Pauline Hanson - the battler's back

By GREG ANSLEY

Last August, still in a life-or-death struggle for control of her party, still to repay half the $A500,000 ($603,000) owed to the Queensland Electoral Commission because of fraudulent declarations, and still written off by virtually every political commentator in Australia, Pauline Hanson announced she was back.

Two months later Hanson was in Perth, shaking off her media image as a dead woman walking and defying the inevitable hecklers to embrace the faithful and stake out new turf, new allies and new candidates for a state election in which she intended to be pivotal.

Come November, as the media surveyed the wreckage of her One Nation Party after the destructive rebellion in which her two closest advisers were
ousted, Hanson remained to most analysts just another bright but brief phenomenon in a century-long shower of similar political comets from the right.

In an article titled The Death of One Nation, the Bulletin commented on the legal wraping up of the party's former
corporate structure: "The funeral was held in a Canberra courtroom. Hanson, however, does not call it this. She sees it as the beginning of a resurrection."

A book, The Rise and Fall of One Nation, followed, describing the party as a shooting star that blazed spectacularly across Australia's political skies before crashing to Earth in 1999. Only faint, smouldering traces remained.

So how was it that two weekends ago Hanson, clad in an amazing jungle-print halter-neck dress, strode triumphantly through the carnage of the West Australian election, radiantly, and even a little smugly, accepting the mantle of kingmaker?

And how, a week ago in Queensland, did she recapture almost all of her lost vote in the seats her party contested in Queensland and win sufficient support, on that count, to gain a seat in the Senate in the federal elections due later this year?

And why, when she chanted her new mantra, "I am not there to keep the bastards honest, I'm there to get rid of the bastards," did tremors run so deeply through Prime Minister John Howard's ruling coalition?
The simple answer is that Pauline Hanson never went away.

If she had, someone would have inven-
ted another Hanson, or even a clutch of little Hansons, to harness and speak for the deep pool of resentment and anger in Australia's country towns, on its farms, around the semi-rural fringes of its cities, and among the new urban working poor.

One Nation is not simply the voice of the far right, the neo-nazis, the racists and the gun freaks, although it has a natural constituency among them. The coalition is broader, embracing a far wider sense of frustration, betrayal, isolation and helplessness. Hansonism is more about the politics of pain than the politics of hate.

Much of its vote is a protest rather than an advocacy of Hanson and her views. And Hanson is the most obvious beneficiary of a great shift away from the two major pillars of Australian politics — the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor — which began with the emergence of the Democrats two decades ago, accelerated with the Greens and has now splintered into a rain of independents.

In the past 30 years the share of the federal primary vote held by Labor and the Coalition has shrunk from more than 90 per cent to less than 80 per cent.

In this month's West Australian election 30 per cent of the primary vote went to independents and minor parties, and in Queensland One Nation won 8.9 per cent of the statewide vote, while other minors and independents won 14 per cent.

Pauline Hanson tapped that rich vein with her own ordinariness: the ideal of the little Aussie battler who survived two broken marriages, made her own way running a fish-and-chip shop in working-class Ipswich, west of Brisbane, and who was not afraid to face the heavies of the media and ask what xenophobic meant.

Her famous "Please explain" when being interviewed has shifted from derogation to badge of honour: Hanson, to the delight of her followers, intends to move into fashion design with her own Please Explain label when she quits politics.

"I'm just an ordinary Aussie who has just stood her ground on certain issues," she says.

And her supporters believe it: Pauline Hanson is one of them. Every time the media batters Pauline, her support deepens; when she abruptly walks out on a
hectoring interviewer, the battler within them all walks out with her.

And she has become far smarter, more polished with the media, refusing to let herself be distracted from her message by side trips into Hansonisms, and playing on her gender and patronism that commonly sees her interviewed as Pauline, rather than the Mrs Hanson that would apply if she was the leader of a real party.

Sydney talkback king John Laws flew her down from Brisbane and had her chauffeur-driven to the studio, but used her first name and at one stage told her, "Just be a good girl there, just settle down there."

It's hardly the way Laws would treat Howard or Opposition Leader Kim Beazley, but in a quirky way it works to Hanson's advantage: she remains Pauline, the champion from the suburbs, not some elevated sellout who's forgotten where she came from.

Hanson talks the talk of the disaffec-
ted, hitting on the issues that hurt them most: the perceived isolation and arrogance of decision-makers; national competition policies that are tearing down the props that held up many farms, small businesses and industries; excise-inspired petrol price rises; dairy deregulation; GST and the bookkeeping burden placed on small business; the loss of government services; failings in health, education and roads ... Oddly, it is not always the voice of the right.

Hanson's advocacy of Australia-first economics — a retreat to protectionism, opposition to foreign investment, demands for industry regulation, greater state intervention and more selective welfarism — would sit just as comfortably in a manifesto of the left.

It is no coincidence that, to their horror, anti-globalism protesters massing against the World Economic Forum summit in Melbourne last year found One Nation supporters enthusiastically in their midst.

But if the voice is not exclusively a mantra of the right, it is uniquely Hanson's.
On globalisation: "The Gatt agreement, the World Trade Organisation ... even bringing pork into Australia, and the citrus and the apples they're bringing in and with it will bring fly blight [actually fireblight]. We've destroyed so many industries in Australia and this has been aided and abetted by both parties."

