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WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

The Pauline Hanson phenomenon

By the Editorial Board
25 April 1997

Once again the Australian mass media has placed Pauline Hanson at the centre of the political stage. The launching of her party -- Pauline Hanson's One Nation -- was given extensive publicity, followed by saturation coverage of her book and its claims of Aboriginal cannibalism. It appears that nothing she says or does is too rabid or outlandish to be given headline treatment and transformed into a legitimate topic of public debate.

These developments are a matter of serious concern. Why has this ignorant and bigoted woman been picked up by the mass media and catapulted from obscurity to national prominence?

Little more than a year ago, Pauline Hanson was a political unknown -- a small businesswoman and local Ipswich councillor who obtained Liberal Party pre-selection in what was the safest Labor seat in Queensland.

She won the seat of Oxley only after being dumped by the Liberals for being too overt in her anti-Aboriginal racism during the election campaign. Depicted favourably by the media as an "outspoken rebel," she benefitted from the intense hostility felt by working people towards the Laborites and official politics as a whole.

Once in parliament she said nothing for months. When she finally delivered her maiden speech it went largely unreported. She was suddenly elevated to prominence by the media and Prime Minister Howard in the immediate aftermath of the sweeping spending cuts unveiled in last year's budget and the furious protests and demonstrations sparked by the budget.

It was the outlets controlled by the big media barons, the tabloid press owned by Rupert Murdoch and the Nine Network Midday Show run by Kerry Packer, that launched the Pauline Hanson phenomenon, echoed by right-wing radio talkback hosts.

Their purpose was to incite racial divisions while the Coalition initiated the most far-reaching assault on public sector jobs, social services and living standards in history. Their promotion of Hanson served to divert attention away from the Liberals' ongoing onslaught on health, education, child care, housing, aged care and other essential social programs.

Following the lead set by Murdoch and Packer, Howard personally boosted Hanson when he defended her right to "free speech" and declared that his government had lifted the "pall of censorship," enabling people to "speak about certain things without being branded as a bigot and a racist".

Howard's remarks were part of a definite ideological offensive, being orchestrated by the media and big business, to make immigrants, Aborigines and welfare recipients the scapegoats for the social crisis and to justify the dismantling of welfare measures. Since then barely a day has passed without the most intensive publicity being afforded to Hanson and her supporters.

Hanson is not merely a media creation, however. She is an expression of a deep economic, social and political malaise. Tremendous political confusion has been created by the breakdown of the old economic certainties, the emergence of widespread poverty and social misery, and the transformation of the old labour organisations into nothing but instruments for policing these conditions.

Hanson and her backers have been able to exploit the political vacuum created by the Labor and union leaderships' open abandonment of any defence of working class conditions and their adoption, in toto, of the corporate agenda of "international competitiveness".

Driven by vast changes in global economy which have ripped to shreds all forms of national regulation, companies around the world are involved in a never-ending competition against their rivals to slash costs and boost productivity.

Over the past decade and a half, the labour apparatuses have become the chief enforcers of this program. As a result, broad layers of people face the insecurity and hardships produced by high levels of unemployment, falling living standards and massive cutbacks to social programs, and can see no way out.

In the absence of a progressive alternative they can fall prey to the various political prejudices and knee-jerk reactions which Hanson and her backers peddle: that a return to tariff protection could somehow provide a solution to the growth of mass joblessness; that immigration is the cause of unemployment and cuts to social services; that welfare benefits paid to certain groups undercut the living standards of others.

The continuing decline in living standards is a product of the profit system itself - an economic system which Hanson defends to the hilt. She supported the massive cutbacks to social services in the federal budget. She calls for compulsory national service, which will be used to discipline and regiment working class youth, preparing them to be exploited as cheap labour and as cannon fodder in future wars.

Despite her claims to represent the "little people," her policies represent the interests of the capitalist elite. Hanson calls for a ban on all immigration "except that related to investment that will lead to employment". In other words, businessmen would still be permitted to emigrate and set up operations in Australia, but workers seeking to escape grinding poverty and the exploitation by Australian and other transnationals would be barred.

Similarly, Hanson has expressed her admiration for "Aboriginal self-reliance". She has nothing but contempt for the vast majority of Aborigines who are forced to live in Third World squalour. Her praise is reserved for the tiny handful of black entrepreneurs who have grown wealthy by exploiting Aboriginal people as a source of cheap labour.

Hanson is not only promoted by the media and boosted by the government. She has also been elevated to the centre of political discussion by other political forces -- for their own specific purposes.

