ONE MISREGISTRATION = TWO FOOT LICKINGS

The perils of Pauline Hanson: why support for Australia’s version of Jean-Marie Le Pen surged last week after she was sentenced to three years in jail Sydney (Anthony Daniels, 30 August 2003, The Spectator)

Pauline Hanson irrupted on to the Australian political scene in the early 1990s, giving voice to blue-collar Australians who resented the immense social changes that had been brought about without their consent. They felt that the world of ice-cold tubes and meat pies was under threat, economically and culturally, from the world of kir and sun-dried tomatoes, a world in which the mainstream politicians, of whatever political stripe, increasingly lived and moved and took their being. When Hanson spoke in crude terms of the dangers of Asian immigration (a return to the yellow peril) and of the feckless Aborigines, she immediately won 22 per cent of the vote in her native Queensland. The proletarian lava had suddenly broken through the bourgeois crust.

From an outsider’s point of view, Hanson’s crime seems to have been relatively trivial. She registered her party — One Nation — without the number of members required by law, claiming that mere supporters at meetings were members. It is even possible that she failed to understand the law, rather than that she broke it deliberately, for the one thing upon which all educated Australians agree is her stupidity. Her one lasting achievement so far is to have bestowed upon Australian English the catchphrase ‘Please explain’‚ which she asked whenever anyone used a word of more than two syllables, such as ‘xenophobic’.

Having thus registered her party illegally, she and her co-founder, David Ettridge, who was also sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, accepted a subsidy of A$500,000 from the public purse to fund her election campaign (election campaigns are publicly funded in Australia). Although she subsequently paid the money back by raising it from her supporters, she was nevertheless charged with fraud. There are also charges pending that she used A$20,000 for her own private purposes.

Hanson had never been convicted of anything before, and it was swiftly pointed out in newspaper editorials and letters pages that killers have been known to receive lesser sentences. On the other hand, a former convict was reported as saying that since Hanson had asked for longer sentences, it was only right that she should receive one. And the only Aborigine in the Australian senate requested that Hanson be given special protection, because the prison to which she had been sent was full of the very Asians and Aborigines whose immigration and conduct she had so vociferously condemned. Truly, the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

There's something seriously wrong with a democratic state where registering your political party incorrectly can land you in prison. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2003 8:19 PM