The Hanson phenomenon
by Paul Walter [0]
With Hanson, Margo’s piece really said it all, i.e., politicians and media inflaming cultural anxieties expressed thru a phenomenon personalised in the form Hanson herself, Hanson then spat out by the system not only for fear of a rival, but for its own exploitationary reasons (Hanson morphed into another minority view to be demonised, as she became “silly” and someone/thing the politicians were nobly defending us from) and Hanson finally hoist on her own petard, an eerily familiar fate when one considers what right wing populists themselves did to earlier minorities from the mid nineties to the mid 2000’s.
As to Hanson herself, you have to wonder at the cultural background that created the woman she was: women’s upbringing and enculturisation (and men’s), gender relations, and politics in general over the last couple of centuries and post ww2 in particular, perhaps against a sort of back drop of the sort of stuff that Prof Marilyn Lake discussed, concerning the Henry Lawson Bronzed Anzac / Pioneer myth and its sidelining of women.
Women as bastions of the domestic front that was all that was left for/to them, perhaps with them made conservative and play-safe because of the impact of policies at different times on women, who were left with child care, etc during times like the Great Depression – hence the idea of refugees as queue jumpers as Trojan horses brought in by middle class leaders to break down the labour market again, at a time of high unemployment.
Don’t forget, at one stage we only had the word of the government and the tabloid media on the veracity of refugee claims – we were told the opposite. A little like Alga, I was suspicious of refugees myself, but no way was the government going to tell the truth, to dispel fears, either.
Quite the opposite. They were too busy using it to cling to government. By 2007, when they were still trying the same tactics on minority vilification with Aboriginals, people were better prepared. There’d been so many minorities verballed by Howardists before and after
As we know, others were better able, placed and motivated to hunt down information about what really was going on and to the activists we probably owe the debt, for salvaging our democracy.