Pauline Hanson: One Nation & The Politics of Race

David Marr, journalist, author and political & social commentator, is the author (most recently) of Quarterly Essay’s The White Queen – One Nation and The Politics of Race. As Marr writes, “This woman went to prison, danced the cha-cha on national television for a couple of years, and failed so often at the ballot box she became a running joke. But the truth is she never left us.” To elaborate on just what makes One Nation and Pauline Hanson tick, David Marr addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 3 May 2017.

PAULINE HANSON: ONE NATION & THE POLITICS OF RACE

 DAVID MARR

What does Pauline Hanson mean? She is both remarkably present and remarkably blank. From the moment she reappeared last year, commentators everywhere were telling us exactly what it meant that Pauline Hanson was back again and what she meant and what she’s going to mean for Australian political life. I was reading and watching all of this thinking all over again how remarkable it is to see so many political commentators – unlike Gerard and me – projecting onto events meanings they dearly wish to find.

One of the delicious pleasures of Hanson’s return is to listen to the language of those who see her as the latest reason why all progressive politics must cease. These conservatives talk in absolutely Marxist terms about the innate wisdom of the working men and women of Australia who mustn’t be upset by inner city progressives trying to force their ideas on them lest they rise up and, with Pauline at their head, sweep us all away.

Pauline Hanson is a woman of remarkable vanity who sees herself part of a world movement: Brexit, Trump, Hanson. In my view this is rubbish – an interesting brand of rubbish, but essentially rubbish.

I’ve spent the last few days reading Shattered, the account of Hilary Clinton’s campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. All through its pages are details that make you think, “Ah yes, that applies to Pauline; that’s something that applies here.” Take the educational levels of Trump’s followers: like hers, they have never been near a university. And the same is true of those who backed Brexit. Everywhere there are details in common: a vengeful hatred of government, distaste for immigration, low education levels and, always, this depthless nostalgia for a country that is gone.

It’s not that Australians want this country to be great again. We think that’s a risible notion. Hanson and her followers want to make Australia white again. They yearn for the familiar and for lost simplicity. We underestimate the extent to which deeply conservative minds are shaped by the appeal of simplicity – a wish to go back to a world that is easier to understand, that does not contain strange and disturbing new elements. That is perhaps the most important part of the Pauline Hanson experience.

Researchers conducting focus groups tell me voters talk warmly all the time about the old days. What distinguishes One Nation voters is that, when asked, they say they would really like to go back there despite everything. And when pressed further to describe the Australia they want to return to, they can’t. They seem to have in their minds an image of the country as it was not even in their own time but in some imagined point in their parents’ lives.

So much of the more profound beliefs of the One Nation voter are like this: not drawn from personal experience. They’re projections, they’re fears, they’re imagined experiences. The same is true for Trump voters and those who want Britain out of Europe. Yes, there are many similarities. But Hanson doesn’t have the numbers.

The Brexit vote was 53 per cent. In the ordinary course of events, we would prefer the President of the United States to win a majority of votes cast but he did get 46 per cent. Marine Le Pen, in the first round of voting in France, got 22 per cent. Hanson is running at about 10 per cent. Now that’s quite a gap. A figure who can get 46 per cent and a figure who can get 10 per cent are different species. And they are operating in different countries.

Now, 10 per cent of a system which has preferential voting is powerful. You can exert a lot of leverage with 10 per cent and she does. But it’s only 10 per cent. It’s incredibly important not to pretend that she musters 30 or 40 or 46 per cent. She doesn’t because we are a different country. We are a different place. We have different conditions here and we have different views.

This brings me back to an issue that I have been pursuing in one way or another ever since I’ve been a journalist: the gap between this country and this country’s politics. Between the generosity of Australia and the meanness of its politics – particularly race politics.

Take the wonderful figures on Australian attitudes to immigration that have come out over for the last seven or eight years since the Scanlon Foundation has been at work. Contrast them with the harshness of the politics of immigration, a harshness that has been finding fresh expressions even in the last few weeks. Seventy per cent of Australians tell the Scanlon people they are happy with the enormous numbers of immigrants coming to this country every year. By contrast, in the United Kingdom 70 per cent are hostile to the numbers coming into Britain. It’s a direct flip.

