Pauline Hanson - Australia's Trump?

Besides the vibrantly-coloured hair, Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson share other equally remarkable traits. Both the American and the Australian politician want cuts to immigration to protect the economic and community well-being of their nation’s citizens. Both are disruptors of politics-as-usual. Both oppose factory-shuttering, job-exporting, free-trade globalisation. Both had stunning political success in 2016 (Trump elected President, Hanson and her One Nation party winning five crucial balance-of-power Senate seats). And both, of course, are shunned by ‘respectable’ opinion as ‘far-right’, ‘racist’ populists.

A new political biography of Hanson (PLEASE EXPLAIN: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Pauline Hanson, by Anna Broinowski) demonstrates how Hanson attracts support from a segment of the disaffected, traditional, hard-working, taxpaying, Anglo-Australian working class in Australia’s economically-hammered regional towns and outer suburbs, including (disconcertingly to Hanson’s ‘anti-racism’ detractors), many fully-assimilated migrants who have embraced the Australian way of life.

Hanson entered politics in the mid-1990s to speak up for these forgotten victims of an Australia of good, unionised jobs and wages, law and order and shared cultural values being taken from them by lax trade and people borders which has seen Australia flooded with cheap and shoddy imported goods and unassimilable cheap-labour migrants and ‘refugees’ overburdening hospitals, schools and other services and infrastructure.

Dumped as their election candidate by the conservative Liberal Party because of her outspoken criticism of ‘reverse racism’ (the favourable treatment of Aborigines when it comes to government funding, welfare benefits, criminal justice, land ownership, etc.), Hanson, nevertheless, went on to win as an independent in 1996 and One Nation thrived electorally.

This panicked the establishment parties and the racism-obsessed Left, both of which went into robotic ‘Must Destroy’ mode through street violence and a clandestine campaign to cruel Hanson’s electoral pitch through hostile preference voting tickets, vicious media denigration, a crippling legal case for alleged electoral fraud (banging up Hanson for eleven weeks in jail in 2003 before she was freed on appeal) and an astute co-opting of some of Hanson’s key policies (‘refugee’ boat turnbacks and offshore detention).

Severe damage had been sustained, however, and Hanson led a political half-life as a serial election-losing candidate before roaring back into life in 2016. One Nation is currently polling at around 9-10% nationally (14% in Hanson’s home state of Queensland), giving her considerable parliamentary legislative leverage.

The core of the politically fearless Hanson’s success has been that of Trump’s – as Hanson put it of Trump, he was ‘saying things that the public out there are frightened to say, but they agree with’, especially on immigration, Islam and the fetishisation of black and minority ethnic identity groups. Like Hanson’s political counterparts in the US and Europe, there is much greater support amongst the general population for these politicians’ specific policies than for the politician, or their party, themselves:

Hanson’s biographer, however, is not a supporter of her subject and her book swiftly degenerates into vitriolic, Social Justice Warrior abuse and name-calling, the predictable, head-in-the-sand response to the fracturing of the dominant multiculturalist ideology by the reality of the three I’s - immigration, Islam and identity politics.

Like Trump, Hanson may not be the most verbally fluent advocate for immigration restriction but if mangled grammar is the price to be paid for untangling the immigration policy mess, if syntactical incorrectness is the price to be paid for some sanity-restoring political incorrectness, then an increasing number of Australians are more than happy to pay that price.