Last October the Labor leaders introduced a cynical parliamentary resolution appealing to the Liberals to join them in supposedly opposing Hanson by proclaiming the "equal rights" of all Australians. This was right at the point when the Liberal government was destroying thousands of jobs and introducing far-reaching plans to dismantle social services.

The purpose of this bipartisan motion was to deflect attention from not only the government's attacks, but Labor's own record in paving the way for the program of the Howard government.

The Hawke and Keating Labor governments carried out the greatest redistribution of income in history - from the working class to the wealthy. They then witch-hunted immigrants for the unemployment and poverty which they themselves had created. Refugees were rounded up in detention centres, factories and homes were raided by police to deport thousands of "illegal" migrants and immigration quotas were slashed.

For all the ex-radical organisations, such as the Democratic Socialist Party and the International Socialist Organisation, Hanson serves a very definite need. They are using her as a focus for cobbling together a rotten and deeply reactionary coalition with the Labor and union bureaucrats, Aboriginal leaders and all manner of so-called liberal forces. This supposed anti-racist alliance is aimed directly against the development of any independent political movement by the working class.

The front page of the ISO's paper, Socialist Worker, recently declared "Don't let the racists divide us". To whom they were appealing was demonstrated by an ad on the same page. It proudly advertised the fact that an "anti-racism" rally had been endorsed by the NSW Labor Council. This is the same Labor Council whose previous secretary Michael Easson was the first to raise the demand for a five-year ban on social security benefits for newly arrived immigrants. His co-thinker, NSW Labor leader Bob Carr sought to blame immigrants for Sydney's urban sprawl.

For all their protests against Hanson, the various radicals share with her a common political perspective -- the return of national economic regulation. These groupings insist that the working class tie itself to the nation state and to the very Labor and union apparatus which has spearheaded the attacks on jobs and living standards.

Like Hanson, they also promote the politics of race. They provide a platform for Aboriginal leaders and bureaucrats whose black nationalism is the other side of the coin to Hanson's White Australia racism. The black nationalists attribute the oppression of Aborigines to "whites" and "white society" rather than the profit system in a crude attempt to justify their own privileged positions.

In its attacks on Aborigines, immigrants and "foreigners," Hanson's movement is the latest in what has become a continuous series of attempts to create a base for a right-wing populist movement. The last such project was the "Graeme Campbell Independents," based largely on the Australians Against Further Immigration and led by ex-Labor MP Graeme Campbell, who has since fallen from favour.

Before him was Danny Johnson, a Victorian rural demolition contractor whose "Save Australia Campaign" was given immense media coverage in January 1991, just after the collapse of the Pyramid building society.

Other organisations which have emerged in recent years include the Shooters Party, the Confederate Action Party and the Federal Party, all peddling various mixtures of right-wing individualism, patriotism and anti-welfare and anti-immigrant prejudice.

All have claimed to speak in the name of the "little people" and lash out against big business, "big" government, and the world bankers. In reality, they serve the interests of big business by seeking to mobilise ruined sections of the middle class and disorientated and impoverished layers of workers on an extreme right-wing and nationalist program. Their populist rantings bear the hallmarks of the politics of fascism.

Similar tendencies are emerging internationally -- Le Pen's racist National Front in France, James Goldsmith's anti-European movement in Britain, the right-wing militia in the United States.

Workers and youth must take stock of these developments. In the absence of a progressive alternative, fighting for the interests of the working class against the suffocating grip of the labour bureaucracies, there is a grave danger that the hostility and alienation generated by the social crisis will be diverted in reactionary nationalist directions.

In the 1920s and 1930s, millions of workers worldwide took part in, or identified with, the struggle against fascism, recognising it as a movement aimed at smashing the organised strength and social conditions of the working class.

The emergence of Pauline Hanson is a warning that the betrayals by the old organisations of the working class, backed by the entire milieu of middle class radicals, have created the conditions where such movements can again rear their heads.

A powerful social movement must be built uniting all sections of the working class - immigrants and non-immigrants, employed and unemployed, Aborigines, youth, housewives and pensioners - to fight for the abolition of the profit system and the establishment of genuine social equality.

This is the alternative advanced by the Socialist Equality Party against all the capitalist politicians, trade union bureaucrats and their apologists. We base ourselves on the understanding that all workers, regardless of where they live, the language they speak or the colour of their skin, are part of an international class, facing a common class enemy: internationally organised capital.