Before Trump or Farage, before Wilders or Marine Le Pen, there was Pauline. Pauline Hanson was the original rabble-rouser who disrupted the pieties of liberal multiculturalism. Along came this copper-topped fish ’n’ chip shop owner with her screechy, strangled sentences and her gut prejudices about immigrants, welfare wasters and Aborigines. Unexpectedly elected to Parliament in 1996, Hanson stunned her fellow MPs and much of the country by declaring in her maiden speech that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’.
She is back in the news after wearing then tearing off a burqa in the Australian Senate. Senator Hanson, who leads the hard-right One Nation party, has made the veil her signature issue. It is a security threat. A public order concern. Misogynistic. Patriarchal. In truth, Islam is just the latest bogeyman that scares Hanson and that she hopes will scare enough Australians to win their vote. Muslims are the new Asians.
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