Indonesia built its national identity around Bhinneka Tunggal Ika – unity in diversity. From next door, Pauline Hanson’s rejection of multiculturalism raises an uncomfortable question about the Australia we want to be.
The only thing we have to hate is hate. (Apologies to President Franklin D. Roosevelt)
Small city uni students in the Indonesian provinces are less likely to know about Australian Senator Pauline Hanson and her opinions because course options are limited.
Not so on the biggest campuses in Jakarta and Surabaya, with departments of social and political science. Here, the leader of One Nation is infamous for her statements about Muslims, including:
I’ve got no time for radical Islam. Their religion concerns me because of what it says in the Koran. They hate Westerners. That’s what it’s all about.
You say, ‘Well, there’s good Muslims out there.’ How can you tell me there are good Muslims?
Her comments were rejected across the political spectrum. They were also condemned by Islamic leaders, but the police said they broke no hate laws.
There are about 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. The country with the biggest number is Indonesia, where this column is being keyboarded.
It depends on the criteria used, but Indonesia is usually considered one of the most multicultural countries on the planet, with more than 300 distinct ethnic groups and more than 700 regional languages across the archipelago.
Faced with the likelihood of the new Republic disintegrating as the Dutch colonialists fled in the 1940s, founding president Soekarno proposed the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.
It translates as Unity in Diversity, though more precisely, ‘it is different, but it is one’.
Soekarno’s masterstroke has helped Indonesia survive as one nation despite scores of attempts to pull it apart, make Islam the state religion, and Java the controlling island. There were also US-sponsored attempts at destabilising the Republic.
The Old Javanese phrase comes from the 1,209-verse Kakawin Sutasoma, written by Mpu (person of spiritual authority) Tantular, a 14th-century Majapahit Empire poet promoting tolerance between Hinduism and Buddhism.
Australia does not have a national motto, and according to Senator Hanson, it “cannot be a multicultural society”. So, what sort do we want?
The nation next door is not a theocratic state like Iran and Afghanistan, where the presence of other religions can be problematic.
Indonesia has more Protestants and Catholics than Australia has people. How would they respond if a politician proclaimed: “There are no good Christians out there.”
She later offered a partial apology if she “offended anyone out there that doesn’t believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a caliphate”.
A lot of her statements are chuckled away by Australians as “that’s just Pauline sounding off”, but others are not so easily appeased.
The public expression of religious animosity in Indonesia can bring jail terms; authorities know from experience that intolerance can lead to riots and firebombing places of worship.
The damage the senator causes abroad through the bigotry in her statements is incalculable. She often comes across as Trump Lite.
US journalist and Pulitzer Prize co-winner Chris Hedges has written of the US president:
“By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level – the level of evil.
“Evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it; if evil aims to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. (It) isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”
This column is not saying Hanson is ‘evil’; the adjective applies to some of her policies.
She has praised Trump and labelled her homeland an “economic and social tinderbox” in a speech to American conservatives in Florida.
It included many right-wing talking points, during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Mar-a-Lago resort. She also attended Trump’s Halloween party over one weekend.
The media coverage isn’t always of her liking. Writing in The Guardian Malcolm Farr said the “One Nation leader’s anger at reporters reflects an intolerance towards anyone who challenges her preferred, self-crafted reality.
“This is not just Trump-inspired. Control of news items about her has, for 30 years, been vital to Hanson’s political ambitions and her rampant ego.
” … the party she founded is all about her and how she speaks to and for some Australians. Any distractions from her voice – such as the crackling intrusion of facts – deflate her political appeal.
“So she gets angry, in the hope her self-protection will be interpreted by voters as a courageous defiance of press ‘elites’.”
Is this the sort of person we want to represent our values, to show the world who we are and what we stand for?
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is fond of pronouncing that we live in the “greatest country in the world”, suggesting he’s sampled all 195, which is probably an exaggeration.
Australia is unlikely to warrant Taylor’s claim unless this issue is resolved: do we want a society built on lies, hate and exclusion – or something wiser, more inclusive and moral?
Like Bhinneka Tunggal Ika?
Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press). He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia.
Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.