Pauline Hanson’s resurgence is an indication of deeper threats in Australia
Although Pauline Hanson’s tactics are loathsome to many, her sense of political timing and guile have served her well. Photo / Getty Images
At 71, Pauline Hanson, the flame-haired scourge of Asian migrants and detractor of Muslim women, might have been expected to be retreating from Australia’s political stage.
It’s almost 30 years since she was first elected to the federal Parliament as an independent after publicly calling for a curtailing of welfare benefits paid to Aboriginals and, in her incendiary maiden speech, saying Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians.
Between then and now, Hanson has lost her seat in the House of Representatives, been jailed for electoral fraud – a conviction later quashed – founded a new political party and been elected to the Australian Senate, Parliament’s upper chamber, in 2016. She remains there, and in last May’s election her One Nation party gained four of the 76 Senate seats.
Those numbers make Hanson a political kingmaker in a chamber where the government’s 29 seats are well short of a majority.
Hanson is not waning – she is surging: One Nation rocketed to its highest-ever level of support in the latest poll, recording 17% in early-December’s Guardian Essential Poll. Were that level to be replicated at the next election, due in 2028, One Nation would command, according to some polls, 12 more seats in the House in addition to its Senate presence.
Hanson’s resurrection is less the return of a populist, small-town Queensland political curio from the mid-1990s who fired the public imagination as the Hawke-Keating Labor era waned. Rather, it reminds us that some deeper threats within Australia’s hinterlands and big-city outskirts can lie dormant until circumstances and time awaken them.
Chief among those are immigration and race. They are currents that re-emerge when enough people feel they’re slipping behind, forgotten and ignored – and are emboldened by politicians like Hanson. Or when tensions elsewhere reach Australia and explode in previously unimagined violence, as they did at Bondi Beach in mid-December when two gunmen slaughtered 15 Jewish people attending a religious festival.
It took a brave Muslim bystander to confront one of the shooters, wrestle him to the ground and disarm him – an act of courage lauded around the world.
In late-November, Hanson had marched into the Senate chamber wearing a full black burqa – a head covering favoured by some Muslim women. It was the second time she had pulled the stunt, and the outrage and attention it drew her was guaranteed. Her week’s suspension from the Senate was a small price for the tide of publicity.
Although Hanson’s tactics are loathsome to many, her sense of political timing and guile have served her well; she is an instinctive politician in the business of channelling grievance. One Nation’s support is not even across the nation, nor deep, but it is entrenched within pockets of aggrieved people who may blame migrants for their economic struggles and envy those who receive more state support than themselves.