Review 22.9
27 June - 24 July 1997

Hey, did you hear the one about Small Business Minister Geoff Prosser? Shocking story. Apparently, back in the early 90s, he employed Jan Pope - wife of WA League of Rights leader Murray Pope - in one of his electorate offices. Sack him, I say. Yes, yes, I know he's also bogged down in all this nonsense about a conflict of interest, but the League link: surely that's the killer blow?

Surely that's the killer blow, I say, because this appears to be a variation on the line that the Howard Government (and a section of the media) is running against Pauline Hanson. Pauline is linked to the League of Rights, or, to be more precise, the League would like to be linked to Pauline. Or Pauline has extremists running her branches. Two, to be precise. Or Pauline is endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

I must say, the last one had even me gasping for air. Frankly, I'm for anything that might lead Pauline Hanson to drape a bedsheet over that mean-looking head of hers, but this was a beat-up to end all beat-ups. I wonder whether Tim Fischer would have been so cock-a-hoop had the journalist produced a few appropriate quotes and asked the Grand Wizard whether he also supported Liberal Senator Ross Lightfoot. The answer, I suspect, would have been the same.

Now, I don't believe it is wrong to show how Hanson has become the pin-up girl of the international far-right and our own rather shabbier specimens. I've done it, others on the Review have done it, and the links have to be made, to remind voters that Hansonism is not the Liberal Party, Country Party or ALP of the 1950s. Whatever she is, and whatever he was, she ain't no Arthur Calwell. But that's not enough. And whatever the great merits of National Party Senator Ron Boswell's recent valuable denunciation of Hanson, it has to be said that many of the direct hits he scored against her could also have be scored against some of his parliamentary colleagues.

I'm not thinking of Geoff Prosser here. Frankly, I don't give a stuff whether he hired Jan Pope or not, so long as she worked a full day's work and wasn't advising him on matters related to multiculturalism. (Although I must admit that I remain curious about the social circle that might have brought them together.) To me, the worry about Geoff Prosser is that there is an impression that he apparently breached the spirit (and quite possibly the letter) of the Prime Minister's guidelines on ministerial conduct when he had, as we all now know, more than 100 meetings or conversations about his private businesses since he became a minister. And it is that sort of behaviour, and the partisan covering-up of that sort of behaviour (by both sides of politics), that fuels Hansonism far better than any efforts on the part of the League of Rights or other minuscule extremist outfits.

To me, two events since the election have done a great deal to boost Pauline Hanson's cause: the Prime Minister's obvious inability to effectively confront her crazy notions, and the unseemly circus surrounding Mal Colston and his alleged rorting of travel allowances.

The first issue has been well-covered in these pages. The second might seem tangential to Hansonism, but it is not. Pauline Hanson's popularity is in many ways linked to the impression that she is not just another Lib-Lab politician. The Colston affair was almost tailor-made for an independent MP such as Ms Hanson, out to show how the parties look after their own, at the expense of "ordinary" Australians. And as much as Labor worked itself up into a self-righteous frenzy against a Government apparently covering up for its new-found mate, the Government was well able to point out that Colston had had his snout in the Parliamentary trough since 1975, with the blessings of his old Labor mates.

The public's mistrust of politicians is always generally high, and partly that's the fault of the public. I'm not fooled by populist blather about the noble aims of the common people; most voters whinge endlessly about the crooks in Canberra, and then vote them back in at the first opportunity. But in a time of intractable unemployment, even the most uneducated voter has my sympathy when he or she starts yowling about a pollie on the take. When Paul Howard or John Keating tells us to hang on, that the good times are just around the corner, over the next rise, after the next structural adjustment, one can't help be experience a sickening feeling of deja vu.

When we focus exclusively on Hanson's odd fellow-travellers, or her odder views, we are not getting the full picture. Voters are flocking to Hanson's banner because they are not happy with politics-as-usual. They are suspicious of politicians looking after their own. They are worried that they might not have a job in two years' time, or that their children might never have a job. If a recent Newspoll is anything to go by, it's a frightening 77 per cent. And yes, there is even specific anxiety related to mythical fears about their culture being changed irrevocably by Asian immigration. John Howard thinks he can ride these fears out. But Hanson not only taps into people's primal fears, she also stirs vitalist longings. There is more than a whiff of fascism about her naive insistence on cleaning up Australia , as if a few decrees would magically sort out Australia's problems. The last Government to pull that con-job was the corruption-riddled regime of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, another far-right Queenslander whose high-flown rhetoric never matched his fly-blown substance.

The specific form that discontent has taken since Pauline Hanson's election may very well dissipate over the next few years, especially if she fails to electorally exploit that discontent. But the drift away from the major parties will continue, the rise of quasi-fundamentalist politics will continue, and one day in the next decade, Australia will reap what has been sown by those who had real power and influence and yet were mesmerised by a shrill wannabe from Ipswich.