Abstract
When Pauline Hanson’s One Nation right-populism emerged as a political force in Australia many took it to be a radical threat to the health of political democracy. It was nothing of the sort. It was, rather, a symptomatic expression of the failure of that democracy as elites of the traditional labour and business parties embraced a shared policy orientation that undercut their ties to their traditional working-class and middle class bases. Hanson’s right-populism emerged from the increasingly status anxious traditional Liberal Party base as it drew upon and reasserted the class-repressing, status elevating, middle class ideology of home that the founder of the party, Robert Menzies, had laid out in the 1940s. This ideology defined the status of the traditionally conservative middle classes as patriotic and self-reliant; frugal savers whose status demanded government refuse the entitlement claims of those perceived as the more feckless and less prudent in the community, and protect them from the philistine monetary aspirations of those Menzies derided as occupants of “great luxury hotels.” Today, this conception founds a nostalgic populism of personal and nationalistic pride in being “at home”, and having worked hard for that “home”. Its broader politics are that of “border control” and a rigid control of access. Those “invited in” must share and respect the values of the household, and, domestically, of a powerful antipathy to government redistribution downwards that reflects a need to divide the deserving from the undeserving on the basis of the amount of pride one takes in one’s home, its values, maintenance and cohesiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
Consider the ALP’s elections slogans from 1983 until today. 1983: Bringing Australia Together. 1984: Put Australia First. 1987: Let’s stick together. Let’s see it through. 1990: Bob Hawke for Australia’s Future. 1993: Australia Deserves Better. 1996: Leadership. 1998: A Safe and Secure Future for all Australians. 2001: A Secure Future for all Australians. 2004: Opportunity for all Australians. 2007: New Leadership. 2010: Together: Let’s Move Australia Forward. 2013: A New Way. 2016: We’ll Put People First. (See Young 2016).
- 2.
Speaking to John Laws on Radio 2 GB, May 14, 1986 (see Conley 2013).
- 3.
In typical fashion, Gillard later expressed her “regret” at these policies. Unsurprisingly this was a not a regret at their international law violating cruelty and sheer inhumanity, and so a repudiation of a PHON driven policy, rather a regret that “our government and our parliament was not better able to handle refugee and asylum seeker policy”. She then added the absurd remark (for the entire policy area was driven by slogans: “Turn Back the Boats!”, “Illegal immigrants!”, “Border Protection!”) “As the current government is already discovering, this is a policy area that defies the easy certainties of sloganeering” (Gillard, in Johnston 2013).
- 4.
For a typical celebratory expression of this conjunction, see the address by Paul Kelly (now Editor-at-Large of Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper) to the Reserve Bank of Australia (Kelly 2000): “The politics of economic change in Australia in the 1980s and the 1990s.”
- 5.
One practical initiative of the Obama administration was equally revealing. They offered Cathy O’Neill, a hedge-fund QUANT who had aligned herself with OWS , a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (She turned it down on realizing those making the offer had no interest in OWS concerns, but were seeking a public relations coup) (see Langston 2017 [Epilogue]).
- 6.
This is the view of the Australian analyst of PHON, David Marr, for whom it is clear that “One Nation will never be dealt with until the major parties find the courage to address the issue that haunts this country: race” (Marr 2017).
- 7.
There is one mention of Indigenous Australians in PHON’s “Principles and Objectives”:
3. To acknowledge and respect the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first peoples of this land. However, One Nation opposes acknowledging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the preamble to the Australian Constitution, as One Nation believes that all Australians are owners and custodians of this land and should work toward unification, not segregation, under the one law for all.
- 8.
Though a diminished and stressed middle class that, 40 years into neoliberalism and the abandonment of the working class by their traditional parties, now tends to view itself as that group made up of all “hard-working families”.
- 9.
Hanson (for reasons, as we shall see, I take to be associated with her commitment to the Mensian politics of home) seems compelled to organize PHON around herself and a strong male figure. These men exhaust that list thus far.
- 10.
Menzies’ 1942 speech is widely available. I take all the quotations that follow from the copy to be found at the Menzies Foundation (n.d.).
- 11.
Strikingly, but unsurprisingly, Hockey’s words resemble those of Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Leader’s Speech to the Labour Party Conference, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, 1 October 2002.
Now with globalisation, a new era has begun. People are no less individualist, but they are insecure. Modern prosperity may be greater but modern life is pressure and stress. 20th Century collective power was exercised through the Big State. Their welfare was paternalistic, handing down from on high. That won’t do today. Just as mass production has departed from industry, so the monolithic provision of services has to depart from the public sector. People want an individual service for them.
They want Government under them not over them.
They want Government to empower them, not control them. And they want equality of both opportunity and responsibility. They want to know the same rules that apply to them, apply to all. Out goes the Big State. In comes the Enabling State. Out goes a culture of benefits and entitlements. In comes a partnership of rights and responsibilities. That’s why we need reform (Blair 2002).
- 12.
For my own account of this story, see Lynch (2016).
- 13.
One might, with an ironical hat tip to Obama’s (2006) Oprah Winfrey-endorsed bestseller, call this line of thought, The audacity of hope; a hat tip even more deserved with the title’s completion: reclaiming the American dream.
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Lynch, T. (2019). Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: Right-Populism in a Neoliberal World. In: Grant, B., Moore, T., Lynch, T. (eds) The Rise of Right-Populism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2670-7_3
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