By Peter Boyle
Just over a week after the independent member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, made the most nakedly racist speech heard in an Australian parliament for decades, Prime Minister John Howard boasted that since his government was elected, people "can talk about certain things without living in fear of being branded as a bigot or as a racist".
Hanson was quick to express her appreciation. Howard was the "true leader" that the community was looking for, a "strong leader" who was listening to the views of the majority of Australians on issues such as immigration, she said.
Hanson was removed as the Liberal candidate for Oxley for fear that her crudely racist outbursts would prejudice Howard's 1996 election campaign. But she won her seat as an independent backed by ex-Labor right-winger Graham Campbell. While officially disendorsed by the Liberals, election posters proclaiming her as the Liberal candidate were left up by the party during the campaign, and local Liberal Party officials gave her their support — unofficially of course.
Now Hanson says she bears "no hard feelings" against Howard for her disendorsement and even suggests that the decision might have been "in the best interests of the party at the time". Indeed, these days Hanson and Howard can be seen working in tandem.
"We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded 'industries' that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups", said Hanson in her maiden speech to parliament.
It is basically the same line pushed by Howard in several speeches this year. The PC myth and the line about "mainstream" (i.e. white) Australians being ignored while "minority groups" got all the privileges — racist doublespeak rehashed for the Australian electorate half a decade after right-wing Republicans introduced it in the USA — are the now the basic building blocks of most of Howard's speeches.
Howard is very consciously playing this card despite increasing nervousness from prominent conservatives, including Gerard Henderson and Malcolm Fraser. Their concern is two-fold: they don't want the Liberal Party tainted with the crude racism of Hanson, and they don't want to turn off present and future trading partners in Asia. Kim Beazley shares the latter concern, saying he fears for the future of Australia's relationship with Asia.
On September 16, Howard puzzled his audience during his visit to Indonesia by stressing that Australia was not part of Asia. This was no gaffe; it wasn't clumsiness. It was a coded discourse with an anti-Asian constituency in Australia: "Read my lips, we are not Asians, we are culturally superior".
Hanson decodes this message thus: "I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians ... They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate ... Arthur Calwell ... a great Australian ... said: Japan, India, Burma, Ceylon and every new African nation are fiercely anti-white and anti one another. Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no and who speaks for 90% of Australians."
Howard is hitting the button consciously. Racism is an important part of his strategy to keep on side a section of the population, including a part of the ALP's traditional base.
Backward and crude as it is, racism remains a central ideological weapon of capitalist politics in the wealthy, imperialist countries in the 1990s. If you are going to put the squeeze on the majority, drive wages down and unemployment up for an extended time — so you need to manufacture some consent — then you've got to find scapegoats. In the UK, France and Germany, the scapegoats are refugees and immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East; in the USA it's African-Americans and "illegal" immigrants from Latin America.
Howard has long been prepared to play this racist card. In 1988 he attacked Asian immigration. Multiculturalism threatened a cohesive Australian national identity, he argued. He had to retreat and insist that he wasn't anti-Asian before this year's election. The message from corporate boardrooms was that this kind of talk wasn't good for business in the region.
But the Liberal Party "focus group" pollsters must have told him his racist stance struck a chord with critical groups of voters. Howard's public analysis of his victory is that traditional Labor voters turned to the Coalition because the Keating government was arrogant, didn't listen to the "battlers" and instead pandered to "selfish minority groups" like migrants and Aborigines.
The Keating government was arrogant, it didn't act in the interests of workers, but the tiny minority it served was the corporate rich, not Aborigines or migrants.
There was an undemocratic regime established by the ALP. Its victims included the airline pilots and the BLF. But the "political correctness" it enforced was not the bogy Howard tries to scare us with. In the trade union movement, it became totally unacceptable to make the slightest criticism of the ACTU-ALP Accord. The idea that the market knows best and even the long-demolished myth of the "trickle down effect" became articles of faith for born again "best-practice" union officials.
Howard now is trying to repackage and market the essentially the same neo-liberal orthodoxy to an even more insecure and worried electorate. Racism is part of the wrapping. Howard needs some kind of irrational prejudice to patch together a false consciousness that is increasingly at odds with reality.
Howard's racist ploy is strengthened by the former Keating government's promotion of Australian economic nationalism (sacrifice for the greater glory of Australian big business) and its escalating attacks on the rights of refugees. The latter was Labor's attempt to use racist scapegoating to divert blame for persistent high unemployment and other growing social problems.
Even Keating's "magnificent obsession", his special relationship with the bloody Suharto dictatorship, encouraged a racism of sorts: Suharto's human rights abuses were justified with theories of cultural relativism which said: "It's their Asian culture to be undemocratic. We're different, but cultural differences must not get in the way of business."
Howard's latest foray into racist politics may become too much of a liability for corporate Australia. At a certain point, having a nakedly racist prime minister could be too much of a liability for them in the global market. But Howard knows how to retreat and how to put on a show of protest until he can come back to the dirty business once again. In fact, there was an element of grudging retreat in his September 25 speech to the Queensland Liberal Party convention.
Those taking advantage of the alleged "removal of restrictions on the freedom of speech" by his government should "do so in a tolerant and moderate fashion", he said after going through the usual diatribe against "political correctness".
Howard may retreat a little, for a while, but to defeat the new wave of racism more decisively will require a broad-based and independent political campaign involving unionists, students, Aborigines, ethnic minorities and all genuinely democratic-minded individuals. That is the only way to stop the "special treatment" that racist bigots inflict on Aboriginal and Asian people.