How can Hansonism be destroyed?

February 21, 2001
Issue 

BY ALISON DELLIT

The headlines on February 12 said it all: "Lazarus in a floral frock", "One Nation's king hit" and "Hanson's One Nation on the loose again". Following One Nation's 9.6% showing in the Western Australian elections on February 10, the big-business media has declared Pauline Hanson back in town.

Of course, it was the same media that declared her dead and buried 18 months ago in a collective spate of wishful thinking. As most media commentators have admitted rather woefully this week, the vote for Hanson's One Nation Party was not significantly smaller in the last WA elections. One Nation had more impact on the formation of government this time because of a wilder preference distribution.

This is not to underestimate the significance of the result. There are not many political parties which can be ceremonially buried by the capitalist media, then face the mass resignation of all their sitting MPs in one state, suffer electoral deregistration and the desertion of two of their most prominent supporters and actually increase their vote in the next elections.

To those who prematurely declared her politically dead, Hanson's reappearance from the ashes must indeed seem akin to the rise of Lazarus. However, the explanation for Hanson's enduring popularity is much more prosaic. The political conditions that paved the way for her rise have not changed, if anything they have intensified.

The combined attempt of the big-business media and the two main capitalist parties to politically destroy Hanson by legal manoeuvring and media invisibility have failed dismally because these actions have not overcome the frustration and disenfranchisement of her supporters.

Hanson came to prominence in 1996 as a disaffected Liberal Party candidate with a bagful of racist and protectionist arguments. Her enthusiastic embracing of "wedge" politics, particularly the scapegoating of Aborigines and Asian immigrants, ensured her a regular run of press at a time when both the establishment media and the Howard government sought to increase support for immigration cuts and attacks on Aboriginal land rights.

But Hanson's support was always more extensive than just the "racist redneck factor". In a survey published in the June 6-7, 1998 Bulletin magazine, only 24% of One Nation supporters indicated their support was based on Hanson's anti-immigration or anti-Aborigine policies. The majority cited instead her support for protectionism and her anti-politician image.

The political space for Hansonism was created by the adoption of pro-corporate "economic rationalist" policies (more accurately referred to in the rest of the world as "neo-liberalism") by all the major political parties. These policies — cuts in expenditure on social services (and increased business subsidies), privatisation of public industries and deregulation of agricultural production — are aimed at boosting the profits of the big corporations and banks, at the expense of working people, including small proprietors.

Decreased spending on and privatisation of key government services has hit hardest in rural areas where services are least profitable to provide. Banking services, schools and hospitals have disappeared from many local areas entirely.

Hanson's initial support base came from frustrated small farmers and regional business operators, mostly former National Party voters, too small or too unsuccessful to have profited under the "economic rationalist" onslaught. Her verbal attacks on the banks, mainstream politicians and unions, combined with rabid scapegoating of Aborigines and migrants acted like a lightening rod to a constituency deserted by conventional conservative politics.

Unfortunately, her support base did not remain limited to disgruntled small proprietors. In the absence of any prominent left-wing opposition to "economic rationalism", Hanson has also attracted elements of the white working class angry about worsening services, falling wages and rising unemployment.

That Hanson was able to gain a hearing among this section of the population is due in no small part to the strategy pursued by the ALP in government and supported by the unions. The twin government policies of multiculturalism and reconciliation focused on involving immigrant and indigenous "leaders" in endless negotiations, and the promotion of "culture" over exposing and fighting the real causes of Aborigines' and non-English-speaking immigrants' social disadvantages.

As this disadvantage has continued, this strategy has failed to combat racist ideas in the white population. This provided Hanson with fertile ground to spew her racist venom onto.

More importantly however, neither ALP politicians or the Laborite union officialdom has posed any opposition to "economic rationalist" policies. During the Hawke and Keating governments, the ALP managed the same rightward shift that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were associated with overseas, embracing privatisation, the commercialisation of education and industry deregulation.

The ALP's love affair with neo-liberal economic policies diminished the difference between the two major parties such they are widely seen as part of the same pro-corporate establishment and serving the same big-business interests.

