Introductory comments
The article below is a classic case of unbalanced reporting. In the article Lumby tries to present the view that One Nation's policies and issues are based around what has gone before in the US. This is palpable trash.... you can assess for yourself the barely concealed derision and hatred that spews out of her pen across the page.
The comments
made by Margo Kingston hide more than they show... just one of the issues
here is the refusal of Lumby to refer to the time when Kingston was
caught disrupting a One Nation meeting at a critical time in the Federal
Election... and how she became the news... not very professional
one would think.
Full story with images at this link.
By Catharine Lumby
Media - The Australian 6th May 1999
The role the mass media played in the rise of Pauline Hanson is not as transparent as many critics have suggested.
In 1996 Australia was introduced to a political force that seemed to erupt from nowhere, to an unexpected new player in our two party system that in no way resembled other recent challenges to the Liberal or Labor parties.
The rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation came as an enormous shock to many Australians, particularly to urban educated Australians, regardless of their political allegiance. To these voters, Hanson's thinly veiled racism, bush-week (sic) economics, and brutal, small town moralism seemed like a horrible reprise of the Australia many believed had been laid to rest in the early 60s along with the White Australia Policy.
Retrospectively, it's clear that there were plenty of clouds on the political horizon heralding the storm to come. Even a basic analysis of the unemployment statistics in rural areas and former industrial regional centres suggests that the social fabric was wearing thin. One of the most commonly voiced claims about the rise of Hanson was that she was a creation of the media - a chimera conjured up by a wanton press so eager for controversy that its reporters were willing to strike at the heart of the public interest for the sake of a good story.
The rise of Hanson certainly had a lot to do with the media, but the connection between the two is neither as transparent nor as direct as many have suggested. Hanson's rise points to some fundamental changes in democracy, the public sphere and our broader cultural environment - changes which as we've seen, are profoundly connected with the rise of the mass media.
Despite her parochial rhetoric Hanson is, in fact, a highly contemporary figure - a post modern figure if you like - and a symptom of important shifts that the media has helped engender in modern democracy. A large part of her appeal lies in the fact that she is perceived as being from outside politics - as a real person, whose humanity is only underscored by her halting dentist's drill voice and her challenged vocabulary. In marketing terms, Hanson is that highly sought after commodity: the product people buy when they want to show their disgust at buying products (sic). And as many numerous talented interviewers have found out when they tried to expose her flawed arguments to the public, all the usual equations are reversed when it comes to accounting for her popularity.
In an interview with Hanson on A Current Affair, then host Ray Martin tried to badger her on why she hadn't turned up to vote on a hundred pieces of legislation while she'd been in Federal Parliament. Hanson responded by blushing indignantly and talking in a shrill tone on top of him. The effect was to turn the current affairs interview format into a family domestic in which what Martin was saying became less important than what he was doing: using irrelevant male facts to humiliate his well meaning wife. In a Lateline interview with Hanson in May 1997, Maxine McKew also fell into the trap of trying to nail her down with statistics. McKew, too, risked looking like a smug elitist: a smarty pants university-educated chick in a suit, to put it bluntly. Hanson knew it too. After the exchange she shot McKew one of those smiles a parent gives a teenager who has just scored points in an argument but hasn't realised she's about to be grounded for the weekend.
In both political and media terms, Hanson cuts across the conventional logic of the system. She's great television because she's so bloody awful on TV: her clothing is cheap, her makeup draws attention to itself, and she explains herself with all the natural charm of someone delivering a prepared speech at a Rotary function. Hanson, in short, has the appeal of an amateur video: she represents a rawer, "realer" world that eludes the sophisticated production values of television current affairs and political spin doctors.
In a fascinating symbolic game Hanson, for a time at least, held all the cards: the less media savvy she appeared to have, the more media savvy she, in fact, had. If the media tried to make her look bad they ended up helping her campaign but if they left her alone they did nothing to debunk her campaign.
The perverse appeal of Hanson's media amateurism was profoundly linked to the appeal of her anti-politician politics. She told Martin that her failure to vote on bills before Parliament was proof of the fact that she's not part of the system, but when she did vote on an issue or make a political statement, she was quick to hold it up as proof that she was there to make a difference. Hanson's policies and persona are similarly paradoxical in conventional political terms - she confounds the conventional political right/left spectrum, at least as we've understood it for the past three decades. She wants to keep public utilities in public hands, but she wants to abolish (special, race based - left out in article) funding for Aboriginal people and the arts. She's opposed to giving single mothers welfare benefits, but she's the highest profile single mother in Australian political history. She's highly nationalistic, but she has nicked many of her policies from the US.
The latter phenomenon provided one of the weirdest spectacles of Hanson's rise: many of her policies were bizarre montage of recent American politics, from Bob Dole's Clean Up TV campaign to Ross Perot's populism, to X-Files fundamentalism, and in early 1998 we saw all the highlights flash before us: the call for a people's bank, the attack on immoral television programs, the pro-gun stance, the anti-welfare stance, the attacks on immigration, the offensive against single mothers, and the fringe militia group supporters. The passion fruit of the pavlova was her claim that the United Nations was banding together with Aboriginal people to enable the establishment of an indigenous state.
The itony, of course, is that Hanson's opposition to globalisation was enabled by the globalisation of information flows. Her cultural and political value is highly mediated by what many voters have absorbed about other cultural and political contexts: particularly those of the US. It's not simply a question of whether Hanson has intentionally borrowed from American political rhetoric, it's that many of the recent debates that she has ignited here only make sense when they're related to debates that originated elsewhere (sic).
