PLEASE EXPLAIN: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Pauline Hanson
ANNA BROINOWSKI
Viking/Penguin, 2017, 312 pages
Besides the vibrantly-coloured hair, Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson share other equally remarkable traits. Both the American and the Australian politician want drastic cuts to immigration to protect the jobs, community well-being and safety of their nation’s citizens. 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.
Anna Broinowski’s new political biography of Hanson (PLEASE EXPLAIN: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Pauline Hanson) claims to try to “understand and engage in debate” with the Hanson phenomenon in Australia. The odds are long, however, as Broinowski (a documentary film-maker for the multicultural, state-owned SBS television station) declares, with increasing stridency, her ‘Diversity’-besotted liking for ‘refugees’, for Asian, African and Arab immigrants, for Aborigines, and for immigration-related progressive causes (super-sized servings of social welfare, easy on the crime and punishment).
Despite initially developing an “oddly affectionate relationship” with her subject, Broinowski soon degenerates into orthodox, and vitriolic, Social Justice Warrior abuse and name-calling – Hanson is a ‘racist’, a ‘bigot’, a ‘blatant Islamophobe’, a dangerous demagogue of the ‘extreme right’ (and we all know who dwells there, don’t we – indeed, Broinowski manages to get in one obligatory ‘Hitler’ reference in relation to Hanson).
Broinowski, a “tertiary-educated, inner-city liberal”, fails utterly to see the world through the eyes of Hanson (Australian-born battler, seven-day-a-week fish and chip shop owner, early school leaver) and the dedicated supporters she attracts from her social base – the disaffected, traditional, Anglo-Australian working class in the economically-hammered regional towns and outer suburbs, the age pensioners doing it tough after a lifetime of taxpaying and work, even (disconcertingly to her opponents) many fully-assimilated migrants who have embraced the Australian way of life and its obligations.
Their land of good, unionised jobs and wages, law and order and shared cultural values has been taken from them by globalisation - the import of cheap-labour immigrants, the import of tariff-free, cheap and shoddy overseas-manufactured goods, the fetishisation of multiculturalism in the wake of tidal surges of unassimilable migrants and ‘refugees’ congregating in their ethnic (and often crime-ridden) ghettos yet overburdening hospital, school and other government services.
Hanson entered politics to speak up for these forgotten and ignored victims of an older and more cohesive social order (what Broinowski disparages as an anachronistic, 1950s white Anglo-Australian culture). The conservative Liberal Party which Hanson joined in 1995, however, showed that that party was as enfeebled by vote-seeking political correctness as its Labor Party counterpart when it disendorsed Hanson as their parliamentary candidate for the 1996 federal election 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, however, with significant support from blue-collar workers, spectacularly went on to win as an independent, taking a seat that had been held by the Labor Party for 37 years Two years later, her One Nation party stormed the Queensland state parliament winning 11 seats (of a total of 89) in the 1998 state election, busting the two-party, Liberal/Labor political duopoly, whilst One Nation grew to 18,000 members in 350 branches nationwide.
This almightily panicked the establishment parties, and the activist, racism-obsessed Left, both of which went into robotic ‘Must Destroy’ mode. The violent street enforcers of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ showed none of the former quality towards the latter when it came to political views which diverged from the ‘anti-racist’ Left’s. They undemocratically shut down One Nation meetings, despite that party’s parliamentary votes attracting many multiples of anything ever achieved at the ballot box by their Leftist intimidators.
The establishment political class, meanwhile, launched and funded a clandestine campaign to cruel Hanson’s electoral pitch through hostile preference voting tickets, vicious media denigration and a crippling, five year legal case alleging that Hanson had fraudulently registered One Nation and dishonestly claimed half a million dollars in taxpayer-funded, government electoral reimbursements.
Hanson spent eleven weeks in jail in 2003 before being freed on appeal but the damage had been done and, dogged by internal divisions in the amateur party, some genuinely loopy candidates, and an astute Liberal Prime Minister co-opting some of Hanson’s key policies (‘refugee’ boat turnbacks and offshore detention), Hanson led a political half-life as a serial election-losing candidate.
Until 2016, that is, when she roared back into life, winning 9% of the Senate vote in her home state (and 5% of the national vote), giving her considerable power to leverage government legislation towards more stringent citizenship tests, de-biasing the state-owned and multicultural-compliant national media corporations, freeing up Islamic counter-terrorism powers against PC-hobbled civil liberties constraints, etc.
