Labor’s cautious path to a third term may be electorally defensible, but avoiding a fundamental argument with Pauline Hanson leaves both Hansonism and Labor’s own weaknesses untouched.
Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party have set their course for facing the next federal election. It’s not a bold strategy, but it’s a careful, cautious and conservative one, avoiding risks that could stand in the way of comfortable progress to a third term in government. It lacks the confidence and resolve that its current majority and dominance in the opinion polls would allow. But it is arguably defensible if one is gloomy about whether the Pauline Hanson One Nation campaign is yet played out. Or if one is gloomy about Albanese’s capacity to puncture the One Nation balloon.
Some friends of Labor might gush at the cleverness of such a small-target strategy. Pauline Hanson does not really have policies yet, and if, or when she does, we can expect these will be divisive and vulnerable. Why should not Labor keep its powder dry, hoping that she will dash herself against the rock of her own weaknesses? Why risk putting up adventurous policies which might be polarising, running the risk of Labor losing an election on its own merits rather than Hanson’s deficiencies.
Hansonism, like Trumpism and other similar cruel, racist and nationalist phenomena it resembles overseas, is a cancer on modern society. Far from promoting or coming out of any sort of Australian ethos, present or past, it is an alien idea appealing to the worst instincts of the individual. Its nihilism and bitterness pitch citizen against citizen and reduce the power of the community to advance its interests by agreed common action. It deserves to be rejected and defeated on its merits and eradicated for good.
Its culture of meanness, exclusion and cruelty should be rejected as unAustralian, unworthy of any of the classes and types of people we really are. If Albanese is an unworthy standard bearer for such a fundamental argument, and he may well be, he ought to get out of the way and let someone more articulate, more charismatic and more invested with the qualities of national leadership take his place.
We can be reasonably sure that Albanese is not holding back for fear of a resurgent opposition. On the people representing it, he and Labor have no occasion to hedge their bets. Angus Taylor would lack the policy skills and the political cunning to organise and mobilise his party for victory even if Pauline Hanson were not in the field. Strangely, the National Party, under Matt Canavan, might be more up to such a job, in terms of calculating the odds and the opportunities, such as they are. But Canavan is handicapped by understanding that a Pauline Hanson movement is likely to do more damage to the Nationals than the Liberals in rural and regional electorates.
Traditionally, a substantial rump of Nationals survives big swings against conservative governments, even increasing their power in the opposition afterwards. But the One Nation push is aimed at the National Party heart and its brain. The party is the more vulnerable from years of complacency, the soft corruption of patronage and pork barrelling, and its misconceived preference for mining interests ahead of agricultural and regional constituencies.
The Nationals, like the Liberals, cannot improve their political position by imitating or attempting to align themselves with Pauline Hanson. They can be only pale copies anyway, and what would be the point? Any attempt to be like her would simply underline their previous incapacity or unwillingness to stand up for their electorates.
Hanson may not like Labor, in or out of government. But her movement has not emerged because there is a Labor government, or because there is a Labor Party. She is a creature of the populist right – born, perhaps to fight Labor ideas, but frustrated and furious at how conservative parties have abandoned what she has seen as guiding principles.
It has been the conservative parties, particularly the Nationals who have earned her anger and contempt by their inability and unwillingness to stand up for her values, her view of the world, and her vision of a fortified and assertive (and largely white) outpost of empire. Largely white particularly in setting the standards and lifestyles expected of those, white or otherwise, who come to live here. Her idea of an older monocultural Australia is essentially false, and it is, it comes from the mythology of a settled and complacent society.
The search for a missing white monoculture
From Labor’s point of view, Hanson will not be campaigning for popular votes in support of her idea of ideal government policies, compared with the Labor agenda. She is not promoting herself as a better manager of an organised set of policies. She wants to tear down government, without much of an idea about what to replace it with. If Donald Trump is the model, there may be a real prospect of her handing over to Gina Rinehart, and other billionaires, the power to dismember the existing system as Australians know it.
Hanson wants to abolish or sack the programs and people of whom she has had a gutful. But she is not focused on what will replace it. She has never presented an alternative government economy, a philosophical approach to chronic problems of regions and communities, or solutions to inequalities or parts of the economy doing it tough.
A familiar critique, from all sides, is that she is good at identifying problems but offers nothing in the way of solutions. It might be better to say that she is entirely uninterested in the details of government or running the country, instead she has a narrow and limited set of grievances which irk her and nothing much else to contribute on public affairs. Apart from a very cynical (and not entirely false) view about the self-interest of many of today’s politicians.
She is against further immigration and multiculturalism. She wants recent arrivals or new ones to be committed to an “Australian way of life”. They must first see themselves as Australians, perhaps aggressively so, rather than Welsh, or Hungarian or Afghan. They must subscribe to Australia’s founding myths, such as gold, Gallipoli, grog, guts and gambling. Those who will not make such a commitment will be by her definition unAustralian and may even face deportation. She is deeply hostile and suspicious about people who by background, colour or creed seem unlikely to merge easily into her idea of a monocultural paradise. For the moment that particularly involves Muslims, but it is clear from what she has said over the years that her suspicions extend to Asians, Africans and even the swarthier groups of southern Europeans. Like bigots in the United States, people of her mindset once feared and despised Irish Catholics, Catholics generally and Jews, as much as they now fear Palestinians, Sudanese or Muslims. These are, she thinks, inherently less likely to fit in.