The furure over political correctness, a term Hanson was quick to deploy, is a classic example. As McKenzie Wark notes in his book The Virtual Republic, the American campaign against political correctness was initiated by right-wing think-tanks "with a great deal more money than credibility". Wark writes: "PC is a remarkable example of the way free-floating public anxiety and resentment can align itself like iron filings towards a magnet, if there is a fantasy object in range that has enough of a charge - and enough publicity". While Wark is referring here to the origins of American anti-PC activism, his analysis describes the Australian strain of the virus equally well.
Gerard Henderson is a prominent conservative Australian writer and political commentator, but in a 1998 column about the rise of Hanson, he too launched a broadside at the uncritical appropriation of PC rhetoric in Australian politics. Henderson even argued that the anti-PC lobby has helped lay the foundations of Hanson'' rise. He wrote that "numerous Australian commentators and personalities have rallied at what is now fashionably termed 'political correctness', well before Hanson and her political adviser David Oldfield adopted the mantra". Henderson's list was a long one.
Henderson is not a commentator who lightly goes into bat on behalf of the left, but he was clearly disturbed at the way Hanson's rise was implicitly aided by the co-option of US anti-PC rhetoric - rhetoric that claims that it's actually dominant groups who are now oppressed by minority groups. The idea that gangs of left wing moralists have been roaming the country gagging white men and locking them in closets because they've dared to question feminism or multiculturalism is, of course, a patent fantasy (commentators note - Lumby lives in fantasy land on this issue). John Howard, with a host of other political conservatives, has been questioning our immigration policy since the 80s. Talkback radio is dominated by right-wing commentators who are notoriously hostile to multiculturalism and other liberal policies. And our newspapers have an abundance of male columnists who regularly attack the "feminazis" and other supposed left wing icons. It's true that attacks on multiculturalism, feminism and other leftist initiatives draw strong responses in public debate, but there's an enormous difference between censorship and criticism.
The anti-PC push is interesting, not because it exposes the truth about public debate, but because it demonstrates how even the terms we use to discuss the shape of the public debate are influenced by ideas framed and disseminated in a global media context. The transferability of American political rhetoric is more than a sign that Australia faces similar social and economic problems in the global capitalist area - it's equally a sign that global flows of information have changed the way we think about politics in a local context.
Pauline Hanson embodies the contradictions that attend politics and culture in the late capitalist era. Her political appeal refutes the binaries that ground so much of her thinking: the local and the global left and the right, and, most profoundly, the media sphere and the real political world outside it. She's also a reminder that the globalisation of capital and information flow isn't a monolithic or predictable process, that systems of power always produce new forms of resistance and unexpected effects, both politically and culturally. Indeed Hanson is a living refutation of the idea that the mass media blithely manufacture the consent of the masses on behalf of political and business elites (or, in crude terms, brainwash them into thinking that they're happy). Hanson and her supporters are highly sceptical, if not deeply paranoid, about both the media and existing political system. They view both groups as elites. And they've had no trouble finding a podium for their view in either sphere.
One Nation has also been adept at exploiting alternative to mainstream political and media platforms. The Internet has been an invaluable tool for soliciting, informing and connecting members of the party. In political terms, the Internet equivalent is Hanson's town hall gatherings. A political journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald, Margo Kingston, has followed Hanson's campaign from the outset. She says that one of Hanson's key skills is her ability to mingle with and listen to her constituency. Hanson, she says, is frequently the last person to leave a venue. "She'll arrive, give a speech, take a series of questions and then wander around having tea with everybody. She might be there for three hours." This populist approach to campaigning has its mirror in Hanson's distrust of the institutionalised media. Kingston recalls an event that found her image posted on One Nation's web site.
"Malcolm Farr (the chief political
reporter for the Daily Telegraph and I went to Hanson's victory celebration
in Ipswich after the 1998 Queensland election. We were just there to confirm
interviews with her for the next day and malcolm suggested we have a photo
taken with her for our reporter's scrapbooks. We were photographed by the
Daily Telegraph photographer with our arms slung around her. The next
day I got a call telling me the photo was on the One Nation website. A
One Nation supporter had taken a photo at the same time (Scott Balson). I
was horrified."
Kingston offers her experience as evidence that One Nation has turned the tables on the mainstream media. "They're constantly filming us filming them... From now on, if I'm on the trail of Hanson, I'll be aware that I'm on stage myself." Her analysis nails an important aspect of Hanson's strategy. One Nation is frequently derided as backward or redneck. In fact, the party has employed a sophisticated strategy of welding together cutting edge technology - in the form of the Internet - and pre-modern town hall meetings to reach the public. One Nation is perhaps the first significant Australian political party to effectively bypass the authority of the mainstream media and use the Internet to communicate with its supporters.
Addressing Pauline Hanson means recognising why and how she has been able to exploit contemporary hostility to both the mass media and conventional politics. And it means seeing that forces like Hanson and her supporters can't be opposed with conventional liberal strategies in either area: they can't simply be countered with rational argument, facts and figures. Hanson stands for the politics of feeling - on one level she is the political level of talk back radio, American talk shows and tabloid TV. Her appeal lies in her rawness, her hyperbole, and her ability to tap into visceral instincts and primal fears. When bearded sociologists attack her with logic, or clever dick reporters start quoting figures at her, they simply confirm her allure. Hanson knows it - that's precisely why she can't afford to smirk when journalists quote Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on immigration to her.