With her upcoming "One Nation" Bus tour, interesting comparison of Australia' s Pauline Hanson started the "One Nation" party to crusade against aboriginal people and those who were not "true Australian s" - just like Palin's word salad tirades about "real Americans" . To quote Mr.Dunn's new book...Palin caters to the dark underbelly of the American psyche. She preys on fear and racial divisions.."..
Sarah Palin isn’t the breath of fresh air her followers portray her to be. In fact, her entire political story has been done before, by a redheaded fish & chips shop owner in 1996 who tired of her Australian government conducting ‘business as usual’ and decided to take on the ‘big boys’, single-handedly. She may not have questionable pregnancy or paraded her children in front of news cameras, but she did drape herself in the flag, complain about her government in a loud, screechy voice and bilk a lot of donations from fellow countrymen. Pauline Hanson’s rise to fame. It reads just like a page out of Sarah Palin’s playbook...
In 1996, Pauline Hanson, the operator of a small fish and chip shop, decided to run for the Australian parliament. She made this decision after becoming fed up with politics-as-usual, and feeling that the existing parties just didn’t represent the interests of Australia’s hard working masses. At least that’s the story as she tells it.
http://socialist.org/socialist/sum98/6.html'In reality they number no more than about two or three hundred, and when they are parading about in their uniforms they are more comical than anything else. It is impossible to imagine that they would have any appeal to anyone other than fools.'
-from a German newspaper in the 1920s commenting on the Nazis.
She was supposed to be a joke. But then as the quote above makes clear, they always are, until one day we realise that no one is laughing, and people are actually getting hurt. By that time it's usually too late, and before you know it, a dictator has taken control of your society. Then no one is able to laugh.
Was Pauline Hanson near that point, although she and her supporters may like to think she is. But in last month's elections in Queensland, she and her One Nation party proved that she is too close for comfort, and while we on the left are still laughing at her, it is now time to take her very seriously. In the months following her election, Hanson became notorious for her views, as the media took an interest in the outrageous new oddity in the House. This brought her to even greater national attention, and in April of 1997, Hanson launched her own political party, One Nation, the name deriving from the view that everyone in Australia, regardless of origin or ethnicity, had to assimilate and 'become Australians,' part of 'one nation,' rejecting all other cultural models and definitions of the nation except the European colonial one.
While Hanson has marketed herself to the public as a courageous voice of a great white Australia Past, her large gaps of political and general knowledge (Hanson answered the question of whether or not she thought her views were xenophobic with 'Please explain...?'
) have been exploited for maximum comic effect by both a hostile press and public. One Nation's connection with more hardcore right-wing groups in Australia, such as the League of Rights and Australia First, have been well documented. In every area of public and electronic discourse, Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party have been jeered and mocked as mindless racist buffoons, the butt of jokes, parodies, and satirical sketches. She has been pelted with garbage at public appearances, almost all of which are accompanied by protests. Even her rural accent and the way she pronounces the country's name ('Ostraya') have been ridiculed.
All in all, it appeared obvious that her party's policies (such as solving the nation's economic crisis by just printing more money) as well as her racist views were too warped for them to be of any use as anything other than political humour. The sudden success of One Nation has set the Australian Left on fire with a barrage of campaigns to stop Hanson. But a question that gnaws at the mind after all that has happened is: who let this monster out of the cage?
Our concern however, is with the fact that despite the attacks, somebody other than her followers put Hanson where she is now. Our question is who is supporting One Nation, and why?
A poll conducted by the Nielsen organisation provides some answers that merit serious thinking. The poll found that most of Hanson's supporters were lower income, middle-aged white males with a lesser degree of education. These 'angry white males,' to borrow a term used in American political culture, feel that they have been beat up by the system, a system that does not care about their interests or need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Hanson
In 2004, Hanson appeared on the nationally televised ABC interview show Enough Rope. Archival footage from a 60 Minutes program shot on the streets of Ipswich was used to introduce claims about racism and bigotry in Hanson's views. Hanson challenged interviewer Andrew Denton to show her things that she had said that were racist. Denton instead responded with an example of an abusive letter sent to an Asian girl after Hanson's speeches. The contents of which included a racist tirade "You are nothing but an ungrateful, treacherous, yellow slanty-eyed little Vietnamese whore. You have... We have had enough of your lot with their drug peddling and crime. So piss off now"
In June 1998, One Nation attracted nearly one-quarter of the vote in the Queensland state election and won 11 of 89 seats in the Queensland Legislative Assembly. During this period, a host of new right-wing parties emerged in virtually every state in the country, running on platforms which were equally anti-elitist but not entirely as populist as One Nation.
Senator Bob Brown had labelled Hanson a "bloodsucker" over her suggestion that Africans are bringing AIDS into Australia. She also said she was concerned by the ease with which people were able to gain Australian citizenship, especially Muslims and Africans. She also made claims that "You can't have schools not sing Christmas carols because it upsets others". Liberal Bruce Baird said Hanson had her facts wrong in her suggestions of immigrants bringing disease into Australia. He also said "Ms Hanson will never let the truth get in the way of a good story"
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