Is Hansonism finished?
By Peter Boyle
The sudden resignation of a Queensland MP is the latest of a string of setbacks for the far-right Pauline Hanson's One Nation, but it is too early to write off this party.
Ever since the mid-1970s, the traditional ruling parties, Labor, Liberal and National, have been steadily losing public support (see graph). In the last federal election, 20% of the vote went to "minor" parties, but nearly half of these went to One Nation.
While One Nation took only 9.3% of the total primary vote on October 3, that was the third largest primary vote, beating the Nationals and beating even the combined Democrat and Green vote. While not as spectacular as the 25% it won in the June 13 Queensland election, which gave the new party 11 MPs, it was still a significant result.
One Nation has only one senator, Heather Hill, to show for its nearly 1 million primary votes in the federal election, but this says more about the unrepresentativeness of the electoral system than anything else.
While One Nation's vote was largely in rural Queensland, NSW and WA, it still won significant support in regional cities and the outer suburban fringe of some of the big cities.
All this after Hanson virtually sank One Nation's federal campaign with her 2% flat tax plan and her proposal to whittle down Medicare to cover just the poorest, after the big business media pronounced One Nation finished and after One Nation banned the media from its events on the eve of the election!
Hanson lost the seat of Blair after preferences were distributed, but she obtained the biggest primary vote in that electorate, 36.8%.
Labor and Coalition leaders declared One Nation defeated after Hanson lost her seat, but this is clearly premature. Hanson is reported to be in a post-election depression and there are rumblings of internal divisions, but One Nation could regroup for the NSW elections in March.
One Nation received more than a quarter of a million votes in NSW on October 3, 8.9%. If this vote holds, One Nation will win at least two upper house seats.
But One Nation could improve its vote in NSW. For a start, it has received $2.9 million in federal electoral funding, and it could still receive another half a million for its Queensland election vote.
In addition, the Carr Labor government is setting the scene for a "law and order" campaign with an attack on "ethnic youth gangs" in Sydney's south-western suburbs. The racist hysteria around this issue, being whipped up by the state's Labor and Coalition politicians and the media, sets a favourable climate for One Nation. Hanson promises a comeback in the November 21 Newcastle by-election.
Even if One Nation misses all these opportunities and/or implodes because of internal contradictions, the politics of Hansonism (i.e. racist, right-wing populism) will remain a significant feature of politics in the next period.
At the very least, it will continue in the form of a further shift to the right by the National Party, whose vote was whittled down to a post-1919 low of 5.5% on October 3.
The far right's dramatic electoral resurgence is directly related to the growing public resentment of the cutbacks, privatisation and job destruction that have been implemented by both Coalition and Labor governments since the mid-1970s. As we roll into the next recession, and unemployment rises even higher, the number of people who will be seduced by far-right populism will grow larger if the organised working class is unable to win the confidence of all the victims of the capitalist crisis.
The bureaucrats and the ALP politicians are driving people into the arms of One Nation. We saw this clearly in the federal election when the union movement compounded the crime of doing the dirty on workers for the last Labor government (through the ACTU-ALP Accord) by throwing their weight and money simply into a campaign for votes for Labor. Even the most militant union leaderships did this.
This allowed Labor to get through the campaign without promising to repeal Howard's anti-union Workplace Relations Act, without promising to reverse the massive public sector job cuts, without challenging work for the dole, the attacks on welfare and similar cuts.
It also gave the Coalition the confidence to propose a second wave of anti-union laws that will further cut back the right to strike.
Economic insecurity and unemployment are the key issues around which One Nation is winning considerable working-class support. While the ACTU leaders, Labor and Coalition politicians pay lip service to the ample evidence that immigrants don't cost jobs, they still reinforce the scapegoating of recent migrants by insisting on restrictive immigration policies, supposedly to take into account the "difficult economic times".
The flip side is that the unions haven't seriously campaigned against unemployment since the 1970s even though unemployment has ratcheted up through the last two economic cycles. The 35-hour week demand is on the ACTU's policy book, but the average working week has crept up to 41 hours.
Racist scapegoating has a long and shameful history in the Australian labour movement, and very little has been done from these quarters to uproot it. (Indeed, some unions have adapted to racist prejudices within the working class. They've started reporting workers to the immigration authorities simply on unconfirmed suspicions that they may be illegal immigrants, based on their Asian appearance.)
What little anti-racist campaigning has been done by the unions has amounted to falling in behind the most conservative critics of Hanson with general appeals for tolerance.
There has been no strong union opposition to the racist policies implemented by the Howard government and its Labor predecessor.
Both Coalition and Labor federal governments have been allowed to get away with whittling back the minimal native title belatedly recognised by the High Court and discriminatory cuts to the welfare rights of new immigrants. Refugees have been treated like criminals, stripped of legal rights and kept for years in detention.
Hansonism won't be defeated until the organised working class campaigns seriously and independently against racism and in defence of its own class interests.
[Peter Boyle is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party. This is article is based on a report to the October 17-18 DSP national committee meeting.]