The long-standing promotion of Pauline Hanson by the pro-capitalist media went into overdrive following her June 17 appearance at the National Press Club.
Typical was the June 16 edition of The West Australian, which devoted a front cover, an editorial and a centre-spread to celebrating her politics while attacking her critics. The Murdoch media was much the same, adopting the descriptor “Iron Lady” on the front cover of The Advertiser.
Whether Hanson actually has the smarts to be a parliamentary opposition leader, let alone prime minister, and if One Nation becomes the party encompassing the majority of the right in Australian politics remains to be seen. That’s probably not even the most important point. As the editorial in The West concluded: “Politics in this country is at a moment like none before”.
The right-wing editors are sniffing around for the opportunity to decisively shift politics to the right — to benefit the billionaires.
The prospect of large numbers of working people who are dissatisfied with Labor and the Liberal National Coalition, and crushed by the cost of living squeeze and the housing affordability crisis, jumping from the fry pan into the fire, has sent them into raptures.
Green Left has always exposed Hanson’s lies and shouted our opposition to her divisive and demoralising political project that will only make working peoples’ lives worse to benefit big business.
We promote anti-racist organising that contests Hanson’s attempts to normalise her politics and claim more public space. Anything we can do to intercept people who might otherwise be drawn to the far-right and to help arm progressive minded people with the counter-arguments is vital.
Right now, we are redoubling these efforts.
However, we cannot defeat Hanson through the force of ideas alone. Put another way, it is not enough to confront lies and bad ideas with good ideas and the truth.
To rely on that is to underestimate the economic and historic conditions that have led to the rise of One Nation.
Working people have endured more than four decades of neoliberalism — privatisation, contracting out, insecure work and the agonising housing crisis — inflicted on them alternatively by Labor and Coalition governments. Alongside this, there has been a collapse in the frequency of industrial action, as measured by days lost to strikes.
This means that a whole generation or workers has lost the practical experience and historical knowledge that when we band together and fight for our rights, we can win.
At the same time Labor and the Coalition have encouraged racist scapegoating, through two decades of their cruel and illegal treatment of refugees, and most recently through their outright support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Labor’s betrayal of working people in particular, coupled with the decline in union membership and activity, has been the very swamp that has nurtured One Nation.
But if Hanson’s rise is a product of demoralisation, division and a decline in social struggle, the opposite is also true.
Each and every form of collective struggle by working people to create a better future is a death blow to her party. It could be something as small as the campaign to save a local park, or the recent industrial action by workers in the Pilbara.
The truth of this was demonstrated early in Hanson’s career by the 1998 waterfront dispute — the biggest challenge to establishment politics at the time. When workers, their families and supporters linked arms to face off police violence Hanson had nothing to say. Working people fighting for their rights is her kryptonite.
All of our struggles at the workplace, in our places of education, for the natural environment and on the streets are an indispensable part of the fight against One Nation. They are the seeds of its defeat.
Green Left champions them all. Please help us to do this by making a donation. We need to raise $180,000 each year to keep going and the good news is that we are on target to do this. But we’re not there yet and your support, big or small, makes a difference.