As a newly elected independent MP in 1996, Pauline Hanson declared in her maiden parliamentary speech that Australia was “being swamped by Asians”. She founded the One Nation Party on the platform of bringing net migration to Australia to zero and abolishing multiculturalism in favour of “assimilation”. Now, Australia’s most prominent crusader against immigration is about to become an immigrant herself; the self-declared patriot is abandoning her country.
Since losing her seat in national parliament, Hanson has been an unlikely source of entertainment for Australians. When asked in an interview once what her position on euthanasia was she is famously quoted as saying, ‘They should stay there!’
Then there was her TV appearance on Dancing with the Stars, the Aussie version of Strictly Come Dancing, and last year raunchy pictures, supposedly taken of her more than three decades ago, were widely circulated in the Australian press (they turned out to be fake). But nothing tops the latest turn in the Hanson saga: she is moving to Britain.
“It’s pretty much goodbye forever,” Hanson said earlier this week. “Sadly, the land of opportunity is no more applicable.”
How Hanson will be received in the UK is anyone’s guess. But it is likely that she will have a bit of a shock when she steps off her long flight at Heathrow. This is, of course, the further irony. You suspect Hanson imagines she will be moving to the Britannia of yesteryear rather than the pluralistic Britain of today. A former fish and chip shop owner, she would be horrified to learn that chicken tikka masala is Britain’s unofficial national dish. No doubt TV producers are already knocking on her agent’s door to film a documentary about Pauline’s adventures in her “mother” country.
One Nation was ultimately a political failure. It survived only a few years before it was deregistered; Hanson herself lost her Queensland parliamentary seat in 1998 and made three further failed bids for office.
Although Hanson left behind no political party organisation, her impact has been profound. She reshaped Australian political culture, many would say for worse. Tapping into white cultural anxiety, Hanson unleashed a nasty chauvinism that reprised an Anglo-Celtic race patriotism.
Her politics were in some ways a vanguard for the reactionary cultural politics of John Howard. It is no accident that Hanson’s uncompromising stance on asylum seekers quickly became Howard government policy, as in the case of “temporary protection visas” for refugees.
By offering subtle approving nods to Hanson’s rhetoric, Howard built a core working-class and lower-middle-class constituency for his Liberal party in formerly Labour electorates in outer metropolitan suburbs. This was the so-called dog whistle tactic, which allowed racialised appeals to become part of mainstream Australian politics. At the same time, Hanson’s politics confounded a progressive left that failed to hear the grievances of the culturally disaffected.
