The line is already running out there that Pauline Hanson spoke for some attention-deprived "silent majority" of Australians... giving a voice to the great, ordinary, battling mass ignored buy the prosperous, softly liberal, inner urban elites.
This is Tory Maguire in The Punch:
"For the past decade and a half Hanson has served as a powerful warning to politicians and the media of the dangers of forgetting to ask people what they think... it's become clear she represented a large section of the community who thought no-one in Parliament House, be they MPs or journalists, were listening to them."
Hmm.
The news point here is that the One Nation founder has announced her intention to leave the country for a new life in Britain. The irony of Hanson, the unconscious xenophobe (only unconscious because she had never heard of the word) becoming a migrant in a foreign land is rich. Delicious. Sadly she won't be imposing herself on the British welfare system, having tweaked enough from her post-politics celebrity and the coffers of the Australian Electoral Commission to see her safely into some quietly respectable home-counties bungalow, union jack fluttering over the dovecote.
What and who did Hanson represent? What is her legacy? It's worth reminding ourselves of the moment when she entered the boarder Australian consciousness, thanks to her maiden speech to the house of representatives. It was 5.15pm on Tuesday September 10, 1996:
"My view on issues is based on commonsense, and my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole parent, and as a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop. I won the seat of Oxley largely on an issue that has resulted in me being called a racist. That issue related to my comment that Aboriginals received more benefits than non-Aboriginals.
"We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded "industries" that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups. In response to my call for equality for all Australians, the most noisy criticism came from the fat cats, bureaucrats and the do-gooders. They screamed the loudest because they stand to lose the most - their power, money and position, all funded by ordinary Australian taxpayers.
"Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged."
There was more: the global collusion of financial markets, the inequities of the family law act, the nagging uncertainty that Australian foreign aid money would be 'properly' spent once in the hands of, well, foreigners... a familiar, resentful grab bag.
Undeniably, she struck a chord: an apparently commonsense of dimly comprehended outrage, the angry sense that one's rightful due was being siphoned elsewhere, to the blacks, the migrants, the fat cats. Anyone but Us.
The record would suggest that Hanson never had the wit or acumen to exploit this low common denominator for her own advantage (other than through tapping the rich vein of public funding to be had after semi-successful forays in politics), but she signalled to others a sense of what might be achieved by appealing to the darker, dumber angels of Australian nature.
Not that her views were ever held by anything like a majority; her power lay in giving a broader body of voters, people whose politics remained unformed and suggestible, a sense of What Was Wrong.
Her bluntness in addressing that sweep of people, in providing a focus for their sense of victimhood and grievance, lowered the bar for others in politics. And others, more capable than she, exploited this new freedom: the freedom to step beyond "political correctness" and cast about directly in the racist, isolationist shadows of Australian public life.
The enduring legacy of Pauline is that the moral emphasis of Australian politics, that elevation was a higher calling than simply pandering and that securing that elevation was the trust of public life, has spent the better part of a decade lost.
Her legacy is a modern Australia where coarse populist nationalism and its attendant shadow of thinly veiled racist grievance is now an accepted part of the mainstream discourse. Much has changed since 1996.
