The Real Challenge of Pauline Hanson
by Veronica Brady
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

Introduction

Is the success of One Nation the cry of rural pain or the early days of an Aussie fascism? And what sort of responses to it will further reconciliation, rather than creating more division?

Veronica Brady
Veronica Brady is a Loreto nun and author of the recent South of My Days: a biography of Judith Wright.

SOCIABILITY ITSELF CONNIVES AT injustice", Theodor Adorno wrote, "by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other" (Minimum Moralities, Verso, 1994). Adorno lived through dark times as an intellectual and refugee from Hitler. He therefore took a gloomy view of an apparently civilised society as he watched its fabric disintegrate. But what if he were right? The arrival of One Nation on the political scene suggests that he may be.

Conversation is becoming more and more difficult between One Nation and the rest of us. Pauline Hanson and her supporters have changed the rules, interrogated the social ground on which we used to stand: the assumption that ours was a pluralistic society, tolerant and easy going, open to the rest of the world and willing to play our part in it. Now, we seem to be a nation divided, with Hanson and her party over against the rest of us, we stand glaring at one another across a great divide hurling insults at one another, but never really connecting.

Adorno might say that at least this put an end to the lie of sociability, that it points to the fact that we are deeply divided, and that it is a good thing to acknowledge this reality. That may be so. But for those of us who call ourselves Christians, that kind of reality needs to be changed. We are obliged to love one another, to work for a society in which people live together in mutual respect, dignity and hope. So the task is to find a way forward, to recover some common ground and common purpose. But how?

In the first place, it is clear that insults make the task even more tenuous. It is not enough to try to discredit Hanson by calling her, as the influential French daily Le Monde recently did (with some geographical inaccuracy), the "former manager of a fish and chips shop in Ipswich, a small right wing town". This is merely to indulge in the simplistic answers of which she is accused, as well as being guilty of the intellectual snobbery she and her followers attack.

Vilification is not an argument; indeed, it can be a civil offence. Nor is it sufficient to demonstrate the foolishness and unworkability of her economic policies. It is the rationality of economics she attacks. Might it not be more important to try to understand what she is saying and where she comes from? Even if she is, as John Howard implied, "deranged", surely the best way to treat derangement is to discover and heal its causes.

If the best short definition of God, as one theologian has said, is "interruption", then God may be saying something to us in the interruption she represents. And it is surely significant here that she appeals so deeply to the victims of social change which has enriched the few at the expense of the many who have lost jobs and dignity, or fear that they will do so; whose farms and towns are being destroyed by globalisation or by drought and whose children are angry, alienated and often without hope and purpose.

The history which matters for Christians after all is not the story of the winners but of the losers, those oppressed by the arrogance and cruelty of power as Jesus was. It matters because their story reminds us that God's rule, the rule of love, mercy and worship, does not yet prevail, but that it is our task to bring it more fully into being.

To say this is not to agree with Hanson's policies, which seem to me at least decidedly un-Christian. They are the expression of fear, intolerance, if not open hate, resentment and revenge. But it is to say that the situation which drives so many people to accept them calls not only for our understanding but for our compassion. To return to Adorno, sociability, our social consensus, can serve as a mask, which conceals the real suffering our society causes so many people. But there is a real sociability we must work either to create or to rescue people talking to one another, working, playing, shopping and achieving together.

To: Part 2