The enduring legacy of Pauline Hanson

Pauline Hanson says Australia is no longer a land of opportunity

Ironically, the Australian anti-migrant campaigner is moving to the UK – but back in her homeland, things are less amusing

Since losing her seat in national parliament, Pauline Hanson has been an unlikely source of entertainment for Australians. There was her TV appearance on Dancing with the Stars, the Aussie version of Strictly Come Dancing, and last year raunchy pictures, supposedly taken of her more than three decades ago, were widely circulated in the Australian press (they turned out to be fake). But nothing tops the latest turn in the Hanson saga: she is moving to Britain.

"It's pretty much goodbye forever," Hanson said earlier this week. "Sadly, the land of opportunity is no more applicable (sic)."

The episode drips with delicious irony. Those familiar with recent Australian political history need no reminder of Hanson's record. As a newly elected independent MP in 1996, Hanson declared in her maiden parliamentary speech that Australia was "being swamped by Asians". She founded the One Nation Party on the platform of bringing net migration to Australia to zero and abolishing multiculturalism in favour of "assimilation". Now, Australia's most prominent crusader against immigration is about to become an immigrant herself; a self-declared patriot is abandoning her country.

How Hanson will be received in the UK is anyone's guess. But it is likely that she will have a bit of a shock when she steps off her long flight at Heathrow. This is, of course, the further irony. You suspect Hanson imagines she will be moving to the Britannia of yesteryear rather than the pluralistic Britain of today. A former fish and chip shop owner, she would be horrified to learn that chicken tikka masala is Britain's unofficial national dish. No doubt TV producers are already knocking on her agent's door to film a documentary about Pauline's adventures in the mother country.

If there are places where Hanson might fit in, they are perhaps the musty meeting rooms of the BNP. The group's angry white nativism and xenophobia are at one with the views once peddled by her One Nation party.

Yet there are significant differences between One Nation and the BNP. Unlike the BNP, One Nation was ultimately a political failure. It survived only a few years before it was deregistered; Hanson herself lost her Queensland parliamentary seat in 1998 and made three further failed bids for office. And while One Nation was accused of racism by its critics, its rank-and-file weren't populated by the kind of paramilitary thugs who surround Nick Griffin.

Even so, there is much in Hansonism that far-rightwing groups such as the BNP might aspire to emulate. Although Hanson left behind no political party organisation, her impact has been profound. She reshaped Australian political culture, many would say for worse. Tapping into white cultural anxiety, Hanson unleashed a nasty chauvinism that reprised an Anglo-Celtic race patriotism.

Her politics were in some ways a vanguard for the reactionary cultural politics of John Howard. It is no accident that Hanson's uncompromising stance on asylum seekers quickly became Howard government policy, as in the case of "temporary protection visas" for refugees.

By offering subtle approving nods to Hanson's rhetoric, Howard built a core working-class and lower-middle-class constituency for his Liberal party in formerly Labour electorates in outer metropolitan suburbs. This was the so-called dog whistle tactic, which allowed racialised appeals to become part of mainstream Australian politics. At the same time, Hanson's politics confounded a progressive left that failed to hear the grievances of the culturally disaffected.

When in 1997 Hanson launched One Nation by draping herself in the national flag, most Australians cringed. Eight years later, when the Cronulla race riot took place in Sydney, most striking was the use of the Australian flag as a symbol of exclusion. Today, on Australian roads, motorists fly the national flag from the roofs of their cars. A growing number of white Australians now tattoo their sunburnt flesh with the southern cross as a symbol of "Aussie pride".

These aren't expressions of benign patriotism or civic virtue, but they do express the legacy of Pauline Hanson. Australia is now a country where national symbols divide as much as they unite citizens.

Guardian

Australian anti-migrant campaigner Pauline Hanson to emigrate

Former One Nation leader who said country was being swamped by Asians plans to seek 'peace' in UK

The fish and chip shop owner who gained international notoriety and a seat in Australia's parliament after warning the country it was being swamped by Asians is packing her bags and leaving – and she's bound for Britain.

Pauline Hanson, the former leader of the One Nation party, who once draped herself in the Australian flag and railed against immigration to campaign for a seat in federal parliament, appears to have changed her mind about the rights and wrongs of migration.

She says she can no longer live in Australia. "Sadly, the land of opportunity is no more applicable. It's pretty much goodbye for ever. I've really had enough."

She said in an interview with the magazine Women's Day: "Our governments lack enough people with the fortitude to speak up without fear or favour. Over-regulation, increasing taxes and lack of true representation are affecting our way of life. I feel very much for the young ones. Once it was common for them to own their own home. Not now. It's a harder place."

After more than 10 years in the spotlight she seeks "peace" and "contentment" and hopes to find it in the UK.

Hanson shot to prominence in the 1996 federal election when she claimed that Aboriginal Australians received an abundance of welfare. Although she lasted just one term in parliament she continued courting attention with her extreme views and unusual behaviour. In a video testimony she once recorded with a television network she alleged there was a conspiracy to kill her.

Once, asked during a television interview if she was xenophobic, she replied "please explain" – a response that only bolstered her kudos among followers who viewed her as a maverick unfairly set upon by the political establishment.

Despite three more unsuccessful attempts at returning to federal parliament and two unsuccessful bids to enter the New South Wales and Queensland parliaments, as well as a stint in jail for electoral fraud, a conviction eventually quashed, in 2006 she was named by current affairs magazine the Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians of all time.

Even as her political fortune waned her popularity grew. She appeared in the primetime TV show Dancing with the Stars in 2004, and wrote an autobiography, Untamed and Unashamed. Now she says: "I know I will never be given a chance to enter parliament again."

Some are sceptical that her departure from Australia will last.

Bob Vinnicombe, a longstanding member of One Nation, thinks she will change her mind. "I think it's a passing fad," he said.

"I don't really understand why she would want to go to the UK. She would realise that there's just as many migrants in England as there are in Australia."

Hanson has never been far from controversy and the attention of the Australian media. She once attempted to drive away at speed from the pack that accompanied her on her campaign in 1998, only to end up with a beeline of journalists following her dangerously in hot pursuit.

From the beginning Hanson positioned herself as an amateur, describing herself in her maiden speech to parliament "not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks". In that speech she also warned that "a truly multicultural country can never be strong or united".

Yet when asked about her decision to move to the UK she said: "Every country has something unique to offer. And I want to experience that, to live it, and not just for a brief time."

The 55-year-old is eligible for dual Australian-British citizenship because her father is English and her mother Irish. But before she makes the final move to Britain, she says she will spend a few months on the south island of New Zealand.

Guardian