Fear and Loathing in Ipswich: Exploring Mainstream and Anabranch in the Race Debate

Fear and Loathing in Ipswich: Exploring Mainstream and Anabranch in the Race Debate Jakubowicz, Andrew “Fear and Loathing in by me (Hanson) and condoned by him” Ipswich: Exploring Mainstream and Anabranch (Hansard 4 November 1996). In this seduction, in the Race Debate” The Rationalist, No 42, this tortured and unconsummated desire, she is Summer 1996-97. the absence filling the empty frame, she is the iconic and black madonna of another time and by Andrew Jakubowicz place and people. One only has to view the headlines of October 31 1996 in the Sydney Introduction press, the day after the Parliamentary “vow of unity” condemning race discrimination (but not In the early 1980s Poland was a society in affirming either multiculturalism or Indigenous turmoil. Marshal law held sway, and revolt was land rights) to see the powerful presence of her in the air. The hitherto unspeakable was being absence - “But where was Pauline Hanson?” voiced and the social order was being rocked. In (Daily Telegraph), “Hanson leaves Campbell to June 1983, along the back roads around stand alone” (Australian) or “Hanson absent as Bialystok, close to the Russian border, banners MPs join to deplore racism” (Sydney Morning hung across the pavement, inscribed with Herald). messages such as “Welcome Mother”. The altars by the roadside were covered with the flowers of We have seen the recent emergence of a populist late Spring, in expectation of the visitation of racism into the “mainstream” of Australian the Black Madonna of Czestechowa, Poland’s popular discourse articulated by independent most powerful Catholic icon. A year before, the and related politicians, the content of which is Catholic Church had turned up the heat on the extraordinary enough. We have then seen the military government, demanding the right to Prime Minister apparently incapable of grasping travel the image of the Virgin around the the import of the situation, declaring it to be an countryside, triggering what both the Church exercise in free speech and the funeral pyre of and the government knew would be an political correctness. The front pages of the daily emotional avalanche of passionate denunciation press scream the outrage that his inaction has of the old order. The regime refused permission prompted among the Asian press in the region. - so the Church said it would tour the empty We then have a ground swell of conservative frame. We now face a similar empty frame, the leaders trying to find safe ways of expressing face of the woman who is never named, the face their sense of astonishment and disbelief at his of the woman who voices the deepest fears and display, only to have the whole thing capped off psychic traumas of Australian society. by a remarkable desire by the Prime Minister to wish away the history of the colonial/settler The media fascination with the Hanson society we are and replace it with a warm, fuzzy phenomenon reflects an unstated recognition of glow reminiscent of Milo and Arrowroot the Howard/Hanson relationship, a bikkies. metaphorical brother/sister incest in which he cannot name her nor face her, while she voices At the heart of this scenario lies a shifting centre his deepest and most repressed feelings, and of what it means to be human in our society, knows, oh how she knows, that she says out what rights one can claim, and how the public loud what his nightmares offer him, “inflamed sphere can act to either erode or promote those Making Multicultural Australia Fear and Loathing in Ipswich: Exploring 1 Mainstream and Anabranch in the Race Debate rights. By public sphere, I mean that realm of echoed Howard’s words when he identified (on interaction of ideas, the proponents of which ABC TV ‘s Lateline with Maxine McKew as the may be politicians, academics, journalists and interrogator) the eradication of political media commentators, and the general public correctness as a primary goal of Coalition through the media-controlled device of polling, strategy in the realm of social and cultural letters, and talkback radio. Many of us are policy. interested in the way in which the media have worked up the Pauline Hanson phenomenon, John Howard had been badly hurt when he lost seeing in the process a case study for exploring the leadership of the Liberal Party to Andrew how the media provide a key arena for the Peacock in 1989. He believed that his own operationalisation of the public sphere. Perhaps career and his chance of being Prime Minister at also we are fascinated by this terrier-like that time were both seriously injured by the creature, snapping at the groin of the most charge of racism made by his critics. He had powerful leader in recent Australian history, a said that the mix of Australia’s immigration man overwhelmingly endorsed as prime intake should be changed if necessary in the minister, a man who has stood up to those name of “social cohesion”. When questioned by extraordinary machos, the gun lobby, and the media on what he meant, it became clear apparently won out. that he was concerned that immigration from Asia might lead to social unrest and conflict (an Australian society is undergoing a significant argument that historian Geoffrey Blainey had transformation - the politico-cultural consensus also made in 1984) - and the way to avoid this of the past generation or more is being was to limit the number of Asians in the challenged and is facing a major transformation country. under a sustained ideological program of privatisation - of the economic realm, quite Howard felt that his comments were not racist, clearly, but also of the socio-cultural realm. For but were a legitimate contribution to the debate it is the re-conceptualisation of human rights on population. His vision of “One Australia” from a social or group perspective to an had no place for those who could not integrate individualised or privatised perspective that into his conception of Australian “mainstream” underpins the social agenda of the new Federal values. Howard blamed the multicultural lobby government, and with that shift, the and the advocates of political correctness for his delegitimation of the “social” as a realm for state defeat - and he vowed to have his revenge on intervention and action on behalf of the socially winning government. Since March 1996 we marginalised. For the media, which in a very have seen that revenge in practice.The Howard important sense represent the space of the dissembling and the Hanson histrionics are not social, this shift creates significant challenges. momentary aberrations, not random fragments of disturbed individuals, but rather echoes of Political Correctness, Racism the monstrous perversions of humanity that are and the Media embedded in the very creation of the Australian Commonwealth - a nation in which the John Howard’s celebration of the end of Indigenous people were classed with the political correctness, made on the night of his indigenous fauna, where non-whites were non- election in March 1996, and now, his human, where Colonial Premiers and then the exhilaration at the return of his perception of first Prime Ministers raged against the moral freedom of speech, reflect a deep angst at the decadence and intellectual decrepitude of heart of the old Australian culture - a desire that Asiatics, and where it was believed that only its racist, sexist, homophobic and misogynist white Europeans could possibly understand and history should be disinterred and vindicated as operate a modern democracy. morally righteous. A few days after the election, John Hyde, a Western Australia senior Liberal, From the outset of the Australian nation, Making Multicultural Australia Fear and Loathing in Ipswich: Exploring 2 Mainstream and Anabranch in the Race Debate human rights issues have been central - the capacity of a society to deliver effective human nation was concerned with democracy and rights can be found in the strength and depth of equality - but it was equally as concerned to the public sphere. In the process of attacking define the non-human and the extra-national political correctness what is in fact under attack and constitute them as outside the acceptable, is the public culture of Australian society, a and thus without rights. Pauline Hanson’s fragile and momentary resolution of conflicts mother, so wonderfully played by herself in the between economic, cultural and social values. Sixty Minutes production of “Pauline Hanson, The role of the media in this process is This is Your Life” (Channel 9, 20 October instructive as it has been an active participant in 1996), provided an archetypal model for eroding the public sphere which it ostensibly is someone imbued with the spirit of Federation concerned to defend. and the struggle for national identity. She noted, that from her childhood she had been warned The calling-up of the public sphere as the arena about the Yellow Races, and how they would for appropriate public debate, (reflected in the come in and take over everything if given half a claim that political correctness had stifled debate chance: for Mum Hanson, the eroticised under the Labor government) indicates a imaginary of the Mongol octopus raping the widespread belief (from at least John Howard virginal body of the young Australia (as in the across to Hanson and beyond), that the public Phil May cartoons from The Bulletin in the sphere had been hijacked by a minority 1880s and 1890s) haunted her sentiment focussed in a particular Left nightmares/fantasies, and saturated the domestic intellectual network, located in key social and world in which the young Pauline learnt of the cultural institutions. The Bureaucracy (especially perils of the real world, and the dangers of key PC minders such as the Department of picking pennies from the pavement.

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