The core of Hanson’s success was the same as that of Trump’s success. As Hanson put it of Trump, he was ‘saying things that the public out there are frightened to say, but they agree with’ viz way too much immigration, the Islamicisation of Western societies and the cultural eclipse of the traditional white population by fawned-over black and minority ethnic identity groups (whilst national identity was consigned to a dark, even fascistic, political place). As one Hanson voter put it, her backers love Pauline because ‘she’s our voice’.
The politically fearless Hanson expresses, for example, popular support for a total ban on Muslim immigration to Australia (as do 49% of Australians http://www.essentialvision.com.au/ban-on-muslim-immigration). She speaks against the elites and their privileging of refugees, migrants and Indigenous Australians over ‘ordinary Australians’. She wants economic protectionism against the erosion of local jobs and industry after decades of globalisation and failed, ‘trickle down’ economics. She believes in individual responsibility, self-reliance, hard work and other terrible, reactionary, 1950s values, not welfare dependency and government hand-outs to bludgers, especially Johnny-Come-Lately foreign moochers, paid for by taxpayers.
Calling for a ban on the full-body burqa in public (as France, Belgium, Italy and, indeed, Muslim Malaysia, have instituted), Hanson entered the parliamentary Senate chamber in August disguised under full Islamic regalia, ostensibly to highlight the security risk that the hideous bin-liner poses (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/muslim-leaders-worried-about-attacks-after-hanson-stunt/news-story/d2f24a63e1b5facef8d2ab835b64503d) but also unavoidably dramatising the enforced self-effacement and subjugation of women under Islam. As with many of Hanson’s policies on immigration-restriction, the noisiest response came from the PC minority (mass multicultural meltdown, the disgust of the ‘Diverse’ and the outrage of the ‘Other’) but there was widespread popular support (56% support for a burqa ban, ReachTEL poll ).
Broinowski notes the popular grievances with lax people and trade borders but prefers not to confer any legitimacy on them. She prefers the easy multiculturalist default analysis of identity, not class, politics and is comfortably on side with the (deceased) Australian liberal art critic, Robert Hughes, who called Hanson’s political utterances nothing but ‘the burps and farts from the deep gut of Australian racism’.
As Hanson reminded her supporters, however, when she is called a racist and bigot (or, at best, naïve and misinformed), or condescendingly dismissed as an ‘economic simpleton’, ‘it is not just me of whom they speak’ but an insult to all her supporters and believers in a nation which looks after its citizens first, on the basis of ‘fairness and equality for all Australians’ with no special favours for any identity groups (hence the party’s name, One Nation).
Hanson’s elite abusers include Broinowski who finds Hanson’s political resurrection ‘horrific’ and ‘frightening’, and who is ‘repulsed’ by Hanson’s popular support. Broinowski considers Hanson’s views on Muslim immigration (Muslims ‘bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own’ and ‘why aren’t the Muslim countries taking Muslim refugees’) to be particularly opprobrious, an “irrational hotchpotch of anecdote, hyperbole and myopic generalisation”. Apparently, Muslim terrorism is not ‘frightening’ enough, or FGM ‘horrific’ enough, or other Islamic social pathologies (gay-bashing, Jew-hatred, free speech assaults, etc.) ‘repulsive’ enough to register as debits in Broinowski’s multiculturalist ledger.
Sticking to emotional clichés about persecuted Muslim kiddies (doe-eyed, yet with beards!) and Nobel-material neurosurgeons fleeing war and being ‘punished’ by Australia in remote islands, Broinowski’s own collection of “anecdote, hyperbole and myopic generalisation” is as fine as any she unjustly imputes to her biographical quarry. Her left-liberal, multiculturalist ideology remains unexamined despite the mounting evidence of immigration-related disasters.
Hanson is now so embedded in the political mainstream, says a distraught Broinowski, that she is now not offensive enough to shout down as she was in the late 1990s. Broinowski’s colleagues in the multi-culti SBS media editing suites are full of “silent despair” at Hanson’s 2016 return. Hanson’s new-found acceptance by the establishment is partly a result of political opportunism – the mainstream parties now desperately need Hanson’s votes in parliament to usher through or block legislation – but the underlying reason, as Broinowski herself notes, is that it is “Australia, itself, which has changed”. Broinowski, however, laments the fracturing and fraying 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-salvaging political incorrectness, then an increasing number of Australians are more than happy to pay it.