Last week Australia had a glimpse of what life might be like under Prime Minister Pauline Hanson, via two speeches, one in Canberra and one in Townsville.
The star of the show in Townsville was actually her benefactor, Gina Rinehart, who handed over an orange bulldozer to the tremulous maestro of angertainment and asked everyone present to provide the appropriate sound effects. Down in Canberra, after multiple invitations, this was the first time Hanson has ever addressed the National Press Club.
After thirty years of political life, the Queensland senator is still a nervous public speaker; prone to gaffes, lacking in detail, dodgy on numbers, big on fear, questionable on facts, all of which is apparently part of her appeal to those who regard this highly paid woman – in league with the richest person in Australia – as somehow a challenge to the ‘elites’.
The same nonsense worked for Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Will Australia follow?
Talking or listening?
After dismissing Welcome to Country, and the original Australians with it, Hanson said, ‘My overriding concern, and that of the people I talk to, is that politicians today are good at talking but not listening. They will do anything to get your vote, but when that has been achieved, the voter is ignored. The public are sick and tired of being ignored.’
So far so good. But then she went straight to attacking immigration, which she described as being in a state of crisis. ‘At the center of this crisis is the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism. We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.’
And presumably that umbrella is white, not rainbow coloured, and definitely not black.
Hanson then said it was outrageous that one in four people spoke a language other than English at home. How dare they? ‘Western civilisation and its values are under siege, she claimed, attacking ‘hate preachers’ without any sense of irony.
Next she went after the government’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains, which she said would worsen the housing crisis by reducing the number of housing investors, even though it was John Howard pushing things in the opposite direction who originally created the whole mess.
The rest of Hanson’s speech followed the same pattern. Identify a real problem, then muddy the waters about the causes of the problem, and propose a simplistic ‘solution’ that directs blame to anyone but herself and her friends.
Lyin’ Albo
Cost of living too high? Desperate people eating out of rubbish bins? That must be renewable energy’s fault. Everything getting more expensive? That’s nothing to do with the ‘hoax of global warming’, it’s Albo’s fault for ‘lying’ to the electorate.
After every step into La La Land, Hanson said something undeniably true, such as ‘we need a secure, reliable energy future’. Who could disagree with that? Except she then immediately followed this by saying, ‘One Nation will introduce nuclear energy’ and ‘we will never be able to do without coal and gas’. None of these options could be described by anyone with a basic understanding of science as secure, reliable, or long term.
Soon she was back to accusing others of stoking fear, her own number one stock in trade, and claiming she was somehow being cancelled, after being given every megaphone imaginable by major media owners for decades, as well as the platform of parliament, which she’s used mainly as a theatrical stage, not as a place to introduce or improve legislation.
‘Every attempt has been made for years to silence me,’ she said. ‘The real tragedy is people are frightened of what will happen to them if they just speak up, but now they are finding the courage to embrace One Nation. What a national tragedy, indeed a disgrace, that many people feel afraid to make their views heard, as a result, civil debate is paralysed, and the media are complicit in amplifying this fear.’
Like her orange friend across the Pacific, Pauline was actually the one threatening to silence opposing voices, by commercialising the ABC and getting rid of SBS. Beyond culture wars, there’s little of substance in her policy bag for working people, mothers or those who have the misfortune to get sick, but plenty of financial carrots for employers, providing they work in the private sector.
Lacking any real policy detail, or numbers that added up correctly, most of Hanson’s speech was simply about generating moments which could be sliced and diced for social media, where Gina Rinehart’s army of bots and outrage spreaders quickly spread the love.
The GetUp! banner stunt and the attacks on Guardian journalist Sarah Martin, who got called ‘trashy’ for daring to question Hanson’s blatant nepotism, were all useful fodder for this – Pauline would be nothing without her enemies.
Lose lose
The deeper problem for anyone reporting on One Nation, as with Donald Trump, is that in the short term it’s impossible to win. Call out the lies and nonsense, and you justify the paranoia and return attacks. Ignore it, and you embolden them because you must be scared. The ultra-right has got this nailed.
Unfortunately for them, it all falls apart once they achieve real power. Then it’s about getting what you can and getting out before the country turns on you and starts looking for the piano wire.
In Townsville, things took an even more surreal turn with Gina Rinehart’s latest pontifications at her self-styled ‘Bush Summit’, presented in conjunction with her friends at News Corp.
She proposed giving islands off Queensland to Elon Musk for SpaceX satellite construction and launches, and land west of Townsville to Taiwanese chip manufacturers and to Israel, of all countries, for building advanced drones and other weapons of war, rather than the renewable energy infrastructure currently being built there.
Rinehart then spoke glowingly of Musk’s chainsaw approach to US government spending via his imaginary Department of Government Efficiency (which actually achieved no significant savings but made his own businesses much more profitable, at everyone else’s expense).
She said she wanted to do something similar here, then invited Pauline Hanson to the stage and presented her with a toy orange bulldozer as a token of her esteem, and a symbol of her hopes for Australia.
It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for those times when billionaires were content to stay behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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