The Wicked Witch of the North?
by Alison Cotesi
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

Part 2

Think how well Pauline Hanson fills this role. With her ginger hair (the Judas colour) and red slash of a mouth, and that high-pitched voice that bleats and whines until all we want to do is banish her from our sight, she is tailor-made for the part.

She voices racist opinions that we abhor, so we try to convince ourselves that she is headed for the political wilderness and that soon we will see her no more.

Because she preaches hatred and intolerance, many people consider her to be positively evil. And because we hate evil and love the good, we allow ourselves to display a sacred hostility towards her, rejecting her views and pretending that she is nothing to do with us.

And that is where we are wrong. Pauline Hanson carries on her shoulders the dark sin of racism of which most of us deep down are guilty, even though we might deny it vehemently. For racism is part of human nature, and most of us, if we are honest, feel more comfortable with people from our own racial and cultural background.

In theory, and even in practice, we may espouse complete equality of opportunity, and even affirmative action for those who are oppressed or have been dispossessed, but I suspect that for many of us, myself included, lip-service is the most we pay. We may support land rights for Australia's indigenous people and a more generous response to refugees, but we don't necessarily number them among our closest friends.

When it comes down to the wire, we don't all speak the same cultural language, and it's a rare and admirable person who can bridge cultural gaps and become soul-friends with a person from another group.

So no matter how much we protest when Pauline Hanson spits out her racist bile, deep down we have the uncomfortable feeling that somehow she is speaking for us. She represents everything that we hate about ourselves, those parts of us that we don't want to acknowledge, and so we dump our guilt on her and let her carry our evil into the wilderness, rather than face up to it. By rejecting her, we believe that we can exorcise our own guilt.

But she is important because she is a manifestation of what Jung calls our dark shadow side, that part of our collective unconscious where the unarticulated fears of a whole society reside. The collective unconscious is something that we have no control over, but if on an individual level we recognise that our fears are deep-seated, and if we confront and come to terms with them on the level of justice, then perhaps we can forgive ourselves, and not have to rely on a scapegoat to carry our sins for us.

At the individual level, at least, we should be grateful for the Wicked Witch of the North, because she forces us to examine our own consciences. And if we honestly try to face up to things about ourselves that are too painful to contemplate, that attempt in itself may be a bulwark against the mass hysteria that so often lurks at the level of the dark shadow.

We may refuse to go to Pauline Hanson's party, but our realisation that it's happening may make us even more determined to work harder for true justice, which may be the best any human society can achieve.

To: Perspectives Issue 61

Alison Cotes Alison Cotes won two major 1998 awards (best social justice story, and best feature article on a religious theme in a secular newspaper or magazine) from the Australasian Religious Press Association, for her work in The Courier-Mail. Some parts of this article have appeared in her religious column in that newspaper.