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

BNP 'would welcome Hanson' in UK

The leader of the British National Party says Pauline Hanson will be welcomed should she decide to play a political role upon moving to the UK.

BNP leader Nick Griffin also said he felt sorry for Ms Hanson because she had been "forced out of her country by this politically correct intimidation and bullying. She would not be a sponger. We would regard her as a good addition."

The One Nation founder has put her million dollar property up for sale in Coleyville, southwest of Brisbane, and has announced she's moving to Britain.

Mr Griffin said the BNP's leaders had long observed Ms Hanson's career and "persecution" by Australian mainstream parties. He offered a bit of advice about where Ms Hanson should live, warning she should stay away from central London because it had become overrun with "spongers". He said more than 100,000 "indigenous" Londoners had fled the capital every year over the past two decades after being driven out by immigration.

"It has been a relentless flow because they can't stand living there and feeling like foreigners in their own city," he said.

Ms Hanson's hardline views on race sparked a national debate over immigration policy and Aboriginal disadvantage from the time she entered federal parliament in 1996. In her maiden speech, she said "we are in danger of being swamped by Asians", and questioned multiculturalism.

The Age

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

Nick Griffin plans visit to Australia

The BNP has announced that its leader Nick Griffin intends to visit Australia in the "very near future" at the invitation of the miniscule far-right Australian Protectionist Party.

It appears that Griffin intends to conduct a speaking tour of the country in December of this year. However, to enter the country he requires a visa and this was refused in 1998 when he last tried to visit Australia.

Nick Griffin wants to visit Australia, now one of the most vibrant, brilliant and multicultural countries on the planet, to help that tiny minority (led by a former BNP member) attempt to drag Australia back into the dark ages of white, racist and unapologetic imperialism that the Australian Protectionist Party wants to "protect".

There is still a minute imperialist, divisive and racist minority of Australians that often hark back to the bygone days when the country had a "White Australia" policy, which restricted non-white immigration into the country right up until 1973. The BNP has often commented that this is the sort of policy that it feels it would like to introduce to this country. If Australians thought that the imbecilic Pauline Hanson and her band of One Nation red-necks were bad, they will be in for one hell of a rude awakening when Griffin and his band of perennial sunglass wearing thugs arrive on their sunny shores.

Contrary to the popular stereotypes, today's Australia is a modern, vibrant multicultural country. In the last couple of years Australia has made very positive steps to redress some of the awful injustices meted out on its indigenous people by British descendents who colonised the vast nation and the surrounding continent. The Labour Prime minister Kevin Rudd, has close ties to the Chinese community in Australia and has an excellent record on defending the rights of migrant communities and workers.

This year, the Australian parliament's first order of business was to make an apology on behalf of the nation to the "stolen generation" - Aborigines who were removed from their families and ancestral lands to be "anglicised" (made to behave more like white people) for the good of the country for over one hundred years until 1969.

The effects of removing children from their parents and their communities has had an enormous and dreadful impact on the lives and the culture of the Aborigine and Torres Straight Island people of Australia.

Griffin's attempted visit is a reminder that not everyone subscribes to this modern vision. Indeed, the sort of people that would be attracted to the BNP message are the thugs who took part in race-related rioting against Muslims in Cronulla New South Wales in 2006. In this country the BNP fuels racist tensions and violence by descending on areas of economic and social difficulty to turn dissatisfaction into racist torment and violence.

It is in the interests of both countries that Griffin is refused entry into Australia.

Jeremy Jones, a spokesman for Australia's Jewish community said: ''A visit by Griffin ought to be a matter of concern for Australia's Muslim community, indeed by all communities here who have found that tolerance and engagement is a better path than division and hatred.''

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