Look closely – Hanson doesn't really speak for ordinary Australians
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Version 0 of 1. My father was among the last Australians to contract polio, a stroke of rotten luck that changed the course of his life. Not long afterwards, Australia got the polio vaccine and future generations were spared the terrible disease. Thinking about how different polio victims’ lives could have been fans my fury when I read about parents who put a misguided or minuscule risk to their own child ahead of the overwhelming collective good of a community-wide vaccination program. The scientific evidence is clear – vaccinations save lives and have eradicated, or come close to eradicating diseases such as polio, diphtheria, cholera and tetanus. It’s why I think Tony Abbott did the right thing to stop family and childcare payments to families that refused to vaccinate their children, and why I applaud The Daily Telegraph for the No Jab No Play campaign that helped prompt that move. And it’s why it was so heartening to see Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten condemn Pauline Hanson’s ill-informed views – flushed out in an interview on Insiders last weekend – where she called the withholding of payments “blackmail” and said parents had “a right to investigate” the impact of childhood vaccination for themselves, as if the scientific evidence left room for non-vaccination as a reasonable choice. They stood up for the facts and public opinion was behind them. By week’s end, the usually immovable Hanson was retreating. This rapid slap down of the anti-vaxxers’ latest moment in the national political debate also raises another heartening thought. Perhaps facts and expertise retain some potency after all, despite the rise of “fake” news, and a US president who got elected in blatant disregard of them, and despite the fact that last year’s Essential poll found that 62% of voters agreed with the statement “I might not personally agree with everything (Pauline Hanson) says but she is speaking for a lot of ordinary Australians.” Perhaps it would really help if they knew more details about the policies with which they might not agree. Perhaps when interviewers finally move past the soft questions such as “Why do you think you’re so popular?” (she says it’s because the voters have “had a gutful” of the major parties) to interrogate the substance of what she is proposing, even voters who have indeed had a gutful will stop nodding in general agreement and start to question whether One Nation would actually be a better choice. Because in that Insiders interview Barry Cassidy barely had time to start with the questions raised by One Nation’s available grab bag of policies. On economic policy, for example, One Nation proposes huge spending policies such as increasing the pension by $100 a fortnight, or $150 for couples, increasing government payments to apprentices and paying tertiary students an allowance equivalent of the dole, while at the same time pushing for the states to abolish payroll tax and – according to a recent interview – investigating a flat 2% tax rate. The progressive Australia Institute has done an initial costing of the 2% tax plan on the assumption (because there is no available detail) that it is a resurrection of her 1998 “Easytax” proposal. It found that move would have a “catastrophic” effect on the budget and would disproportionately hurt those on lower incomes and disadvantage local manufacturers – exactly the groups Hanson claims to represent. And if Turnbull is happy to call out Hanson’s disregard for the science on vaccinations, wouldn’t it be logical for him to do the same for her party’s blatant disregard for the science of climate change (with the added advantage of sending a message to the sceptics in his own ranks). Because on climate change, One Nation refuses to accept the science – to Hanson’s mind, teaching climate science is “indoctrination” and climate scientists need to be hauled before a royal commission to investigate whether they have “corrupted” their data. “We are told humans are to blame for the change in weather patterns and that the earth is being destroyed. This theory has, and still is being indoctrinated in our educational system, and by our representatives of parliament and their scientific cohorts in toe, to brainwash the general public,” she once wrote. Given that 60% of Australians understand that humans are contributing to the warming of the planet, according to the Guardian Essential report, and given that the real world impact of the changing climate is becoming increasingly evident, knowing Hanson’s policies on the subject might give some of those who think she “speaks for ordinary Australians” reason to pause. And even if there is a vein of prejudice in the community that responds to her incendiary anti-Islam rhetoric, there is also the considered view of the director general of security, Duncan Lewis, that social cohesion is the only way to solve Islamic extremism. Hanson’s calls for Muslim immigration bans and stopping the construction of mosques can only have the opposite effect. Ever since One Nation stormed back as a political force last year, debate has raged about how mainstream parties should respond. It will undoubtedly continue after this weekend’s election in Western Australia. Some have argued the “deny her oxygen” course, but with four federal senators, 9% support in the latest national opinion polls and much more in polls in Queensland and Western Australia, the time for that approach may be gone. Some have toyed with she’s-not-really-that-bad legitimisation, a course former Nationals senator Ron Boswell called out in his inimitable way this week. (“I said to my colleagues ... you stupid bastards … all you are doing is legitimising people voting for her. Making it safe for people to vote for her,” Boswell told Guardian Australia’s Gabrielle Chan. Others have urged tolerance and conversation, and indeed Hanson is at her most potent when she can play the belittled victim battling against the out-of-touch prejudices of the inner city “elites”. But factual scrutiny need not be sneering or disrespectful of the disenchanted voters looking for someone, anyone, who will listen. And it is credited with staying the rise of One Nation in the late 1990s, the last time Hanson was riding high. In his address to the National Press Club after the 1998 federal election, in which One Nation won a single Senate seat and was unable to maintain the momentum of its historic vote in that year’s Queensland state poll, the then Liberal federal director Lynton Crosby explained what he thought had happened. “Our research found that every time the media or others focused on Pauline Hanson, her support – and One Nation’s – would rise in the polls ... For many Australians who did not agree with much, if anything, that she said she earned points for sticking to her guns in the face of constant attacks. To hound her personally gave her the oxygen of publicity which was essential to her survival,” he said. “... The clue to dealing with One Nation was always in its policies. Ultimately, it was policies like a 2% Easytax and, the advocacy of printing money to fix your problems coupled with unacceptable attitudes on other issues which drove people away.” In other words, facts – not generalised blame and grievance, but facts that allow the disillusioned voters she claims to represent on whether her ideas would help or hinder their lives. As with her “let parents decide” foray into vaccination policy, the evidence may well reveal her ideas to be retrograde. |