By Sue Boland
A road worker, who voted for One Nation in north Queensland, told the Australian that he had formerly been a "red hot Labor supporter" until "Paul Keating brought in enterprise bargaining agreements", which resulted in road crews being cut from 20 to three or four.
According to a Morgan poll, One Nation voters are predominantly blue collar, retirees, unemployed or working unpaid in the home; they earn less than $25,000.
Pauline Hanson claims to represent "battlers" or "ordinary Australians". However, she's carefully vague about who she considers to be battlers. She has stated that she doesn't consider Aborigines or migrants to be battlers, despite the majority of the Aboriginal population being the most impoverished section of Australian society.
Interviewed by ABC radio after the Queensland elections, Hanson said that her goal was a fair go for Australians wanting to establish their own business. Then she paused, before remembering to say that she supported "the battlers" as well. But what would she do for battlers who don't have the money to set up in business?
Since employing David Oldfield as her adviser, Hanson has consciously tried to broaden her base beyond farmers and small businesses in regional areas to rural workers and workers in the cities. To appeal to workers in the cities, Hanson has had to put forward ideas other than crude racism. This is where her supposed opposition to a goods and services tax comes from.
The Morgan poll on June 6-7 (published in the Bulletin on June 16) examined why people intended to vote for One Nation. Of its supporters, 46% said, "Hanson is better than other politicians and knows what ordinary Australians want", 17% liked its policy of "protecting jobs, limiting foreign investment and opposing foreign aid", 14% favoured "restricting immigration". Only 3% supported One Nation because of its "opposition to the Aboriginal 'lobby'", 5% because of gun controls and 7% because of "opposition to Aboriginal land rights".
Vote-catching
Hanson's program of right-wing populism voices some of the discontent of white workers, but rather than turning that anger against exploitation by big business, she turns it against Aboriginal and Asian workers, who are even more exploited than they are.
While Hanson picks ups on some ideas which address that discontent, they're only vote-catching slogans, not policies that are intended to be implemented.
It was noticeable that during the waterfront dispute, Hanson kept a very low profile. When questioned early in the dispute, Hanson said that she had no position on it. Later, she indicated that while she didn't support how the waterside workers were sacked, she didn't support the Maritime Union of Australia either.
If Hanson had come out in support of the waterside workers, she would have alienated her farmer and small business supporters, but she couldn't afford to alienate rural workers by coming out against the union either. Instead, she sat on the fence.
While Hanson has won popularity by attacking politicians' rorts and the scandalously generous parliamentary superannuation scheme, she has never called on big business to allocate some of its profits to providing jobs and paying taxes. The only big businesses that Hanson criticises are overseas-owned; she's silent about the corrupt and exploitative practices of Australian-owned corporations.
Hanson has won support recently with statements expressing opposition to privatisation and to the proposed GST. However, these don't feature amongst One Nation policies.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald (June 3), Hanson said she had concerns that a GST would not be fair to all Australians, but then talked about what "offsets" there might be. Her position wasn't one of outright opposition to a GST.
Anti-worker
On trade unions, Hanson trots out the standard right-wing line about unions "holding people to ransom". Hanson voted for the Howard government's Workplace Relations Act, which is aimed at moving workers onto individual contracts and restricting the right to organise.
While One Nation released policies on small business, primary industry, local government, the family, firearms, law and order and employment for the Queensland elections, it has no special policy relating to the rights of workers, despite the rights to a decent income and decent working conditions being under the most severe threat for many years.
One Nation's small business policy calls for the overhaul of unfair dismissal laws, which supposedly "treat employers unfairly".
The small business policy advocates enterprise-based unions rather that industry-wide unions, and enterprise bargaining rather than industry-wide bargaining. Without the solidarity of workers from outside their workplace, workers employed by small business are more easily intimidated into accepting reduced working conditions and pay.
One Nation puts the blame on migrants from low wage countries for driving wages and working conditions down, rather than the drive for profits by both big business and small business.
On workers' compensation, One Nation gives priority to minimising the opportunity to "defraud". It says nothing about workplace health and safety.
Robbing the poor
While some try to justify support for One Nation by pretending that Hanson's "equality for all Australians" is not intended to be racist, One Nation's Queensland election platform makes it clear that One Nation is no different from other far right groups in imperialist countries, which seek to promote privileges for whites at the expense of indigenous and migrant communities.
One Nation's family policy advocates more funding for child-care, domestic violence services and disability services, but where does it plan to get the funds? Would it redistribute wealth from the big corporations to government services, especially since Australia experienced a big shift in wealth from workers to corporations in the 1980s? This source of funding is not even considered.
Instead, it calls for abolishing funding for Aboriginal-specific services and migrant-specific services and abolishing the Anti-Discrimination Commission — robbing from the poorest to give to the next poorest.
The whole approach is to say that victims of discrimination have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If this argument is accepted by workers and anyone on a pension or benefit, then it can just as easily be applied to them.
When Hanson was first elected, she said that single mothers should be denied the sole parent's pension if they had another child, and they shouldn't have access to government-funded child-care places.
Unemployment
There isn't much difference between One Nation's employment policy and those of the major parties. It states that "real long term jobs in any substantial numbers must come from the private sector".
The substance of the policy is to provide subsidies and low interest loans to businesses and farmers to train apprentices, expand existing businesses, establish new ventures and introduce new technology.
This approach was tried by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. It can never eliminate unemployment because businesses always try to maximise profits by employing as few workers as possible. The subsidies simply work as handouts to boost profits.
Hanson has also claimed that increased tariffs and protection of Australian industry will save jobs. But it doesn't matter if a company is Australian-owned or overseas-owned: all companies work to maximise profits. The only one way to do that is to introduce new technology, or to cut working conditions and wages.
Both methods result in the loss of jobs. Government subsidies, whether in the form of tariff protection or direct handouts, are simply a gift to the employer from taxes paid by workers.
The only effective methods of fighting unemployment would never be considered by One Nation because of its commitment to business profits. One solution would be the introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay, so that workers can share the work around and benefit from their increased productivity. Another is to nationalise essential industries that threaten to sack large numbers of workers.
Another Hanson policy, supposedly to tackle unemployment, is "zero net migration". However, numerous economic studies show that migrants, through their demand for food, clothing, housing and other consumer items, create at least as many jobs as they fill. "Zero net migration" is simply a 1990s version of a White Australia policy.
As with far-right parties overseas, increased policing and repression, referred to as "law and order", featured heavily in One Nation's Queensland platform. It called for more police, a referendum on the death penalty, a youth curfew, mandatory sentencing and giving police the "power to remove people under the age of 16 from the streets".
Previous statements by Hanson have even called for compulsory national service for young people.