Hanson and the 'battlers'
By Peter Boyle
The big business media paint Hanson as a "battler" championing the interest of other "battlers". This is a false picture. Hanson is small business person (one of the wealthier ones), and many of her most passionate supporters come from the same background.
Yet the future of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party depends on how much support it can win in the urban working class. So far, when she has held meetings in the larger cities, her opponents have far outnumbered her supporters.
The rural right didn't succeed with the Joh for Canberra push because it failed to break from its rural heartland. But politics has moved on since then. Every year of cutbacks, privatisation and "jobless growth" creates a potentially larger audience for Hanson's white nationalism in the urban working class.
She also has support among small farmers and small business operators, who, like workers, are victims of the capitalist neo-liberal offensive which began in the early 1970s in a concerted effort to pass the consequences of economic crisis on to these sections of society.
There is still a bigger audience for Hanson's politics in regional cities and rural towns than in the capital cities where most people live in Australia. First, racism is more deeply entrenched in rural areas, reflecting the ideological impact of white settlement and Aboriginal dispossession as well as general rural backwardness.
According to one survey, nearly 80% of rural Queenslanders and 90% of rural Territorians consider Aborigines "well looked after". Far right groups, like the League of Rights, have long operated in rural Australia.
Secondly, the neo-liberal offensive has distributed unemployment and poverty unevenly. Studies show clear regional concentrations of stagnation, much of it centred on smaller towns, thus adding to the pain and insecurity of small farmers and former small farmers driven off the land.
Cuts to government services and "rationalisation" of banking and other private services have also impacted more dramatically in smaller towns.
The regionalisation of unemployment and poverty tends to stir up a reactionary mood in the middle class, upper working class and retired workers in these areas. Hanson's strong support in the Gold Coast is an example.
How much political support One Nation will find in the working class is not yet decided. The Australian labour movement has a racist legacy, based on the relatively privileged position of workers in imperialist countries. The white Australia policy, economic nationalism and protectionism were ideological cornerstones of Laborism and Australian politics for decades.
Now the new Labor-Coalition consensus is support for neo-liberal "reform" — privatisation, deregulation and cuts to social spending, justified as an inevitable response to an objective process called "globalisation".
There is growing resentment at this new political consensus, in the first instance expressed as a desire to return to the old Labor-Coalition consensus.
According to the Australian Electoral Study conducted by Clive Bean (ANU) and Ian McAllister (Manchester University), the percentage of voters who identify with the major parties dropped from 91% in 1987 to 78% in 1996. Only 52% of voters haven't shifted their party allegiances in this period.
Hoping to ride this resentment, Hanson has been calling for greater tariff protectionism.
While the older generation of white workers was strongly influenced by racist Laborism, the progressive political and social movements since the 1960s have done a lot to break down racist ideology. There is now also a clear generational divide on this issue, in the working class and in the population as a whole.
Even crude racists like Hanson still have to be defensive today and claim that they are "not racist, but ..."
The increasingly multiracial nature of the working class in the bigger cities helps as well. Because of the extremely discriminatory immigration policy that operated until the late '60s and because recent migrants have been shunted into the worst jobs, the industrial working class is more multiracial than other sections of the working class.
Hanson's support in the working class would be a lot weaker if the union movement was led by people willing to fight for workers' rights and actively oppose racism.
So far, the union movement has only made a token effort. The demonstrations against Hanson's meetings have been organised without the active support of the union movement. In Newcastle, the Trades and Labour Council explicitly opposed organising a protest.
Most unions have preferred to support tightly controlled expressions of "tolerance" and "cultural diversity". This allows them to avoid coming behind a movement that might oppose the racist policies of the Howard government that began under Labor (such as limits on native title and attacks on refugee rights).
Most union bureaucrats also haven't got the guts to argue before their members that Hanson is wrong in saying that the unions have not defended their members' interests — because she has a point! They'd have to admit that they were wrong to subjugate their members' interests to those of the previous Labor government.
Further, to differentiate themselves from Hanson, the union leaderships will have to drop their economic nationalist outlook (which is intrinsically racist) and embrace a class and internationalist outlook.
It is telling that union leaderships in Newcastle's BHP steelworks, facing threats to thousands of jobs, haven't come up with different "solutions" to those put forward by Hanson. Until the union leaderships give up their tradition of supporting Australian capitalists and instead defend all workers, they will be helping to drive some workers into the hands of Hanson's One Nation party.
The Hanson phenomenon shows we live in increasingly desperate times. People are looking for alternatives to the bipartisan commitment to neo-liberal reform. If they don't find them on the left, they may go to the right.