In 2017, when I had only been living in Australia for a few years, Pauline Hanson came to my neighbourhood. The event was billed as “Pots and Pizza with Pauline at the Paddo”. About 200 people turned up to listen to her speak, and a similar-size crowd gathered outside holding protest signs and likening her to Donald Trump. Twenty police officers showed up in 11 police cars. A few days later, my daughter ran over to one of our neighbours’ houses for a play. When I walked in there later to get her, there were One Nation pamphlets on the counter. “You went?” I asked. I was hoping (desperately) that her friend’s dad had gone as a protester. “Yeah,” he said, looking a bit embarrassed. “I thought it would be good to hear what she had to say.”
Amid all the political punditry about the One Nation win in Farrer, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, for those on the receiving end of One Nation’s grievance politics, this all feels really personal.
A few years later I was talking to a young woman who came to Australia when she was in primary school. If I remember correctly, she was from east Africa. One of her first assignments at school had been to choose a person in the public eye who she admired and do a presentation on them. It could have been a footy player, a community leader, the prime minister (at the time, Julia Gillard) – anyone.
She chose Pauline Hanson. She didn’t know anything about her except that she was in parliament and had brightly coloured hair. In a sea of men in parliament, her budding feminist instincts told her this was someone worth celebrating. She was cutting out a picture of the red-haired wonder when her teacher came by and asked, with great curiosity, who she had chosen. She proudly proclaimed, “Pauline Hanson!” We had a chuckle as we imagined the delicate choreography of a teacher trying to dissuade an innocent child from idolising someone who had built her entire platform around normalising anti-immigration and Islamophobia.
For as long as she has been in public life, Hanson has made no secret of her hatred for non-European migrants. To this day, her antics have remained remarkably consistent. What’s different is that there is much greater mainstream appetite for her views. Hanson is no longer a lone weirdo: she has candidates, money and a sexy new jet paid for by Gina Rinehart, Trump supporter and Australia’s richest woman.
Much of the commentary on One Nation focuses on how the party has been able to marshal the grievances of everyday Australians about the cost of living, housing supply and low wage growth. The underlying message is that One Nation’s surging support isn’t so much a function of racism and xenophobia as it is a function of widespread, generic political and economic frustration.
In fact, there seems to be tacit support for the idea that it may not be politically correct but that it’s “natural” for the public to direct its frustration at migrants. I don’t accept this.
There are plenty of ways to express anger at a failing political system without scapegoating particular communities. Independents and the Greens have done an excellent job of attacking the major parties while resisting the kind of populism that gives permission to racism and Islamophobia. The Liberal party is not willing to put the work into developing a non-racist conservative platform and so, as I have written elsewhere, the Liberal party’s unserious and lazy approach to politics is playing a major role in rising One Nation support.
There is no question that One Nation supporters are staggering under the weight of economic pressures. But so are we all. It is not clear to me why many media outlets are so keen to privilege the grievances of one segment of Australians over the grievances of others.
Being a Muslim doesn’t protect you from petrol prices, and my skin colour does not make me immune to rent hikes or property prices. As we know the opposite is true – on top of the problems faced by all Aussies, first-generation Australians from non-European backgrounds have a harder time finding jobs and renting homes because of racism.
One Nation supporters are not unique or special. And treating their concerns as though they are more poignant, more precious, is part of a long history of racist scapegoating in this country.
This latest incarnation of racism and xenophobia is also enabled by the nebulous way in which the term “migrant” is used. When One Nation protests about there being too many migrants despite economic data to the contrary, are they upset about French backpackers working at pubs in regional towns? Or are they saying they are unhappy about the Indian Australian community, many of whom are Australian citizens? Do we stop being migrants when we get citizenship, or are we forever migrants even when our families have been here since the 1800s like so many Chinese Australians?
One Nation’s win – in a region that is older and whiter than most in the country – underscores the fact that Australia’s migration problem is driven less by data than it is by a long-running narrative in which white people are seen as being under threat from outsiders. This says a lot about the psyche of a country that was colonised by settlers who would never have called themselves migrants.
Last year, One Nation played a prominent role in anti-immigrant protests that targeted the Indian-Australian community, in particular, and earlier this year Hanson declared that there are no good Muslims.
One Nation’s Farrer MP, David Farley, is now tasked with leading an electorate in which there are several mosques and where the last census recorded Punjabi, Gujarati, Nepali and Chinese as among the languages people speak in their homes.
I’m curious about what their new MP will say to them when they ask him to attend their local events. I wonder whether he will stand shamefaced and make excuses for his boss, or whether he will lean into her rhetoric and decline their invitations. Politics may be discussed in abstract terms but, as we “migrants” know, it’s always personal.
• Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
