‘Hooray, the Wicked Witch is dead!’—well, not quite, Dorothy. One Nation failed to get Pauline Hanson back into parliament in October 1998 and ended up with one senator, and journalists predicted the imminent demise of the new party in a welter of recriminations. Yet the One Nation vote was over one million, making it the third most popular Australian party after Labor and Liberal. Unless there is total chaos within the ranks, this gives it a very solid base on which to build.
A look at the other two parties that broke into the party system in recent history—the Democrats and the Democratic Labor Party (DLP)—suggests it is possible that One Nation will be around for several years. Neither of these other parties was able to get into the House of Representatives, but they had a continuous presence in the Senate for twenty-four and eighteen years respectively, and their preferences were counted in the majority of contests. What makes One Nation a bit different is that all other parties turned against it after the debacle of the Queensland state election, when many Liberals and Nationals cut their own throats, in broad daylight, by underestimating One Nation support. However, public funding now sustains minor parties that can secure a good vote—One Nation will collect $3 million for the future. Like the late lamented Liberace, their critics make them ‘cry all the way to the bank’.
One million votes cannot be ignored or discounted, especially for a party that openly appeals to the apolitical and that behaved in an almost self-consciously idiotic way during its first national election campaign. Pauline Hanson is not an experienced politician like Don Chipp, the Democrat founder, or Frank McManus, the most impressive of the DLP leaders. She came from nowhere and, in her maiden speech, revelled in her lack of experience. To look at the declarations of support for her on the One Nation website just before the election almost brings a tear to the eye. Stilted and semi-literate, the message is the same: you speak for us all; you are honest and not a politician; we love you because you are like us only braver; Australia will decline into oblivion without you; ignore the media and the elites because we, the people, are right behind you.
So what sort of society is Australia if one million of its enfranchised adults prefer the farrago of One Nation ‘policy’ to the heavily researched programs of the Labor, Liberal, National and Democrat parties? A society with problems. One problem is that extreme right-wing groups have been beavering away around the National and Liberal parties for many years and have now found a home at last. While half a dozen such groups ran candidates, none but Hanson got support. Australia, therefore, now has a populist party that can win seats, break the monopoly of the older parties, and see off all other rivals, which puts Australia in the same league as New Zealand (New Zealand First), Canada (Reform) and several European states (especially France and Germany)—though not the United Kingdom, where the National Front and the British National Party are minor players outside east London. All these stable democracies have spawned racist, nationalist, populist parties that have appealed to those who feel left behind in their globalised, information-saturated societies. Yet few of these parties (and not One Nation) are neo-Nazi or fascist, and most speak in code about race relations rather than being overtly racist. They are much better understood as populists within their respective cultures than as totalitarian in the European interwar tradition.
Populism, which is manifest in many societies, originating as a political term in Russia, is inherent in all mass democracies because politicians must be legitimised by voters less informed and less engaged in politics than they are. In English-speaking democracies populism might be traced back as far as the Chartists in 1830s England, many of whom emigrated to Australia after the collapse of the movement in 1848 and some of whom were earlier transported as convicts. A young Chartist who emigrated from Birmingham in 1839 is remembered now as Sir Henry Parkes, the father of federation, and Chartist ideas were prominent at the Eureka stockade in 1854 (it was largely as a result of this influence that Australia became one of the first societies to adopt manhood suffrage). The idea of politicians as servants of the people, which was implicit in much Chartist rhetoric, has a long local history. Queensland in particular has been populist for a century, whatever party has been in power.
Even more relevant for today is the Populist movement in the USA. Associated with William Jennings Bryan, presidential candidate in 1896 and 1900, its themes, according to Paul Johnson in his History of the American People, were ‘conspiracy theory and racism’,1 a description that applies with uncanny accuracy to One Nation a century later. One of the inheritances of American populism is the citizen-initiated referendum and the referendum movement, supported locally by the followers of the American Lyndon La Rouche, who backed Pauline Hanson, who in her turn endorsed their objectives. The greatest influence of US populism was in the Deep South, where it was directed against the northeastern metropolis, Jews, Catholics, liberals and, of course, blacks. Deeply conservative, being associated with Protestant fundamentalism, it was strong enough to control Democratic politics in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana until the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Its militant wing was the Ku Klux Klan. Most of this has faded away, and American populism is now more commonly found once more in the west and in the citizen militias and gun lobbies. An odd echo was found in Queensland through the Confederate Action Party, many of whose activists are said to have joined One Nation, while the Sporting Shooters Association, which backed One Nation financially, was inspired by a basic populist proposition, derived from the American constitution, that citizens ‘have the right to bear arms’.