The fundamental argument of my essay is that Pauline Hanson is one of us. She is the product of our system. She has to be understood in our terms and dealt with on our terms. We have to face the fact that Pauline is cultivating the race vote in this country and recognise – with some relief – that while not insignificant, the race vote here is not as high as it is in the US, Britain and France. We don’t have to be afraid of Hanson. She is sitting on 10 per cent.

Nobody ever admits they’re racist. Pauline says she’s not. But she is. Her climb back to power began in 2006 when she stopped putting the boot into Aborigines and began attacking Muslims instead. Although everybody remembers her claiming in the old days that we were in danger of being swamped by Asians, what really took her to parliament in 1996 was an antipathy to Aborigines. And you can’t really run that anymore. So Pauline switched to Muslims. There is a strange respectability about attacking Muslims that no longer attaches to attacking Aborigines or Asians. I cannot see why we don’t face this bluntly.

Of course, it’s not enough just to name her as a racist. That’s barely a start. But I can’t see the point of us flinching from that reality. I would call that political correctness – the unwillingness to be candid about the reality that you’re facing because it’s very difficult to speak out. But it’s got to be faced even if it’s hard for political parties to do. They tell me they fear attacking her as a racist because hers are instincts that many of their own voters share. They say they have to attack her in ways that won’t actually recruit for her. A very subtle strategy is required. But I can’t see any benefit in not facing the truth: she is a racist playing race politics.

I’m not saying anything particularly remarkable when I argue that the art of politics is the art of straddling. Parties have to straddle constituencies, some of which are directly at each other’s throats. Leaders have to find ways of keeping groups of people together who are deeply dissimilar. The Coalition has been tempted to try to clean up the mess that has emerged of little parties on the far right by playing to the race vote, by mucking around with Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, while their bigger constituency sits around and says, “What on earth is happening here?”

The future of the Liberal Party lies in winning over as many people as it possibly can from the naturally conservative communities of Chinese and Indians who have come to this country. They are entrepreneurs. They’ve come here because they’ve got skills. They are natural supporters of the Liberal Party. And what is the Coalition doing? Playing to the far right. Playing to a racist minority, playing to the mess of little parties out there.

The political professionals are not particularly worried by her. What terrifies them is the breakdown of the two-party system in Australia. Hanson they regard as temporary. What they find particularly terrifying is the notion that the two-party split in Australia is falling apart. This is not, remotely, an adequate response to a woman whose politics taint this country.

The Coalition deal with Hanson in Western Australia was a dreadful deal for the Coalition to strike. Giving preferences to One Nation has proved diabolical for the Liberal Party in the past. Quoting Paul Kelly, I say that a third of the Liberal voters of Brisbane deserted the Liberal Party in the state elections in 1998 in disgust that a deal had been done with One Nation. Disgust was a more powerful emotion in the electorate in those days.

But the deal done in the West this year again damaged the Liberals – and was bad for One Nation. It exposed Hanson as a chancer. I feel Hanson has gone off the boil since Western Australia – because she seemed to be just another politician.

The core argument of my essay is that Hanson is ours, and we have to find a way of dealing with her on our own terms. We’ve got to be clear who she is. We must dismiss irrelevant foreign comparisons. We have to acknowledge her constituency has been with us ever since Australia was Australia. It shifts and changes, it grows, it waxes and wanes but it is always going to be here. Hanson has not created this constituency but for the moment she has a kind of supernova power of attracting people towards her.

In many ways, she represents an ordinary wish for change amongst voters who are deeply pissed off with government and gloomy about immigration. Her people are not representatives of a ruined generation as they are in America, Britain and Europe. We got through the GFC fine. It did not strip a whole cohort of the population of their property. Hers is not the vote of a ruined generation. Hansonites don’t come from the rustbelt. Half the One Nation vote comes from the cities – big cities.

But it is the vote of a generation that is more used to an economy hedged about with tariffs and government assistance. There’s no doubt Hanson’s voters want tariffs. Dealing with her means selling the benefits of free trade. But I also want her called out for her racism because making compacts with her on a race basis does this country harm. It damages this country.

The Coalition and Labor wonder why 30 per cent of the electorate is not voting for them. Perhaps the way they deal with race has a something to do with this where the instincts of politics are so much grimmer than the instincts of the country itself. Our politicians just seem to be representing so much of a time, another country, which is not ours. It’s the country of politics, not Australia. And that I suppose is the fundamental subject of nearly everything I write.