'She says what the people say': Pauline Hanson's fans on jobs and immigration
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Version 0 of 1. There are eight One Nation posters in the front garden and two more in the car. A card table has been set up at the front door, bearing a dusty stack of party membership papers and a pen, tethered to the table with masking tape and string. Some of the posters, showing the party’s leader, Pauline Hanson, clad in an Australian flag and pearls, date back to the 1998 federal election campaign. They were quite expensive. “Those ones were $28 each,” says Athol Chester. “But it’s a lovely photo.” This is not a One Nation branch office, it’s just Chester’s house. The 87-year-old lives in Mandurah, a nominally conservative-voting coastal city about 50km south of Perth. His wife, Frances, lives in a nearby nursing home but visits daily to have lunch and watch the cricket. Chester opens the door in a One Nation T-shirt, tucked into belted shorts. The shirt was for Hanson’s benefit. The Queensland senator visited that morning, before making a public appearance at the Mandurah waterfront and hosting a combative press conference. It was the first stop in a week-long tour by Hanson ahead of Saturday’s state election in Western Australia, in which One Nation, thanks to a preference deal with the Liberal party, is expected to pick up as many as three upper house seats. “I’ve never talked to Pauline until this morning,” Chester says. “It was wonderful. I don’t mind, but for my wife … it was lovely for her to see her. She couldn’t go anywhere to see her so it was lovely for her to come and talk to her.” Chester has been a fan of One Nation since 1997, when he returned from an overseas holiday to see images of the then federal member for Oxley being pelted with rotten eggs by protesters. “I rang up the TV station, which you could in those days, and I demanded to know [where she was] but they wouldn’t tell me in case I was going to kill her or something,” he said. “I said I wanted to send $100 to her, whoever she is, or to her organisation, to fight this, I won’t have a bar of this … So I sent it off. I’ve still got the receipt, I think.” A few years later he started the One Nation Supporters Group. There are placards advertising the group stacked in his living room, alongside memorabilia from a lifetime in local politics. In the far corner is a bushel of dried stalks, which Chester says is industrial hemp. It’s the hemp that caused the former wheat farmer from Cleary, a town of 50 people about 300km north-east of Perth, to abandon the WA National party, which he helped found as a key supporter of its first leader and his “very best friend”, Ray McPharlin. Chester blames Terry Redman, who was until recently leader of the WA Nationals, for stifling the production of industrial hemp in Western Australia until 2004. “He’s a bloody Liberal,” Chester said. In Chester’s convoluted personal political history, the bloody Liberals are always to blame. He uses the word interchangeably to mean social liberals, economic liberals and the Liberal party. At the heart of his support for the National party was deep parochialism and faith in the views of “ordinary people” over academics (“once you go to university you’re buggered”). Now that the WA Nationals had been “infiltrated by the bloody Liberals”, that support, and those values, found a new home in One Nation. “I don’t know what the One Nation policies are, and I don’t care much,” he says. “I’m only saying that she says what the people are saying.” The comparison to One Nation irks the WA Nationals leader, Brendon Grylls, who says he has been asked about little else since the minor party decided to challenge for his seat of Pilbara. “The entire analysis of this thing has been flawed and I look forward to the mea culpas after the election,” he said. About 400km south of Mandurah, in Albany, a travelling boot salesman named Brad Dickinson has been talking to a stock and station agent about the price of avocado. It used to cost 60c extra to put avocado on your Subway sandwich, now it’s $1. That price increase hasn’t gone to the farmers, Dickinson says. It has lined the pockets of the multinational corporation, and is a symptom of the problems that come with globalisation. Dickinson has sold Australian-made Rossi work boots to stores in regional WA for the past 35 years. He will be 64 next week but is still a decade away from retirement, after a divorce left him “financially filleted”. He is proudly blue-collar and voted Labor in the 1960s, switching to the Liberal party in the 1970s when, he says, “the Labor party got hijacked by the legal industry and the academics”. Now neither major party will do, so he’s voting for One Nation. The National party, he said, “have got a lot more experience and a lot more to offer, but they’ve allowed themselves to be overshadowed by the Liberals”. Dickinson’s 21-year-old nephew is also voting for One Nation. He has been unable to find a job since finishing university and is considering joining the army. It’s a position shared by many young West Australians. The state’s unemployment