiquette and self-interest were thrown out the window, and the people – God forbid – took centre stage.
I describe in the book the media pressures and split second judgments – some wrong in retrospect – which resulted. A major reason I wrote the book was to describe what happened when the rules that have imprisoned us were disregarded, and thus hopefully open up debate on a possible third way between all rules and no rules.
Coming out of the campaign, I was convinced that the health minister, Michael Wooldridge, was correct in his essay on the rise of Hansonism in the 1998 book Two Nations when he wrote:
“Why this malaise in the relationship between power and people? This is an Australia of two cultures, which have little in common and find it hard to understand or appreciate each others views and attitudes. The policy culture sees the community culture as uneducated, ignorant, backward and occasionally comic in its primitive beliefs. The community culture sees the policy culture as arrogant and divorced from reality. The policy culture often sees the community culture as a barrier to the better future it is trying to build, and views with suspicion and contempt political leaders who pander to the concerns of the backward mass. The community culture sees the policy culture as responsible for the mess were in, and sees political leaders as captives of the narrow elites, governing for the noisy few and ignoring the real people.”
To the community culture, the quality media seems part of the elite, and is treated accordingly. Some elements of the tabloid media simply exploit fears and distrust and feed off them. It seems to me that the media groups which wish to serve their elite readership should be striving to report and understand the community culture, because if the two cultures continue to drift apart, the elites will suffer in the end. Thats the self-interested motive to examine our role and how we are fulfilling it. The idealistic motive is to help restore a coherence and common purpose among Australians, so the media deserves its place as an institution central to democracy.
Wooldridg’s analysis seems to rely heavily on Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul. His definition of the elite in The Doubters Companion should, I believe, be required bedtime reading for all our elites, including the media, because in the end, it can only be the elites who are to blame for Hansonism. Ralston Saul wrote:
“Every society has an elite. No society has ever been without one. The thing elites most easily forget is that they make no sense as a group unless they have a healthy and productive relationship with the rest of the citizenry. Questions of nationalism, ideology, and the filling of pockets aside, the principal function of an elite is to serve the interests of the whole. They may prosper far more than the average citizen in the process. They may have all sorts of advantages. These perks wont matter so long as the greater interests are also served. From their point of view, this is not a bad bargain. So it really is curious just how easily they forget and set about serving only themselves, even if it means that they or the society will self-destruct.
“There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them.”
As I said in the book:
“Now easy-going, egalitarian Australia had its own unique brand of far right populism feeding off disgust with our elites. In our version we had a female leader and an amateur at politics, which had made her both easier to pull apart and much harder, since Pauline’s People, despite everything, admired her refusal to abide by the rules and her dogged insistence on coming back for more. Surely it was the duty of the elites to solve the causes of Hansonism, because Hanson was only the symptom, not the disease. After all the anger and pain of Hansonism, that was the lesson I felt I’d learned from her campaign. Pauline’s People felt they no longer understood their society and what it was for, and many of them felt they were being told they no longer belonged to it. They couldn’t make head or tail of the political discourse, and no one could explain it to them or even wanted to, let alone help them join the brave new world their elites insisted was inevitable.”
So what could the media do to assist in restoring a real national conversation, and to heal the misunderstandings and resentments in our society? We all expect our politicians to adjust, but what about us?
Lets start with election campaigns. What on earth do we think were doing thinking we’ve covered a campaign if we follow around the leaders and try and find a gaffe in their manipulative image making? That process not only locks out voters, it is more and more irrelevant to them.
Nicolas Rothwell’s reports in the Australian during the 1998 campaign show the way ahead. He travelled the country talking to all sorts of people, and tried to distill themes and moods from those grassroots contacts. The standard gambit of going to an electorate for a day or two and reporting it is now drab and meaningless, and as formulaic, as most other election coverage. We really do have to connect with reality, and that takes time and effort.
I’d like to see the Herald send a reporter to two marginal seats – one in the city and one in the country – for the whole campaign. They would live there, get the daily direct mail, get to know the candidates and the electorate, and file daily reports. The reporters would thus be actually experiencing the campaign on the ground, and their position would also make them ideally placed to see what both parties actually saw as the main issues on the ground. Readers would get to know the main grassroots players quite intimately, as well as the lives of their voters. Reporters would also, like the voters, be on the outside looking in when the leaders road shows visited, and be able to judge far more accurately their impact where it countson the ground.
Between elections, I’d like to see specialist reporters in the press gallery spend at least three months a year observing how their specialties play out on the ground. Immigration specialists could visit immigration centres for example, education reporters schools and universities, health reporters public and private hospitals. Now, we have a separation of abstract policy and the politics of it in Canberra, from the working realities covered by others, often without the big picture policy expertise. We need to connect policy and practice much more directly.
More radically, I think there’s place for reporters to live for extended periods away from their middle-class lives. After the election, my editor gave me permission to live in Bourke for three months. The idea was to observe and report black-white relations and the difficulties and challenges of life in the country first-hand, I backed out of the plan when One Nation started a regular smear campaign against me on their website, for fear that I might be targeted for abuse, but I hope to try such an experiment sometime. One of the common complaints of political reporters, including myself, is that many grassroots groups cant give us a useable quote quickly, but seek time to discuss the matter between themselves. I am starting to think that instead of constantly demanding that real people meet our demands, it might be time for us to reach out and adjust to the way they operate.
