Will the real Pauline Hanson please stand up! For a politician whose popularity is based on her supposed willingness to talk straight, she speaks with a surprisingly forked tongue on matters of race.
There is the Hanson of the maiden speech to Parliament. This Pauline warned that Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians", and said she had "no hesitation in echoing" former Labor leader Arthur Calwell's remarks that Australia did not want or need any migrants from Asia and Africa. A similar Pauline recently told ABC's Four Corners that there were "too many of one race coming to Australia".
Seemingly opposed to this Hanson, there is colour-blind Pauline who doesn't care about anyone's race, as long as they fit into Australian society. This Pauline lost Liberal Party endorsement for the 1996 election after she wrote a letter to The Queensland Times demanding that governments "wake up to themselves and start looking at equality not colour".
This same Pauline had to be prevented from committing what her former adviser John Pasquarelli called "political hari kari" in a speech to Parliament in December 1996, where she had planned to say, "I wouldn't mind if there were more Asians in Australia than Anglo-European Australians as long as they spoke English".
Then there is Pauline, friend of Asians and Aborigines, whom we saw chiding a sad fellow on last Monday's Four Corners program who had said he was "sick of Asian people" and blacks. Hanson responded, "I don't like your attitude ... If you think you are here because I feel that way, well then, you are very wrong and misguided".
Last week, this Pauline went even further. To the protesters who held up placards with the words "Asians are welcome here" at her open-air meeting in Ipswich, she shouted, "Yes I agree. Asians are welcome here".
The uncertainty about Hanson's real beliefs could be ended by an acid test. Why not ask her to appear as "the-Pauline-who-welcomes-Asians" in the international marketing campaign that Peter Beattie's government and Queensland's universities are running. This commendable campaign will attempt to convince potential students in Asia that Queensland is a friendly and tolerant place, thus protecting an industry which generates $9 million a week for the state.
If we really want to reassure Asians, who better to invite them to Australia than Hanson herself, the person responsible for creating all the anxiety. Such a campaign would require little paid advertising, because its news value alone would ensure enormous publicity in the overseas media, benefiting tourism and other service industries as well as education.
Unfortunately however, Asian television viewers are unlikely to see Pauline telling them she has put another prawn on the barby in eager anticipation of their visit. People on both sides of the One Nation divide have an interest in keeping the matter of Ms Hanson's real views about race as murky as possible.
Mixed messages clearly suit the electoral strategy that Hanson's political adviser David Oldfield has mapped out. On the one hand, One Nation can claim it is not a racist party, thereby retaining support from Australians who are sick of the existing parties, yet who also believe it is wrong to judge individuals by the colour of their skin.
But it can also keep "nudging and winking" in the direction of people who really don't like Asians, in the hope they will vote for One Nation rather than Graeme Campbell's Australia First Party. Campbell claims Hanson took most of her ideas from him; and in some ways his is the more radical party. It has just announced that the Mayor of Port Lincoln, Peter Davis, will be one of its Senate candidates for South Australia. Davis, a long-standing member of the extremist League of Rights, gained national notoriety a couple of years ago with his statement that people of mixed race were "mongrels".
"Anti-racist" opponents of One Nation are also happy for Hanson to continue fudging on racial issues, because they are keen to make "racism" as broad a concept as possible. The more racists they can identify in Australia, the more resources they can demand to combat them, and the greater the shame that can be heaped on the nation.
At the beginning of last week, announcing a national dob-in program targeting supposedly racist politicians, Jeremy Hobbs from Community Aid Abroad offered a particularly expansive approach. According to Hobbs, any policies which are assimilationist, in the sense of expecting one racially defined cultural group "to suborn their interests to a dominant group" are "clearly racist".
This effectively means that any politician advocating the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia is racist, because this policy obliges members of other cultures to assimilate to certain values of the "dominant group". Among other things, the National Agenda requires all Australians to be committed to freedom of speech and equality of the sexes. The latter in particular is an out-and-out call for assimilation, striking at the very heart of many cultures now present in Australia.
It was the Hobbs-like excesses of "anti-racists" in the Keating years that helped to make Pauline Hanson such an attractive figure to many people in the first place. Just when the great majority of Australians had finally come to accept that past practices of treating people differently because of their race were wrong, the leaders of the anti-racism and multicultural industries started to change their tune. They began to claim it was "racist" to say that all citizens should be treated equally, with their needs assessed independently of their racial or ethnic identification.
Hanson had a gut recognition of the resentment this kind of turnaround was causing. It is a pity she did not develop the colour-blind Pauline. She could have harnessed her courage to argue clearly and consistently that race is irrelevant and that people should only be judged -- in the words of Martin Luther King -- "by the content of their character". Then she could really claim she is not a racist.
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