By Lucas Rosas
1. All the right people hate her
I have to admit, I didn’t put One Nation as my first preference Senate vote.
I thought that for all Pauline Hanson’s bravery, guts and tenacity that she was yesterday’s woman with a faded star and a pitch that had gone out of style.
I believed that the future leadership of the long ignored middle Australian grassroots revolt would lie with a new party like the ALA.
When Hanson was elected I was shocked and mildly pleased, but I wasn’t rushing to support her.
But I was wrong.
I had forgotten how the establishment hates.
The political class from left to right has freaking exploded into incandescent, spluttering rage.
From Malcolm Turnbull:
“Pauline Hanson is, as far as we are concerned, not a welcome presence in the Austrian political scene.”
To Bill Shorten:
“Malcolm Turnbull is the reason why One Nation is back in the Senate after 18 years”.
“Very, very dangerous…One of the roles that I’ll have in the Senate is to make sure that she’s in there for one term and one term only.”
To Guardianistas throwing tantrums about global warming:
“One Nation will not be a lone climate denialist voice in the Senate – there are a handful of Coalition senators that also share similar views.”
To the wonder that is Crikey:
“The centre ground of Australian politics has been dragged so far to the right that (as Hanson herself has noted) there is very little to differentiate One Nation and other elements of the so-called patriots’ movement from right-wing members of the Liberal Party.”
To the first Indigenous woman elected into the House of Representatives; Linda Burney:
“You cannot excuse stupidity for ignorance and that’s what is being displayed. There is no excuse for racism.”
To Leftist blogs calling for a crackdown on free speech:
“The argument that we should seek to find common ground through dialogue with Hanson is dangerous…. It’s also strange to see so many commentators come out in defence of Hanson’s ‘right’ to voice her anti-Islam and anti-migrant views. Unlike the U.S we don’t have a long history of ‘freedom of speech at all costs’ here in Australia.”
To our very own $300,000 dollar a year “Race Discrimination Commissioner” and former ALP staffer Tim Soutphommasane:
“We have plenty of examples about how licensing hate can lead to serious violence and ugliness in our streets and our communities.”
To a Muslim immigrant Greens MP:
“Racist and Islamophobic behaviours can no longer be written off as a fringe part of Australian life, or simply Muslims being oversensitive.”
To the head of the largest Muslim association in the country Samier Dandan:
“They are provided platforms by the media to spread their vitriol. It is just as deplorable as those that entertain such sentiments.”
Across all of social media, in and out of every newsroom and television studio, in cafes and pubs, churches and mosques, schools and retirement homes everyone is now talking about issues others have struggled for years to bring to light, and as events overseas have shown, no matter how hard the powers that be try to twist the narrative of HOW things are spoken about, often the fact that they are spoken about at all is enough.
As the quotes above show, the fiery redhead from Queensland drives the absolute worst human beings in Australia absolutely nuts. It’s pretty clear to see, Hanson hasn’t just moved the Overton window, she’s taken a cricket bat to it.
2. The fire is rising
As XYZ’s own David Hiscox has pointed out, the rise of right wing populism in Australia is not an isolated event.
In the UK, the entire elite establishment have been slapped in the face by Brexit; from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems to Labour, from leftist academics to City stock market traders, from the trust fund hipster living in an Islington bedsit to the doctor’s wives chattering in Chelsea cafes, all of them had their will, their opinion and even their conception of the world around them ripped in two by the uprising of the forgotten and unwanted.
In the US, a candidate who said things that almost every commentator from right to left declared to be “Disqualifying” has made it to the final two. All over America, from the rust belt to the South, working people who have never done so much as post in an online newspaper comment section are getting up off the couch, leaving their homes and filling stadiums. They’re called racists, sexists, and any other name the elite can scream through their megaphones. They get attacked on the street by well funded media-encouraged mobs, yet keep showing up in their tens of thousands to fight for change and a different tomorrow.
Across Europe and the wider West, electoral scams are being exposed, journalistic and academic bias is being called out, a media deaf to the changing winds see their circulation dropping and their audiences declining.
The little people, the ignored, the looked down upon, the unfashionable, the excluded, are angry.
These people are on the march all across the West, their work-tired feet tramping the ground and their ears deaf to the threadbare slurs thrown at them by an increasingly desperate establishment class.
In Australia this class, this scream of the unwanted and sneered upon has chosen a woman that the elites hate almost as much as they hate our nation itself. Many have been competing to grab their attention, to give them hope, but they chose her.
The fire is rising, it’s time to fan the flames, not smother them.
3. You might just have to.
I was only an adolescent the last time Pauline Hanson was on the scene, but even I remember enough to know what’s coming.
There were plenty of people and groups in the aftermath of the disastrous Keating years, attempting to speak up for those without a voice on the right when John Howard pointedly refused to do so. Many people who had seen their opinions ignored and squashed by the first great onslaught of political correctness. I’m sure the activists in these groups worked tirelessly to get their point of view across and spent time and money trying to build something meaningful.
And I can’t really remember any of them, or even the names of their groups. No-one can.
But I do remember what happened after Hanson’s maiden speech.
I remember the vile socialist thugs attacking working class pensioners with bricks and iron bars; screeching leftist drones kicking helpless prone bodies of vulnerable people who had the sheer effrontery to disagree with the establishment and love their country. All cheered on by a compliant media chuckling with sneering laughter as the “white trash bogans” get what is coming to them.
And that was twenty years ago.
It’s going to be worse this time.
Almost every mid-tier, middle-aged lefty journalist was a uni student during the rise of Hanson.
They have been taught to hate her and fear her from their earliest adulthood.
There is going to be zero oxygen for anyone else on the issues she has staked out.
Twenty years ago, One Nation couldn’t hold a meeting in Hawthorn without the innocent blood of attendees being shed on the streets.
Now it will be impossible to even find a place willing to hold a meeting, knowing full well the vandalism and violence of the left would be aimed squarely at any property owner or manager that allowed it.
The question you have to ask yourself is, regardless of how you feel about Hanson, her voice, her hair or her economic policies, when the hate filled haters of hatred come to your town looking for a chance to squash any remaining semblance of free speech for dissenters, will you lend a hand? Or will you tut-tut aimlessly while watching from the safety of your lounge room?
The choice for me is simple, as it should be for you.
Lucas is a former soldier and current hedonist reclining supine beside a pool in a tropical paradise with a cocktail as the sun sets on Western civilisation. He likes hats.