There is also an urgent need for the media to make itself accountable. We spend so much time enforcing accountability on other establishment institutions; it is becoming increasingly untenable that our own house is in total disorder. Heaven forbid that the State regulate our behaviour, but really, surely we have an obligation to do so ourselves, if only to begin to restore our credibility with readers.
The Herald is now finalising a code of ethics, written by a committee of journalists, which will be published in the paper. The method of reader complaint is still under discussion, but I would like to see us appoint an ombudsman modelled on that position in the Washington Post, with regular columns from him or her responding to complaints and suggestions.
I also believe that the days when editors could refuse to report the media, its excesses, and the publics concerns with its behaviour on the basis that all this is just navel gazing are nearing an end. The public is well aware that the media is not an impartial observer, but a major player. They want to know how the game works, and to critique it. To me, there is no excuse for the Herald not to have its version of Media Watch, and I am amazed that the Australians media magazine has not taken the plunge. I would like to see the Herald solicit readers queries, and complaints about media behaviour, and reply to them in print. This step alone would help force us to examine ourselves, as well as help convince readers that we exist for them. If the public have faith in us, they will support us when our freedoms face erosion. If they dont, the State will find it much easier to constrain us.
At the press council, a complainant usually faces a newspaper executive with no knowledge of the story in dispute, who fudges and prevaricates in arrogant fashion. This only adds to the public perception that the media is a faceless octopus. I would like to see the reporter front instead, and engage with the reader. Having done this myself late last year, I found that the public members of the council had little or no idea of the pressures or constraints faced by a journalist, or the politicians codes it is the political reporters job to deconstruct. Although the complainant lost his case, we shook hands at the end of it, and he was satisfied both that he had a fair hearing, and that the reporter was a human being who wanted to communicate with him.
In its review of my book, The Courier-Mail said it should not have been written. According to the paper, the book showed that I had lost objectivity, whatever that is, and had become too close to my subjectas if the purpose of political journalism was not to get as close as the politician will allow. Is telling the truth about how journalism was practised on the campaign so frightening that it should be censored? Aren’t Australians allowed to look each other in the eye any more?
There is much in my behavior in the campaign to be critiqued, and many journalists will profoundly disagree with my approach. But surely, if the book does create a debate on how journalism should be practised, that can only be a good thing. The time has come for journalists to abandon their raincoats of self-protection – the myth of objectivity for example – which serve only to stop debate in its tracks without engagement with the realities of journalism. Only if we are honest with ourselves and our readers can we adjust to the demands of the new millennium.
But has there been a real debate since the 1998 federal election? I believe that most mainstream media is still not listening, either to its chattering classes or its redneck readerships. Both groups now, on several fronts, have the same concerns, but the media is not seeing the significance of this, let alone reporting it.
There are two recent examples. This year, the Coalition and Labor did a cosy little deal to pass a law giving the prime minister the power to call out the troops to any State or Territory, without their request or even permission. No cause for such action was stated, so industrial disputes and civilian protests were included. Troops were given the right to search and seize, block off streets, and even shoot to kill.
The issue created not a ripple in the Canberra press gallery. My attention was drawn to the story when I began receiving emails from readers of my Herald online column setting out the proposed law and asking how this could possibly be true?
Herald reporter Toni OLoughlin was interested, and began reporting the story. We were the only major newspaper to do so. Lo and behold, our readers were outraged, and the mail flooded in. John Laws asked Greens senator Bob Brown – who was running a sophisticated one-person campaign to amend the laws – onto his program for the first time. It was incredible, the John and Bob show. Laws even invited Brown back soon after, and publicly endorsed Brown’s stand. Lo and behold, the sole One Nation senator, Len Harris, backed Brown all the way. The far Left and far Right were as one, and a whole lot of people in the middle agreed with them.
Grassroots feeling drove this story and deeply embarrassed the Labor Party, which was forced (partly due to union pressure) to reverse its public support for the bill and seek amendments.
The second example concerns the Melbourne protests outside the World Economic Forum. The unions were scared they would be implicated in violence and lose public support, but marched anyway. Peter Reith predicted union violence in the streets. There was none. What will the Hansonites make of thisthe horrible unionists as core supporters of civilising economic globalisation? Who will the Hansoiites relate to in this battle for the streets of Melbourne? My guess is the protesters.
Who organised these protests? Young people with all sorts of wild and woolly causes, operating outside the mainstream media. And what did the baby-boomer writers of the major papers do? Screamed cheap abuse at their successors, who have emulated the protest culture of the 1960s in a much less classist way. Sure, the only thing that unites the protesters is an emotional antipathy to the effects of economic globalisation. Just like the Hansonites. But that emotion is powerful, and is forcing the rich-list in world capital to listen, and to adjust. We must report this matter without malice or condension to remain relevant.
Two years on from Hansons defeat, the media has got much better at reporting issues of importance to country people, but is still just as blind to some of the needs and concerns of its readers. The identity of our nation is being reshaped as we speak, and write. Our job is to understand and report these changes. Lets start doing it.