A little while after Pauline Hanson graduated from Ipswich City Council politics to take the Queensland seat of Oxley, I ran into her in a Canberra pub. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Journalists and politicians often drink together, or at least in close proximity to each other, and in the late 1990s Canberra had so few drinking holes that collisions were inevitable.
She was new to the national capital, and so was I.
Older, more experienced journos were giving her a pretty wide berth, but it was late and I was young, so I jammed myself in beside her at the bar and tried to change her mind.
We galloped through her views on race as I tried to hold her attention. But she was clearly there to have a good time and was getting a fair bit of attention from the half-cut crowd.
Over the years I kept trying.
At science and education dinners at Parliament House I was often seated next to her, I assume because I could be relied on to try to hold a civil conversation with a climate denier. By then I had read Margo Kingston’s book on Hanson, and this only encouraged me. I’d read up on her recent speeches, introduce her to the most charming and compelling experts, and try to engage in any way I could. She was never impolite, but nothing seemed to make a dent.
It wasn’t until I watched her rambling, illogical and bigoted performance at the National Press Club this week that it hit me.
I had been conned – fully sucked in by her everywoman act.
I knew what she was playing at, but still the charade had pulled me in.
The truth is that for 30 years, since the day she became a fully remunerated member of the Australian Parliament, she has been playing the nastiest kind of politics.
Forget ‘I am here for you’ performances. Ms Hanson has, for her whole political career, been manipulating Australians – playing to our worst instincts, in the pursuit of personal power. The difference is that now she has more fertile ground to play on, and more tools.
This week, emboldened by Trump’s example and Rinehart’s billions, she stared down the “establishment” and the media again, and sniffed the wind.
In a speech that was a mile wide and millimetres deep, she chucked a spray of repulsive rocks into the pond to see which ones would float – which thought bubbles would appeal to voters desperately looking for something and someone to believe in.
On the hopeful front, there is a real possibility that this time she has gone too far, spreading her net so wide that more than half the Australian population is in the bad guy camp, outside her ‘mono-culture’.
Time to stop hoping she will see sense and make sure we do.
Read Kos Samaras and, in coming days, Kim Carr and John Menadue, on what we have done to allow bigotry and hate peddling to become normalised, and what we can do to stop it.
My best bit for this week counters pretty much all Ms Hanson said this week.
As a committed AFL fan, I’m going to pretend the World Cup has been a central concern for me. But this week it was impossible to ignore. Who didn’t shed a tear for our magnificently multicultural Socceroos, who slammed home two goals to pull off a stunning upset against Türkiye, with a young man born in a refugee camp the youngest Australian male player to score at World Cup level.
In case you missed that goal, here it is, and SBS’s profile of a team of Australians from across the globe.
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Who says sport, culture and politics can’t mix in the best possible way?
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Catriona Jackson is the Chief Executive and Editor of Pearls and Irritations.