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

Part 2

The first step is to unmask the present lie of sociability, to acknowledge that in fact to a greater or lesser extent we are part of a great coercive system (constructed by the media, advertisers, so-called educators and even by one another) to consume, compete, to live by sensation and in the instant. The great business in life, we are told, is money-making, money-having and money-spending and our value depends upon appearances, the clothes we wear, the shape we are, the car we drive, the place we live in. Just as buildings today tend to be cast in one piece, so the mortar between people, true sociability, is replaced by those conformities, pressure from outside often the only thing which holds us together.

The trouble is that even as I write this I am aware that I am somehow distanced and somehow defended from this situation by the fact that I have an alternative world-view, an alternative which is truer to the way things actually are, which is that we are part of the large and mysterious life of creation, children of God responsible to one another and to creation as a whole as its crucial centre of consciousness and influence.

Unfortunately, this knowledge can generate a sense of superiority. Some of us can seem to live in a glacial or at least rarefied atmosphere, sheltered from the pain and stress of others rather like aristocrats of the ancien regime, "watching the impoverished in spirit marching joyously into the inferno", the new revolution they hope to make.

In this way we, too, can be influenced by the lack of human warmth, the coarseness, insensibility and violence of our society. What we need, therefore, if we are to be true to the obligations our Christian vision requires, is to recover a sense of a common humanity which embraces not only people of different cultures and appearance, but also those we profoundly disagree with and even regard as enemies within our own society.

Pauline Hanson, it has been said, practises the politics of inarticulacy. The people who look to her feel not only that they have been silenced, but that what they have to say and what they feel has been excluded from the general conversation which has been and is still going on over their heads. They are unable to articulate a coherent critique of the system which they feel is victimising them. Even more importantly, they do not have a clear view of an alternative, so that by and large they have to resort to easy answers and to slogans, which, like symbols, focus a complex of experience in an instant of time. Anti-Asian sentiment, fears of international take-overs, attacks on Aboriginal 'privilege', the longing to return to a simpler, more secure and more personal society are expressions of anomie, of being somehow rootless, adrift in an unfamiliar and incomprehensible world over which the individual has no control.

This is unsatisfactory, of course. The problems we face demand long, careful and principled attention. But this kind of attention will also need to consider the underlying crisis which Hanson's popularity points to: the quest for identity, for a significant place in a world which makes sense. For most people, our present society does not provide a sense of meaning or purpose. Our lives and deepest needs, and the system in which we find ourselves are at odds. But it is the system which prevails. We have, many of us, lost any real notion of virtue, of the good life. Increasingly, the values which govern politics and society are those of the economy, success, efficiency, technical appropriateness of means to stipulated ends.

Technology, however, can be brutal as well as efficient. It reduces people to objects, subordinating them to its ends and, if needs be, eliminating them from its calculations. Ethics yields to pragmatics. Faring ill, being poor, less intelligent, disabled, disadvantaged or different, is confused with doing ill. The implication being that there is something morally wrong with such people and that being wealthy and successful is a sign of virtue.

All of this is familiar enough to those of us in the know, but familiar only at the intellectual level. Perhaps those of us who are better educated and have more intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources do not really appreciate the effects of this situation, the fear, the loss of hope, the anxiety, resentment. Technology has changed the world, enabling some of us to travel, to explore different cultures, languages and customs, to communicate across boundaries, glimpse a new world community and also make us more aware also of the sufferings of so many. But by the same technology, the global economy tends also to crush those unable to master the skills to be part of this world. The rebellion of One Nation is one of its consequences

To: Part 3

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