When Pauline Hanson first burst onto the political scene, the immediate response of the media-political establishment was exactly the same then as it was over the next 30 years: Shut up! It’s all they ever do: screech dementedly at Hanson and her supporters, sneering that they’re ‘uneducated racists’.
A sneer, though, is not an argument. But rational debate is the last thing the establishment can muster in the face of the existential threat to their cosy uniparty rule of musical chairs. They certainly will not debate One Nation’s policies. In fact, they actively deny that One Nation even has policies: despite the fact that there is an entire website full of them.
Because, if they were forced to honestly admit what One Nation’s policies are, even more Australians might start noticing that they sound a lot like common sense.
Consider the curious intellectual bridge between the Stagirite philosopher and our formidable senator from Ipswich. While the modern Australian cognoscenti would likely choke on their smashed avocado at the mere juxtaposition of Hanson and Aristotle, both share an inquiry into what constitutes a flourishing life rather than mere material existence. The Canberra bureaucratic caste prefers to avert its gaze from the foundational verities of hearth, home and heritage. When the populist matriarch dares suggest that public housing ought to be a temporary sanctuary rather than a permanent entitlement, millions of ordinary Australians struggling to put a roof over their heads get the point immediately.
Housing commission houses should not be there for people to live in them for 30, 40 years … Sorry, that’s not on, to me.
Quite so. To expect the diligent taxpayer to perpetually underwrite decades of tenancy without rotation strikes the common man as entirely reasonable, even if it sends the permanent political class into a paroxysm of moralising vapours.
Similarly, when the cultural mandarins sneer at ordinary sentiment regarding our armed forces, and particularly the disgraceful persecution of a war hero, they echo those whom Kipling immortalised: the comfortably ensconced elites busy making mock of the uniforms that guard them while they sleep. Soldiers perform the grim, necessary labour of statecraft, yet our superior sorts remain perennially baffled that the citizenry understands that the battlefield is not a place for ivory tower sanctimony.
We see a parallel friction within our educational institutions. While the educational establishment insists upon encumbering mathematics and English syllabi with fashionable cross-curricular novelties such as explaining maths by means of Aboriginal dance and ‘counting-by-fives’ (literally counting on their fingers apparently being the great mathematical achievement of ‘the world’s oldest living culture’), Hanson points simply to the foundational basics. If children are foundering in numeracy, loading the curriculum with Stone Age performance art is akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic while handing out bark canoe lifeboats.
On the perennial shibboleth of Multiculturalism, the Canberra consensus demands a theatrical devotion to abstract theory over social cohesion. Yet, as elder statesmen have previously observed, a nation must anchor itself to a singular, robust civic culture rather than fractured enclaves.
You’ve got to control the overall character and culture of your country... I am not an enormous fan of theoretical multiculturalism, I’m a fan of multiracialism. I’m a fan of bringing people from all parts of the world, but once they’re here you live behind a common set of Australian values.
When our indomitable Queensland senator speaks plainly of a cohesive monoculture, she merely articulates what sensible citizens have understood for generations: a house divided against itself by competing tribalisms cannot stand. Even the incumbent prime minister has belatedly discovered the harsh arithmetic of mass migration, stumbling toward the very immigration caps long championed by One Nation, albeit stripped of genuine conviction or communicative clarity.
Ultimately, the great electoral juggernaut rolls onward precisely because the political establishment is utterly bankrupt of authenticity. Every hysterical shriek from the press gallery serves merely as a flashing neon sign pointing the electorate toward the one political figure who deigns to speak their language, because she’s lived their struggles.
Until our betters learn to trade their contempt for comprehension, the Hanson phenomenon will continue to loom large over the Antipodes, a living monument to the enduring power of plain, unvarnished common sense. Long may it do so.