She probably now accepts that many of those she once accused of diluting Australian blood, such as people from India, Indochina, and China have now embraced Australia and are mostly making a great success of their life and work, and they must be accepted as having become a part of the furniture. At least if they leave to their betters – northern Europeans and protestants the jobs of defining the Australian character, culture and history, and deciding who is in and out. But the day has come when Australians of migrant background are not willing to leave to Hanson or northern Europeans decisions about what Australian culture is.
On economic matters Pauline Hanson has little time for government intervention, least of all if it is about achieving dubious social objectives, such as the uplifting of whole classes of Australians. The education system, so far as it is to be publicly subsidised, is there to reinforce her monoculture of provident and ambitious Australians advancing by their own sweat and toil. Australian cultural institutions should again reflect what is, not the dreams or imaginings, or foreign ideologies of the intellectual or political classes. She sees much of what modern governments do, at all levels, as undermining the value of hard work and initiative, and she sees almost all anti-discrimination and due process architecture likewise.
Hanson’s faith in self-reliance and hard work
Fighting Hanson must involve what she thinks, not just the consequences of putting her gut instincts into action.
She is too sensible to say that she is against aged pensions or modest assistance to the disabled, since these are facts of life and saying what she thinks would only create constituencies against her, not least among older Australians sharing some of her general prejudices. She is not, a point Labor is hammering, for the worker. Hers is the perspective of the small business owner, and she is hostile towards overtime loadings, public holidays, maternity leave, and employee rights in relation to dismissal or redundancy. It is not very hard to get her to say, against her own political interests, that many such employment rights should be dropped. Thanks to such “progress”, modern generations of workers are lazy and unambitious, much more focused on their own gratifications than the satisfaction of hard work and profit for the employer.
Such sentiments have existed forever. Representing small business (and being opposed to very large and monopolistic businesses) was once a central theme of the Liberal Party of Robert Menzies. Likewise with doubts about the capacity of socialism or collective action to produce outcomes better than individual initiative and enterprise. Menzies, seen from today, was virtually a socialist and big government man. But he always preached the virtues of limited government and individual rights.
Much later, a new scepticism of big government came from leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. With others they preached the virtue of government withdrawing from many marketplaces, the creation of new market-based mechanisms for the provision of traditional public services and utilities such as water and sewerage systems, buses, trains and airlines, and the provision of much public infrastructure, including land planning and development. Privatisation and contracting in and out became the essence of neoliberalism; a new central problem of modern government became weaning the public away from their expectations of the quantity and quality of services provided by government. Those needs and expectations have not diminished, and most of the policies of the 1990s, including privatisation, remain deeply unpopular even among Hansonites. It would be difficult to establish Hanson’s economic views, or to disentangle them from the ideas of Gina Rinehart. But she cannot be cast as neoliberal, or as an economic rationalist.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan appealed to older ideas about prudent management, the household budget, self-reliance and rejection of an ever increasing, ever expanding and ever more bossy big state. This seems rather more where Hanson sits, even if she does not use much of its philosophical rhetoric. In her ideal economy, about half the population would be in the economic position of about half of the population of the United States, locked into low wages, reduced economic opportunities and modern peonage. These modern workers, here as in the US, can blame only themselves for their low aspirations and position in society. They have had it too easy, particular younger workers. They need the discipline of economic insecurity, fear of the sack, and the need to keep the boss happy.
By contrast the entrepreneur needs incentives, and rewards, including tax breaks, for risking their money and their energy in growing their businesses, providing a source of employment for others, and for growing the economy.
Hanson’s protest is not against the status quo of perks and rorts
It is quite true that arguing with a Pauline Hanson is difficult, not least for the ease with which she moves from (often contentious) assertion of facts, into emotion and “feeling”, and into prejudice, bigotry and hate. Too many have thought that she can be simply knocked from the ring by a superior, or more accurately based, argument, or by an appeal to the heart and the goodness of most Australians. Many of her supporters do not adopt her policies, such as they are, or her prejudices. They instead adopt her anger and fury about how politicians have been failing their communities, how old levers no longer seem to work, and how disconnected the intellectual and political classes are from the population at large. Many also have come to see in wokeness and political correctness the encapsulation of the chasm between insiders and the general population.
Walking away from any sort of fundamental argument or confrontation involves another risk for Labor and its approach to government. The Labor conference stage-managed farce reinforces all the most unattractive features of Labor in government. These include chronic secrecy and unwillingness to be accountable, or open, or to consult the population at large. Nothing could better symbolise Labor’s own remoteness from voters, and the ascendency of insiders, than the presence at the Labor conference of scores of lobbyists, representing some of the most unattractive economic interests in the nation. Albanese and the broader party seem to be flaunting the presence and the power, and the access, of the gambling industry. Insider access and unaccountable power is also evident in some of the land development deals being done by state premiers. Albanese may have grounds to be smug about Labor’s safety from external assault. It will be by internal weakness, and unwillingness to reform itself, that Labor will be ultimately brought down.
Republished from The Canberra Times
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.