Populist parties appeal to the uneducated, alienated, marginalised and insecure. The 1998 federal election suggests that there are at least one million Australians who suffer from some or all of these conditions and seek a political solution. Populists also appeal to the majority, the mainstream, to those whom John Howard repeatedly calls ‘the Australian people’ or ‘all of us’. This appeal implies the exclusion of those defined as ‘others’—immigrants, Aborigines, Asians, welfare dependants, elites, cosmopolitans, the latte set, chardonnay socialists, intellectuals, politicians. It was wrongly assumed in 1996 that because Hanson won a Labor stronghold in Oxley, she would do most damage to the Labor Party. The Nationals woke up to that fallacy much more quickly than the Liberals. Many One Nation supporters might otherwise vote Labor, but the party belongs very firmly on the right, certainly as firmly as the Democrats belong to the left despite their historical origins in the Liberal Party.
One Nation support has yet to be analysed for the federal election, but there has been considerable research into its Queensland following. The two most incisive studies, by Murray Goot and Bob Stimson, reach similar conclusions through different methods.2 Goot aggregates public-opinion polls while Stimson correlates booth results in the state election with census data. Goot notes the greater support for One Nation in Queensland than anywhere else, which the federal election bore out. This is hardly surprising, given the long history of Queensland populism and the particular role in it of the Bjelke-Petersen Nationals.
The Federal results suggest areas similar to those in which the party does so well in Queensland; the party gained 12 per cent of the primary vote in thirty-two federal electorates—seventeen in Queensland, six in New South Wales, four each in South Australia and Western Australia and one in Victoria. The great majority were provincial and rural, the rest on the outskirts of Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide. All but two (Bonython and Brand) were won by the coalition in 1996 and most were held by the government in October 1998. Bonython and Brand had large British-born populations, but most of the others were virtually untouched by postwar immigration.
Basing his analysis on the Queensland state results, Stimson concludes that support is strongest in peripheral areas rather than in the outback or more remote rural areas. The One Nation constituency, in his view, ‘is a large and, in all likelihood, a growing component of the community that is both disenchanted, feels disenfranchised, and is relatively highly mobile’.3 This might need to be modified for the federal election, as there was considerable One Nation support in quite remote electorates such as Maranoa, Mallee, Grey, Parkes and Gwydir, as well as in those areas that had already voted for One Nation in the Queensland elections. Stimson and Goot agree that blue-collar workers are particularly susceptible. Goot goes further in pinpointing elderly male support and low levels of education. The classical background for southern populism in the USA also seems to apply in Australia, though for voters who are now much better off and better educated than those in the Deep South of the past. One Nation populism feeds on suspicion of big cities, the professional classes and those whom the recently deceased Alabama populist George Wallace used to call ‘pointy-headed liberals’ (now known as the politically correct). Resentment and alienation are more significant factors than basic poverty. The decline of provincial centres is important but so, to a lesser degree, is the decline of outer industrial suburbs such as Elizabeth (SA) and of manual employment in general.
