CLAPTRAP?

The martyrdom of unsaintly Pauline: It is still not politic to condemn the former leader of Australia's racist One Nation party - even though she has been jailed for fraud (David Fickling, September 1, 2003, The Guardian)

Poor old Pauline Hanson. The former leader of Australia's defunct, racist One Nation party has swapped her glitzy power-suits for prison overalls. She has been picking at her institutional dinners. Friends and family are only allowed to greet her from the far side of a glass wall. She had to be medicated after a strip search. My heart bleeds.
By the outpouring of public sympathy that has followed her imprisonment for electoral fraud, you might have thought that Hanson was mother Theresa. Her supporters have nominated her as Australian of the year. Every frontline politician seems to think her three-year sentence is too harsh. Fewer than one in seven Australians think she should have gone to jail. Today she was refused bail and will remain in jail until her appeal begins in November. [...]

The success of One Nation, and the rage at its destruction by mainstream politicians, is the story of an electorate losing patience with the big parties that were running the country in a cosy duopoly.

Many of those who voted for Hanson did so not because she opposed Asian immigration or welfare for Aborigines, but because she was the only alternative item on the electoral menu. Terry Sharples, the former candidate whose lawsuit against One Nation led ultimately to Hanson's imprisonment, has no truck with her extremist views and had previously applied to be a candidate for the leftish Democrats party.

It is a shame that when Australia first took notice of someone saying the unsayable, what was being said was so much racist claptrap. There are plenty of other issues on which the mainstream parties still act as a cartel, agreeing not to disagree and in the process stifling debate.

There is a warning to them in One Nation's success: you cannot kill debate, only suppress it. Hold it down for long enough, and when it eventually emerges it may have taken on a more alarming form than you could ever have suspected.

Have you ever noticed how in the Left's mind the platform of Far Right parties has little to do with their appeal? You saw the same thing when Le Pen finished second in France's last presidential election. Unfortunately they're quite wrong, racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration are all terrific political issues and the difficult task for the traditional Right is to separate out the policies that make sense in defending one's own culture from the visceral appeals to treat some group as hated "others".

That said, it's ridiculous to send someone to prison for misregistering a political party in a democracy. Just fine them out of existence. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 1, 2003 9:49 AM