Editorial: Unions can't keep ignoring Hanson
The large vote for the racist One Nation organisation in the Queensland election, and the outfit's rise in national opinion polls, should be seen as a threat by the entire union movement.The workers' movement internationally has a long and proud tradition of opposition to racism. Not least, this attitude stems from an understanding that the function of racism is to keep workers divided and to that extent unable to defend their wages and working conditions against attacks by the bosses.
For their part, the employers and their organisations have an equally long tradition of encouraging and exploiting racism â by paying oppressed minorities lower wages, using them as strike-breakers, diverting the majority's anger at its own exploitation onto scapegoats and so on.
More generally, racism serves to shift the overall political agenda to the right, to the disadvantage of workers and their unions. It creates a conservative climate in which people seek individual solutions, not collective ones. The habit of scapegoating racial minorities leads easily to scapegoating overpaid workers and blackmailing unions.
Pauline Hanson is far from being the only racist involved in Australian politics, but what is new is the relative openness of her racism, and the confident attempt to impose One Nation's reactionary agenda upon national politics. In many respects, Hanson recalls the Joh for PM campaign of 1987, but in a more dangerous form.
The Hanson danger is greater for three reasons. First, Hanson is not handicapped, as Bjelke-Petersen was, by a long record in politics and government, which allowed the public to form a clear idea of what he really stood for. As a relative newcomer, Hanson is far more able to fool the gullible.
Second, the union movement is significantly weaker, and therefore less able to offer resistance to a racist demagogue, than it was a decade ago. Its membership is smaller, its democratic structures are weaker, its militant traditions are more distant â despite the recent struggle of the MUA.
Third, 15 years of economic rationalism have created a widespread desire for something better, a feeling that is frustrated by the lack of a progressive alternative and which can therefore be tapped by someone like Hanson.
The second and third reasons are closely connected. The lack of a credible progressive alternative to neo-liberalism is in the first instance a failure of the Labor Party. But it is the unions' meek cooperation with the ALP's gentler version of economic rationalism that has weakened their fighting spirit and numbers.
Hanson's One Nation is a serious threat, which it would be extremely foolish of the unions to keep ignoring. The union movement needs to take the lead in opposing racism, explaining the Hanson danger to union members and the broader society. A failure to do so will only encourage the growth of the anti-worker, anti-union forces that Hanson is seeking to marshal.
In order to counter Hansonism effectively, however, more is required than explanation. One Nation has to be cut off from the base it is trying to build among workers, small farmers and others harmed by the economic agenda of both major parties. That can be done only by a labour movement that is not afraid to take on the Coalition government's attacks â but which also rejects the ALP's more subtle schemes (like the Accord) for subordinating workers to the needs of Australian big business.
The message from Queensland and the polls is that growing numbers of battlers have had a gutful of Liberal-Labor austerity. If the unions do not win them to the left by breaking decisively with cooption and timidity, more and more of them will follow Hanson to the right.