The Perils of Pauline: Pauline Hanson's One Nation Delivers A Dangerous Wake Up Call To Australia's Left ANDREW HAMMER & JERI STANTON

She was supposed to be a joke. But then as the quote above makes clear, they always are, until one day we realise that no one is laughing, and people are actually getting hurt. By that time it's usually too late, and before you know it, a dictator has taken control of your society. Then no one is able to laugh.

Pauline Hanson is not near that point, although she and her supporters may like to think she is. But in last month's elections in Queensland, she and her One Nation party proved that she is too close for comfort, and while we on the left are still laughing at her, it is now time to take her very seriously.

The story of Pauline Hanson's One Nation
In 1996, Pauline Hanson, the operator of a small fish and chip shop, decided to run for the Australian parliament. She made this decision after becoming fed up with politics-as-usual, and feeling that the existing parties just didn't represent the interests of Australia's hard working masses. At least that's the story as she tells it.

The real story is a bit more revealing. Hanson began her political career in 1994, in Australia's conservative Liberal Party, as a local councillor in the town of Ipswich. She distinguished herself with a decided bent towards questions of Aboriginal rights and social programmes. While she is indeed the owner of fish and chips shop, she is also the daughter of a land-owning family with substantial real estate holdings herself. Clearly she is not the working class battler she is portrayed to be by her handlers. In the weeks before the elections of March 1996, Hanson was actually the Liberal candidate for parliament for the constituency of Oxley. After her comments about ending government progammes for Aboriginals, and her assertion that the identity of the nation was being endangered by Asian immigration, a outcry arose within the Liberal Party which resulted in her disaffiliating with the party, only to stand as an independent. With the Liberals having no time to replace Hanson with a strong candidate, and the mood in Oxley going against the Labor Party who held the seat, Pauline Hanson entered the Australian House of Representatives with 48.6% of the vote. Her maiden speech in parliament was a xenophobic tirade against aboriginals and Asians, as well as 'fat-cats' and 'international business.' Whether they realised it at that time or not, Australians now had a modern-day fascist in Parliament.

In the months following her election, Hanson became notorious for her views, as the media took an interest in the outrageous new oddity in the House. This brought her to even greater national attention, and in April of 1997, Hanson launched her own political party, One Nation, the name deriving from the view that everyone in Australia, regardless of origin or ethnicity, had to assimilate and 'become Australians,' part of 'one nation,' rejecting all other cultural models and definitions of the nation except the European colonial one.

While Hanson has marketed herself to the public as a courageous voice of a great white Australia Past, her large gaps of political and general knowledge (Hanson answered the question of whether or not she thought her views were xenophobic with 'Please explain...?' [i.e., the meaning of the word]) have been exploited for maximum comic effect by both a hostile press and public. One NationŐs connection with more hardcore right-wing groups in Australia, such as the League of Rights and Australia First, have been well documented. In every area of public and electronic discourse, Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party have been jeered and mocked as mindless racist buffoons, the butt of jokes, parodies, and satirical sketches. She has been pelted with garbage at public appearances, almost all of which are accompanied by protests. Even her rural accent and the way she pronounces the country's name ('Ostraya') have been ridiculed.

All in all, it appeared obvious that her party's policies (such as solving the nation's economic crisis by just printing more money) as well as her racist views were too warped for them to be of any use as anything other than political humour.

And then, on 13 June, Pauline Hanson's One Nation won nearly a quarter of the votes in the Queensland state elections, taking 11 of 89 seats in the state parliament. Not only were the conservative parties (Liberal and National) left shellshocked, but the winning Labor Party was left short of a majority by one seat. Overnight, One Nation has become the story in Australian politics, and the jokes aren't as funny anymore. Recent polls suggest that Hanson's popularity is on the rise, and that there is at least the possibility that One Nation could perform so well in the upcoming national elections (which must be called by mid-1999, but are expected before the end of this year) as to hold the balance of power in forming the next government.

The sudden success of One Nation has set the Australian Left on fire with a barrage of campaigns to stop Hanson. ALP (Australian Labor Party) leader Kim Beazley has appropriately called One Nation a 'monster'; former Labor prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, and Paul Keating have issued a joint statement condeming Hanson as a threat to the future of the nation. The smaller socialist groups, such as Democratic Left and the Progressive Labour Party have turned up the volume on their anti-Hanson efforts. But a question that gnaws at the mind after all that has happened is: who let this monster out of the cage?

Who is for Pauline?
It would be too easy for us to continue here with a further exposé of the One Nation organisation, who is behind it, and the connections those people have with international fascist groups. But that information is becoming more abundant every day in the mainstream press. The media attacks on Hanson have now become so frequent and intense that she has even made a macabre 'death tape' of her addressing the nation in the event of her assassination. The tape was sent to Australia's Channel 7 to be played only after her death, but the network broadcast excerpts of the tape anyway. Like her phrase 'please explain,' the quote 'if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered' has become yet another famous line in the farce that is Pauline Hanson.

Our concern however, is with the fact that despite the attacks, somebody other than her followers put Hanson where she is now. Our question is who is supporting One Nation, and why?

A poll conducted by the Nielsen organisation provides some answers that merit serious thinking. The poll found that most of Hanson's supporters were lower income, middle-aged white males with a lesser degree of education. These 'angry white males,' to borrow a term used in American political culture, feel that they have been beat up by the system, a system that does not care about their interests or needs. They are, in essence, the same classic working class constituency that supported the ALP before the party took its own 'New Labour-ish' turn towards the right in the 1980s.

It is significant to note that one of the most hotly debated issues of the Queensland elections was the impending privatisation of Telstra, Australia's state-owned telecommunications company. One Nation strongly opposed the privatisation, albeit on the grounds that something Australian was being sold off to foreigners, and gained support for that position. Hanson has also gained support for her strong opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), but from the same right-wing xenophobe-protectionist perspective.

Of course, these issues were not the issues that One Nation was built upon, and as far as they affected the election, the ALP did get the most votes in Queensland. But the danger of a political vacuum of the left, created when the social democratic parties move to the centre in a time of crisis, opens the door for a Pauline Hanson to enter in with her volatile combination of pseudo-socialist populism and raw hate. The lessons here should be obvious for socialists. In recent history, we have seen the migration of supporters from the French Communist Party into the fascist National Front. A more complex but nonetheless valid example is the rise of fascist movements in Eastern European nations where the people have no confident democratic socialist movement. In the absence of a clear socialist programme, the most disaffected of the working class will not come to our side, but instead go looking for drastic solutions which reflect their anger.

The rise of a Pauline Hanson or an Adolf Hitler is not the fault of Pauline Hanson or Adolf Hitler. It is the fault of a socialist movement that has not done its job in addressing the issues of working people in a time of worldwide economic reshuffling. Now that movement seems to have been awakened, mainly in response to Hanson. But merely reacting to Pauline Hanson is not good enough if we want to prevent the rise of right wing politics in Australia and elsewhere. If we want to have our side come out on top of this mess, we have to stay on that question of how and why we are faced with the need to react to her in the first place.

Jeri Stanton is a writer and activist living in Sydney. Andrew Hammer is editor of Socialist.