Large numbers of voters have become frustrated with the lack of real alternatives to more social cuts, and worsening incomes. Unable to express their opposition through the capitalist two-party system, many have felt themselves electorally disenfranchised.

In the face of the Liberal-Labor "economic rationalist" consensus, Hanson has provided a focus for much of the popular frustration with mainstream politics.

Hanson's racist scapegoating of Aborigines and migrants pander to the same divisions within the working class that the Howard government is at pains to exploit. Her mostly incoherent economic policies are designed to benefit small business, at the expense of workers.

But to her supporters, the fact that One Nation has no coherent policies is irrelevant. Pauline Hanson has become a symbol of conservative revolt against neo-liberal economics. As writer Bob Ellis put it following the WA state election, "Voting for Hanson is road rage against economic rationalism".

It is Hanson's importance as a symbol of frustration with "economic rationalism" that has guaranteed her political survival over the last two years. She is capable of weathering any number of scandals and policy reversals because she is viewed by her supporters as a modern day Evita, championing the "little people" against the establishment. Their hatred of the mainstream parties is so intense that they will forgive her any sin, as long as she is perceived to be sticking up for them.

In the wake of the February 10 WA election, capitalist media commentators have finally begun to acknowledge the source of Hanson's popularity. As ABC election commentator Antony Green put it: "It's very hard to know what the electorate is thinking at the moment. You've got the suspicion that they don't really like the governments they've got, and they're prepared to just toss them out and they don't care who gets in as a replacement."

Hanson is acutely conscious of her status as a symbol of discontent. She has shown herself capable of changing her rhetoric to increase her support. Campaigning in both the WA and Queensland elections, she reduced her staple racist rhetoric in favour of slamming dairy deregulation, petrol prices and the GST. She also came out in opposition to individual workplace agreements despite a previously harsh stance on unions.

The racism is still there. However, it has taken a back seat to general anti-National Party rhetoric that focuses on "reducing the pain of the battlers".

This shift in tack should be seen as a victory for the anti-racist movement. Hanson's racism was initially welcomed with open arms by the Howard government, which used it to attack "political correctness" and then to implement some of her racist policies. But eventually her overt racism proved a liability for the government as it threatened to spark a mass response that might have challenged the whole of the government agenda.

When hundreds of people demonstrated outside every meeting Hanson spoke at, Coalition ministers started to openly condemn Hanson's racism. In 1998, when tens of thousands of high school students organised by the socialist youth group Resistance walked out of school and took to the streets in protest, the Liberals announced a preference swap deal that amounted to an electoral lockout to "destroy" One Nation.

These demonstrations had a real effect. They forced Hanson off the political scene for a while, and damaged the political value of the race card for her. They have contributed to a situation where the Liberals are under enormous pressure to limit their own racist rhetoric.

The last thing federal Coalition PM John Howard wants right now is the re-emergence of Hanson as prominent bigot to draw attention to his racist policies. This is one reason that the media has chosen to give little publicity to Hanson's racism since the WA election.

The movement against racism forced Hanson to retreat a little, for a while. But to destroy her, it is necessary to cut her base of support away. This requires posing alternatives to neo-liberalism and practical solutions to the hopelessness that Hanson feeds off.

The emergence of a strong anti-corporate movement through the mass protest against corporate tyranny outside the World Economic Forum in Melbourne last September provides the basis to do this.

The radical left forces which organised the S11 protest action have regrouped around the project of building an anti-corporate strike and stock-exchange blockade on May 1.

The M1 organising collectives need to put forward internationalist solutions to neo-liberalism, linking "local" examples of corporate control over government policy such as privatisation and deregulation to "global" examples, such as the increasing powers of the World Trade Organisation. They raise the need for political solidarity with all those suffering under neo-liberalism as an alternative to divisive racism.

The left-wing anti-globalisation movement needs to expose the real problem with neo-liberal "economic rationalism" — that it puts the needs of the big corporations ahead of the needs of human beings and further deepens the impoverishment of the majority of the world's population.

The radical left also needs to develop a stronger electoral vehicle to present a socialist alternatives to both Hansonite protectionism and Liberal-Labor "economic rationalism". The recent agreement between the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party to form Socialist Alliances in the upcoming federal elections could provide the basis for such a vehicle.

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