Pauline Hanson popped up on television on Sunday, and then again morning, and as predictably as night follows day, progressives on social media went ballistic.
In her appearance on the Today show, she demanded that Australia stop accepting refugees from the Middle East. She argued that it would be all too easy for terrorists to infiltrate the refugee flow, and therefore Australia.
She voiced the favourite cliche of Islamophobes: “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim”. This talking point, touted as a “maxim” by the likes of Andrew Bolt, conveniently forgets Anders Breivik and Dylann Roof, among others.
Then she attacked Malcolm Turnbull for being insufficiently bellicose and vengeful, something which he must be getting used to, what with Bolt inviting backbencher Tony Abbott on for a chat about what really needs to be done.
Hanson – who holds no office, wields no authority, and is a perennial electoral failure – has always had a unique ability to unbalance and frustrate progressives. That may be especially true of those who have been around long enough to see her story unfold from the beginning.
Even though members of parliament, influential columnists, senators, presidential candidates and a vocal, apparently growing anti-Islamic movement have all been saying similar things about Muslim immigration for a long time, Hanson is the one who really winds people up. And her willingness to articulate nativist sentiment, combined with her irresistibility to the news media, mean that she has many opportunities to do so.
Perhaps it’s because her presence reminds us that despite her overt political failures, so much of our political discourse and policy environment has been made over in her image. A figure who was too openly racist for the Liberal party in 1996 has lived to see her anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments become embedded in bipartisan policy commitments.
That it’s apparently politically impossible to do anything to soften our punitive border protection policy can be traced back to John Howard’s success in theatricalising refugee policy in the wake of 9/11. Howard’s rhetoric came straight from Hanson’s, and his intended audience was those who had voted for her in the past. Refugee policy has ever since remained near the heart of Australian political debate.
It’s always a challenge to explain this, in a world where there a far greater and more menacing problems, and in which refugees are usually fleeing from the west’s self-nominated enemies. One answer lies in the political energy made available by Hansonism’s inverted identity politics.
In a perceptive essay written just after the initial Hansonist wave had crested, and just before the Tampa election, Michael Leach wrote that Hanson’s party, One Nation, mobilised “affective” appeals to a “collective identity, which was under threat and needed to be protected.” He noted:
These types of discourses are potent. They acknowledge that people are rarely motivated to political action by brute material facts (such as ‘inequality’), but, rather, by the conceptualisation of material or cultural changes as forms of disrespect to the traditions or identity of a group.
Mobilising (white) people around the idea of immigrants as a source of fragmentation or threat in a rapidly changing world is much easier than creating forms of solidarity, particularly in the absence of meaningful political alternatives that might unite people against exploitation or capital. The broader right, from Howard to Abbott, saw this and took it up. The centre-left, apart from a brief softening under Rudd’s first go at the prime ministership, have been far too timid (or worse) to seriously challenge it.
Terrorist actions that are explicitly framed as attacks on the west and its values play directly into these fears, indeed they rely on them existing in order to accomplish the political goals of Islamic State (Isis) and other groups. The Islamic right and sections of the western right have a shared interest in a project of radical segregation.
But the worst of it is that every time this happens, progressives are brought face to face with the fact that they have never, after 15 years of the “war on terror”, managed to come up with an effective response to this campaign of fear.
If you doubt that this is true, just look at the slow and steady ratcheting of national security, surveillance, border paranoia and militarism. The argument here is not that the right’s view is correct, but that it has not yet been met with a persuasive articulation of any alternative.
And this is despite so much energy and time having been devoted to opposing first Howard’s, then Abbott’s exploitation of the refugee issue for political gain. Alongside climate change, it has arguably been the Australian left’s defining issue over the past decade or more. And despite this the treatment of refugees has only become steadily worse.
In this sense, Pauline Hanson is an avatar of the left’s failure to consistently voice a viable response to the idea that migrant populations, and particularly Muslim Australians, are at best suspect, and at worst complicit with terrorists who some of them have fled. Official multiculturalism has not been up to this job, despite many attempts to revive it.
Clearly something more radical is needed, and urgently. It has been a priority along with climate change because they are our most important political challenges. They are intertwined, because climate change will lead to more wars, more refugees. Our inability to successfully propose solidarity as an alternative to fear and resentment is indeed frustrating. But it’s important not to give into it, or be driven to despair by the triumph of Hansonism. After Paris, it’s clear that time is running out.
