She has been a remarkable survivor in the cutting, remorseless field of politics. Mocked for her incoherence, her lack of erudition, and dismissed as a garden variety racist, Pauline Hanson of the One Nation Party now boasts a degree of popularity that has eclipsed her opponents. As with other countries, Australia is seemingly experimenting with the “I-am-fed-up” school of political representation, making any figure supposedly anti-political most attractive.
It is that degree of appeal that risks wearing off. Hanson, hoping to draw inspiration from foreign sources of resentment (domestic sources are evidently not enough) thought it wise to conduct what she amusingly called a “fact finding” tour of the United Kingdom. Her aim: to learn from the mistakes arising from immigration, notably of the swarthy sort.
The trip was intended less to take in the sights (no loot inspection of the British Museum) as digest the morsels of bile and suspicion offered by such figures as the convict and race baiting Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson; the grumbling, pampered Holly Valance, formerly of the mercifully terminated Neighbours; and one of Britain’s dimmest and briefest of prime ministers, Liz Truss.
The One Nation senator also made an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a forum for the washed-out right-wing set. Should you have wished to waste your money, or anybody else’s, tickets were in the range between £600 and £10,000. The conference speech, entitled “The Australian Fightback”, was delivered at the InterContinental Hotel’s Arora Ballroom. (Fewer than a quarter of the available seats were filled.) It had all that rambling unsteadiness we have come to expect in such an oration, with the usual barbs. Australia had “gone woke”. Immigration was poorly controlled. The current government had shown an unhealthy interest in environmental policies. London was benighted by its multicultural population, a portent of what would happen to Australia in “about five to 10 years”.
The cognoscenti on right-wing politics see this as an exercise of purposeful polarisation and danger. What the One Nation leader was doing, suggested Imogen Richards of Deakin University in somewhat execrable jargon, is “building international far right alliances and signposting them.” The jargon train – signposted, no doubt – also chuffs along from the White Rose Society, an anti-fascist group focused on such terms as the “attention economy” and Hanson’s hostility “against non-white people”. According to a spokesperson for the group, “We think in reporting on this, it’s important to identify the agenda that the people involved are trying to push and avoid furthering it.”
This doom and gloom analysis of Hanson’s rise fails to appreciate the character of the person and the inherent instability of her leadership. She has shown herself incapable of retaining party members in parliament. Her command of the party’s finances is questionable and has previously caught her out. One Nation’s vetting processes for standing candidates have also been shown to be rather shoddy.
In various superficial ways, Hanson shares a tendency with Nigel Farage of Reform UK, who was most forthcoming with praise of “what you’ve done to get to the top of the [Australian] opinion polls.” Farage has a potentially fatal fondness for money and makes no secret of that fact. He also talks about the ordinary person of the street whose vote he craves. His recent gimmick – resigning as member for the seat of Clacton only to stand in the resulting byelection – is intended to affirm his standing as such a man of the people. Yet this figure of anti-establishment elan has received donations from convict aristocrats and offshore billionaires, some of which he has never declared to the British parliament. To attack the establishment, it does not look too good to be its coddled darling.
Hanson is receiving her own degree of coddling from the rich and powerful. Gina Rinehart, billionaire mining magnate and Australia’s richest figure (success comes easy with a father who looted the earth), has joined the show. Access to her private plane for the One Nation leader is guaranteed. Donations have been coming in. Exactly what every candidate for the people needs.
Rinehart even featured as a recreational adjunct to the Hanson tour. Nothing quite says loving populism than a tour to the Sicily resort town of Taormina, expensive hotel accommodation and a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show. Both were also seen together at CPAC. Questions put to Hanson about her funding arrangements regarding her Sicily trip have been coolly rebuffed. In a video posted on social media, the senator declared that the trip had not cost taxpayers a single dollar. “Yes I went to Sicily. Yes I went to the Dolce & Gabbana fashion show. What an experience, I was invited.” Having “never been to anything like that”, she thought it opportune to “go and see it”.
While it is churlish to see Hanson as exceptional in this regard (politicians of all stripes frequent the yachts of billionaire tycoons when votes are at stake), it departs from the down-in-the-trenches feeling she otherwise likes to exude. Hanson, in pursuing this needless sojourn of myth mining, has been acting the goose. For voters, that act can only be tolerated for so long.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