rate reached 6.9% in December, the highest it has been since 2002. In 10 years WA has gone from the best place in the country to find high-paid work, with unemployment driven down to 3.3% in 2007 by the mining boom, to the worst. The worst of the worst is Mandurah, where the rate is now 11.3%. That is one reason it was chosen for the first stop of Hanson’s election tour. Dickinson was among those who greeted her on the foreshore. Since the 1960s, he says, “there just hasn’t been any leader with any real love for his country above himself or his party”. Hanson filled that gap, with the twin platforms of protectionism and xenophobia. He supports her stance on foreign ownership, saying “the sand is being taken away from underneath us”, and on immigration. “One real thing that gets me is because I travel extensively overseas and in countries from the Middle East to Asia, and everywhere I go there and I’ve got total respect for that country’s culture and traditions, and I always do what I’m supposed to do in their country,” he says. “And we’ve allowed people that are coming into our country, and they come into my country and call me a racist. I absolutely loathe that.” Unlike Chester, who talks about “the bloody Moslems” (always with the archaic spelling clearly pronounced) almost as often as he talks about “the bloody Liberals”, Dickinson skirts around his concern, calling it “a certain religious sector”. “I’ve got friends that practise that faith that are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but if they’ve got a cause it’s been very much undermined by these people,” he says. “They are going to tell us what we can do and what we should do.” Dickinson says society has become dominated by two minority factions: the super rich and “your leftwing lunatics”. He is unimpressed by the professionalisation of politics and thinks politicians have fallen out of touch. He says the media has become obsessed with negativity and spreads “false news” by taking out of context comments of people such as Hanson, who spent the week backtracking comments she made casting doubt on the merits of vaccination and in support of Vladimir Putin. Hanson, he says, is “the buzz in the bush” again, after sweeping back into federal parliament leading a team of four One Nation senators in the 2016 election. The party won 4.03% of first preference Senate votes in WA, and the most recent poll has them at 9% ahead of Saturday’s election. It was a significant comeback for Hanson, who lost her federal seat in 1998, led a failed Senate campaign in 2001, and spent 11 weeks in jail in 2003 on an electoral fraud conviction that was later overturned. “I think the other thing people like about her, and I’ve heard people say in discussion, is, you know, this lady’s really got balls,” Dickinson says. “She’s like a rugby player, she gets knocked down but she bounces back up again.” The knocks this week came from within Hanson’s own party, which has been tearing itself apart over the preference deal with the Liberal party (those bloody Liberals again). On Friday Margaret Dodd, who has a high media profile as the mother of murdered teenager Hayley Dodd and has campaigned on the basis of “no body, no parole” laws, quit as the One Nation candidate for Scarborough, having previously described Hanson as “just a Liberal puppet”. Dodd had refused to follow the preference deal. Last month the party disendorsed two other candidates who had criticised the deal, although the official reason for their dismissal was that they failed to “reach standards”. Colin Tincknell, the party’s WA leader and candidate for the upper house in the south-west, has been deeply critical of the media for focusing on troubles within the party rather than looking at the positives – that the party has 50 other candidates who have not been disendorsed. “These people are loyal to Pauline, they’re loyal to me, I’m absolutely rapt with the way the campaign’s going,” he said in a Facebook video on Thursday. “So yeah, you can listen to the bullshit from the media, but the facts are, that’s one or two people. Have a look at the 50 fantastic candidates that are there behind me, behind Pauline, and are going to deliver what you guys want if they get into parliament.” At Hanson’s press conference on Monday, some supporters were more forthright. “I would like to push some of this media out onto the road and run them over with a bus,” said one man, after reporters asked a string of questions about disqualified candidates. Hanson’s stump speech was met with applause. “I do believe that people are absolutely so fed up with the major political parties because they are not listening to the people,” she said. “People are struggling with everyday costs, the rising cost of living, jobs, people are worried for the future of their children.” The future that Hanson is offering, which has comforted and appealed to many voters, is a return to the past. An Australia for Australians, or those prepared to act like Australians, a concept reminiscent of the white Australia policy formed more than 100 years ago. “She’s just saying what everyone else is saying,” Chester said. |