On reconciliation: "Reconciliation will only happen in Australia when you treat everyone equal and the same. Australians are getting fed up with seeing the difference between an Aboriginal Australian and the other Australians."

On boat people: "Turn them around ... It is a known fact that they actually pay for the passage here. They destroy their identification, they won't tell us who they are. They're not refugees. They've got something to hide."

On gun control: "What they've done is treat law-abiding citizens as criminals by taking their guns off them. People who have fought and defended this country with a gun thrown in their hand — you've got the man on the land whose right to own a gun has been taken away from him. You outlaw guns and only outlaws will have them."
On homosexuality: "I stand by the family unit, which is mum, dad and the kids. It [homosexuality] is not natural."

By such cracker-barrel pronouncements, Hanson articulates an eclectic populism that is reflected in the policies unveiled for the Queensland election and which will drive her federal ambitions.

She wants to lower education requirements for police to allow more streetwise cops on the beat, supports mand-
atory sentencing and a zero tolerance of crime, and wants to allow homeowners to use guns to defend themselves.

Hospitals should be returned to public management and nurses trained in hospitals rather than at universities, the size of school classes should be cut and government-funded apprenticeships should be introduced.

The national competition policy should be repealed, payroll, land and other taxes should be abolished, the dairy industry should be re-regulated and farmers should be encouraged to plant trees through right-to-harvest guarantees.

The lack of breadth, depth, coherence or costings in the policy mix does not concern Hanson's followers:
it is the breath of anger, rather than the breath of reason. Hanson's constituency lies largely in the bush, in dying country towns and urban fringes that have seen their world change, contract and turn upon them with bewildering speed and ferocity.

Across Australia, the small towns that gave life to the bush are withering or already dead, abandoned by their young in an accelerating rush. KPMG demographer Bernard Salt says 120 rural local areas lost more than 1 per cent of their base population in 1999, compared with just 74 in the preceding 24 years.

Local manufacturers and small shops and businesses have folded. Ghost towns, streets of boarded windows, unpainted churches for sale, abandoned schools, vanishing football leagues, collapsing social services, endemic unemployment, tragically rising suicide and drug abuse rates and communities stripped of their youth scar rural Australia.

An exhaustive study of trends in rural health, education and banking services by the National Farmers Federation four years ago both spelled out the process of decay and accurately forecast further deterioration.
Despite the fact that rural people suffer a greater incidence of disease and illness than urban Australians, health services have been contracting, and many specialist services — such as anaesthetics, obstetrics, gynaecology and urology — do not exist in rural areas.

Health care is hobbled by inadequate hospital facilities, a shortage of 500 GPs, and shortages of surgeons, locums, dentists, pharmacists, and aged care and mental health workers. Shortages of schools and teachers and wholesale closures of bank branches have compounded problems.

Where there has been growth in regional Australia, promoted by better transport and telecommunications, it has too often come at the expense of smaller surrounding towns.

Dairy deregulation, forced upon reluctant farmers by the power of the huge Victorian industry, forced out more than 300 farmers in its first six months, with another 4000 expected to follow in the next five years.
Petrol prices in the bush — where people must drive much further for even basic needs — are anywhere up to 12c a litre higher than in the cities.

Globalisation and the national competition policy, launched to drive economic efficiency, are seen as guns to the head of small business.

Bob Katter, a maverick federal National Party MP who believes his Government's policies are as popular as a brown snake in a sleeping bag, wrote in an article in the Australian Financial Review that competition policies had, within three years, increased the market share of the three biggest grocery chains from 68 per cent to 80.4 per cent.

And on present trends, he wrote, globalisation would see Australia become a net importer of food within the next seven to 15 years.

This is the torque of Hansonism, the driving force of One Nation's revival. But how real is the power?
For the moment at least, Hanson is punching above her weight.

Although One Nation won up to 20 per cent of the vote in some rural seats in Western Australia and almost 10 per cent statewide, the broader support for the Greens was sufficient to gain five seats in the state's upper House — two more than One Nation.

Similarly, in Queensland, One Nation polled strongly in the electorates it contested and won three seats, but the most significant factor in that election was the inroads Labor made into traditionally conservative constituencies.

Hanson's heaviest punch is her policy of directing her supporters' preferences against sitting MPs. This delivered conservative seats to Labor in Western Australia, toppling Liberal Premier Richard Court, and has the potential to unseat Howard.

But analysis of the 1998 election confirms many people used One Nation as a protest vote — 54 per cent of its preferences went to the Coalition, 46 per cent to Labor — and the deals struck with 17 National MPs in Queensland failed to save most of them.

How effective Hanson's vengeance on the major parties will be in the federal poll remains to be seen. But it is already enough of a threat to cast panic into the Coalition, with a clutch of MPs apparently ready to defy orders to reject deals with Hanson, and instead to scream for policy changes and backdowns to pacify their constituents.

This may be the real impact of Hanson: the coalescence of an emerging discontent with economic efficiency, free trade, open competition and deregulation that, if not actually supporting One Nation, has found its voice in its leader.

Labor has already indicated a more interventionist posture, Howard has launched multi-billion dollar infrastructure programmes targeting the bush and there are rumblings in the Government that could see, for example, a backpedalling in competition reforms and lavish spending in the May budget.

Not bad for an ordinary girl.