By Jim McIlroy
BRISBANE — The growth of the racist One Nation party, behind figurehead MP Pauline Hanson, is a result of the capitalist economic crisis, which has pitched workers into unemployment and poverty, ruined small businesses and driven family farmers off their land in droves.
It is part of the rise of far-right organisations in the US, France, Germany, Britain and other countries of the advanced capitalist world as the neo-liberal offensive cuts deeply into living standards and democratic rights internationally.
With polls showing support for One Nation running at 14% statewide in the Queensland election, and at up to 25% in some depressed rural areas, the debate over One Nation has virtually taken over the entire major party campaign.
The furore over the state Coalition's decision to allocate preferences to One Nation over Labor has served to emphasise that these parties and Hanson's racist organisation are part of a single far-right bloc, which seeks to turn back the clock on any progressive gains made by Aboriginal people, migrants, women and workers over the past few decades.
This opportunist ploy by the Queensland Libs and Nats, aimed at winning the Queensland election by any means necessary, may come back to haunt the Coalition in future.
As some sections of the Liberal, National and business sector have pointed out, Hanson's anti-Asian, isolationist stance could have serious implications for Australian big business trade and political relations with the countries of our region in coming years.
Former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser protested on May 28 that the Coalition parties had done Australia "a great disservice" by legitimising One Nation, which he said had promoted the "evil scourge" of racism.
Other conservative politicians and former MPs have backed Fraser, nervous about a possible ethnic voter backlash against the Coalition in the marginal suburban electorates of Sydney and Melbourne, especially, in the upcoming federal poll.
Support for One Nation, while initially founded on anti-Aboriginal and anti-Asian immigrant racism alone, has now been broadened somewhat by the astute strategy of Hanson's political advisers — which is to capitalise on the deep disillusionment of a large section of the population with the "economic rationalist" policies of the major parties, and with parliamentary corruption in general.
Certainly, One Nation has tapped into the reactionary rural base in Queensland of former National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, even siphoning off sections of the National Party membership itself in some country areas.
Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Hanson herself got her start as an "independent" MP by winning the former ALP urban stronghold of Ipswich.
The immediate result of the Coalition preference deal with One Nation is to threaten several Labor-held marginal seats on the Queensland coast, such as Hervey Bay, with a semi-rural and high unemployment population, vulnerable to Hanson's vicious lies about "Asians taking our jobs", and "lazy blacks living off our taxes".
One Nation's simplistic far-right program calls for open extinguishment of native title; abolition of an Aboriginal affairs portfolio; an end to all affirmative action programs; an end to Asian migration; reintroduction of capital punishment; even more prisons; mandatory so-called "truth in sentencing"; police-enforced curfews on youth; and reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools.
Together with populist opposition to foreign imports and support for tariffs, and condemnation of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, this brew of reactionary nostrums has a powerful appeal to many people faced with gloomy economic prospects — in the absence of a strong progressive alternative with enough influence and resources to reach out to the depressed sections of our society and offer them an anti-capitalist solution in the interests of working people.
This is why the Democratic Socialists are calling for the construction of a fighting opposition to One Nation — and to the neo-liberal two-party system which feeds the growth of this far-right monster.
Now, in the face of this threat to our political and social gains, is the time to relaunch the project of a broad-based, genuinely progressive opposition, relying primarily on mass action rather than parliament, to halt this deepening rightward offensive in its tracks.