One Nation populism draws on these fears and resentments but also appeals to engrained Australian attitudes that can be traced back for a century or more. Pauline Hanson admires Pro Hart and R.J. Williams and quotes Arthur Calwell with approval. Opinion polling has found a hard core of ‘nativists’ who either deny that the country has changed or, more commonly, believe that it is declining rapidly and should go back to its ‘real’ self. They are confident that they are the backbone of the country; that they should define what is truly Australian and who is entitled to be called an Australian. They are older, less well-educated, more Christian, more rural and more likely to be Australian-born than the average.4 They feel, with Hanson, that it is ‘bizarre’ that the cities are becoming ‘Asian’ while the rest of the country is more traditionally ‘Australian’. They expect migrants to speak English, to give their total loyalty to Australia, and to leave the quarrels of the old world behind. Word for word these expectations can be traced back through the generations—the earliest example I have found was in Victorian parliamentary debates about Irish immigration in 1863, but further research could undoubtedly dig up earlier cases. The point about all these formulae is that they repeat folk wisdom. They are thus incorrigible and cannot be shifted by rational argument or endless facts. As Pauline said about figures of the Asian population, ‘those are just official figures, and I don’t believe them’.
Australians are disunited in many ways, as are the citizens of most other societies, The notion that there is a community—’the Australian people’—that embraces all those of goodwill is a politician’s illusion, most strongly subscribed to by John Howard. That less than half the voters endorsed his government does not prevent him from claiming a mandate from ‘the people’, nor would it have inhibited Kim Beazley from making the same claim if a handful of votes had gone the other way and delivered up a majority of Labor seats. The rise of One Nation (however temporary) to a support level greater than that of any secondary party raises some serious issues for the future. Australian politics and popular attitudes have always been much more populist than in Britain or Europe, where a degree of hierarchy and deference is still influential. Populism is peculiarly the ideology of settler societies—Australia, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina. There society is not rigidly stratified, and politicians depend on the voters rather than on patronage or heredity. Tall poppies are suspect—witness, locally, the recent fates of Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Alexander Downer or Cheryl Kernot. Yet charismatic leaders are not rejected if they appeal to the people—hence the support of Bjelke-Petersen, Hanson, Wallace, or, in the past, Jack Lang and Juan Peron.
Populists favour a majoritarian democratic society in which all should be judged on their personal merits rather than their origins. This, again, is a central belief of both John Howard and Pauline Hanson in their approaches to Aboriginal or multicultural policy. Populism is not an unmixed blessing any more than any other political ideology. It assumes that political leaders are servants of the people and should be as like them as possible. But political leaders are not like the people any more, if they ever were. They are much better educated and informed and much more influenced by expert opinion. Candidate selection is a trade-off between popularity and competence. The shift in educational and social background of Australian Labor and National politicians has been especially marked. As in Animal Farm, the animals look at the pigs and then at the men and find them to be the same. This was not true in the golden days of Ben Chitley, Jack McEwen or Arthur Calwell: they were not like Stanley Bruce, John Latham or Bob Menzies.
Any society in which so many people voted for One Nation should start to worry a bit more. Any society that bases its economic future on globalisation should worry a lot more about the decline of major economies such as Japan and Russia. Those to whom populism appeals most are those most vulnerable to economic decline. As things get worse their populism becomes more resentful, more punitive, more hostile to ‘others’, whether at home or overseas. Fortunately for Australia, many of One Nation’s supporters are elderly. They will not become fascist street fighters. But a society that contains such a large alienated minority, believing themselves to be the ‘real Australians’, will not be a happy one to live in. This minority cannot simply be bought back by subsidies or the kind of bribes being paid out of centenary of federation funds by the government during the October election. Australian society does not offer much to those brought up in British White Australia (1900-70), nor to those living outside the cities, nor to those without qualifications or skills, nor to those who reject the multicultural and global reality. Public policies that elevate the market or globalisation will not serve them well or alleviate their resentments. The future does not belong to them or to One Nation. But for the present, they are the ghosts at the political feast and they will not go away just yet.
1 Paul Johnson, History of the American People, Harper Collins. New York, 1997, p. 505.
2 Murray Goot, ‘Hanson’s Heartland: Who’s for One Nation and Why?’, Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the One Nation Party in Australia, Bookman, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 51-74.
3 Rex Davis and Bob Stimson, ‘Disillusionment and Disenchantment at the fringe’, People & Place, 6/3, 1998, pp. 69-72.
4 Frank L Jones, ‘National Identity and Social Values’, People & Place, 4/4, 1996, pp. 17-26.
