Anyone who believed that “easy-going” Australia was somehow immune from the far-right tide that has swept Europe and the US has been confounded by the rapid surge in support for One Nation, which has now overtaken the combined vote of the Liberals and Nationals in various opinion polls. Over the last two decades, the tendency on the left has been to dismiss Pauline Hanson as a has-been” and a joke. We can no longer afford that attitude. The rules of the game have decisively changed. The left needs to rise to the occasion and offer a clear alternative to defend working-class interests.
Hanson first rose to prominence back in 1996 with an inflammatory maiden speech to parliament condemning Aboriginal people and proclaiming that “white Australia” was being swamped by Asian immigration. For months, the middle-class fish-and-chip shop owner was the darling of the media, who published her racist diatribe in full. Any protest against Hanson was condemned as an attack on “free speech”. The Liberals and the Nationals lapped it all up and Labor leader Kim Beazley refused to call Hanson a racist.
Hanson, like so many far-right and fascist figures in Australian history, emerged out of the bowels of the Liberal Party. She was the preselected Liberal candidate for the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley for the 1996 elections. However, her vile attacks on Aboriginal people were too embarrassing even for hard-nosed Liberal operatives. She was disendorsed at the last minute but, with the help of local Liberal Party members, went on to win as an independent. Hanson benefited from the economic hardship that had hit the rural middle class.
John Howard, the newly elected prime minister, was determined to shift society sharply to the right. Howard saw Hanson as a useful ally in his campaign against “political correctness”—right-wing code for any opposition to racism or bigotry. Howard implemented many of Hanson’s policies: cutting immigration (particularly family reunions), locking up refugees, extinguishing native title, abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and disbanding the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
It was only when One Nation began to severely erode the Liberal vote and cost it seats that Howard’s sympathy for Hanson began to fade. The 1998 Queensland state election was an important turning point. The Liberals directed preferences to One Nation, but this backfired badly on them. One Nation won 22 percent of the vote, captured a swag of Liberal seats and, by splitting the conservative vote, delivered a range of other seats to Labor.
Rising mass opposition to Hanson also worried Howard and sections of the ruling class. Initially, most workers in the major urban centres were shocked and intimidated by the media barrage championing Hanson. But fear quickly turned to anger and loathing as a clearer understanding of the nature of Hanson’s right-wing agenda seeped in. With her backing from top mining bosses like Hugh Morgan and the Murdoch press, class-conscious workers saw her as a serious threat to their rights.
In that context, the confrontational protests that targeted and on a number of occasions actually shut down One Nation meetings had a real impact. As well as giving anti-racists confidence, the protests played a key role in breaking the momentum of her movement, demoralising her supporters and preventing Hanson from establishing strongholds outside rural areas. Support for One Nation was weakest in Victoria, where the protests against Hanson were most intense, collapsing to just 2 percent in mid-1998.
In Melbourne’s Hawthorn, with just five days’ notice, Socialist Alternative initiated a 3,000-strong mobilisation that shut down Hanson’s meeting. In working-class suburbs like Dandenong, anti-Hanson protests mobilised not just the far left but many thousands of local Asian and white workers. These militant protests helped spark a much broader anti-racist movement, including large school student walkouts that spread to numerous regional centres and country towns. Hundreds of Aboriginal people clashed with police in Echuca during an anti-Hanson protest. Rockhampton had a sizeable demonstration, and 5,000 rallied in Bendigo. In response to rank-and-file pressure, trade union officials in Melbourne organised a 50,000-strong anti-racism rally.
These mass mobilisations extending into 1998 broke the back of a genuinely threatening far-right movement and prevented the consolidation of a serious fascist organisation. In the 1980s there were substantial far-right mobilisations on the streets, and by 1996, far-right support was surging, more than 70,000 marching in Melbourne in opposition to the Howard government’s gun laws.
An array of far-right and fascist organisations, including National Action and its skinhead gangs, briefly coalesced around Hanson, who they saw as their “great white hope”. Hanson herself was becoming more extreme, publishing a book, The Truth, accusing Aboriginal people of cannibalism. But in the face of the mass mobilisations and the waning of ruling class and Liberal Party support, One Nation, wracked with infighting and corruption scandals, tore itself apart. The eleven One Nation MPs elected in Queensland in 1998 deserted the party.
In the 1990s, the mainstream media, innumerable liberal commentators and some on the left repeatedly claimed that Hanson’s support base was overwhelmingly working-class “racist rednecks”. Some conservative workers, especially in rural areas, did vote One Nation. However, Hanson overwhelmingly attracted former Coalition voters, not Labor voters. Opinion polls in the 1990s showed that unionised workers were the most hostile to Hanson.
As in many far-right movements, her core supporters were drawn from the small-town middle class of real estate agents, pharmacists, newsagents, lawyers, accountants, dentists, bank managers and farm machinery suppliers. They, in turn, galvanised around them retirees, police, sections of the self-employed and contractors and non-unionised workers in small workplaces. One Nation’s highest votes were concentrated in small town rural areas, peaking at 43.5 per cent in former Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old electorate of Barambah in south-east Queensland.
In the capital cities, as the commentator Phillip Adams noted, BMW and Volvo owners were prominent at Hanson’s meetings, not struggling blue-collar workers. As Australia is one of the most urbanised and proletarianised societies in the world, One Nation’s failure in the 1990s to make significant inroads into the working class of the major cities marginalised her movement. Whether One Nation or another far-right force can seriously break into and consolidate a presence in the capital cities this time around will be decisive.
Right up to the present day, One Nation’s leaders and candidates have overwhelmingly had a middle-class or small capitalist background. Hanson herself owned a fish-and-chip shop. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts had been the general manager of the Gordonstone coal mine in central Queensland. Western Australian One Nation Senator Tyron Whitten owns an earthworks and construction business. Former One Nation NSW Senator Warwick Stacey had been a British SAS officer. One Nation’s lone Victorian upper house MP Rikkie-Tyrell, who moved a motion to outlaw burning the Australian flag, is a dairy farmer from northern Victoria.
One Nation has, if anything, moved further to the right since the 1990s and doubled down on its anti-Asian racism. A typical example was One Nation’s Victorian state secretary, Bianca Colecchia, posting a video of people in Melbourne’s CBD on New Year’s Eve, exclaiming, “Spot the Westerner?” Vilifying Muslims is now stock in trade for Hanson. She has embraced every other fascist cause: championing Donald Trump, denouncing lifesaving vaccines and the World Health Organization, opposing abortion rights, backing “men’s rights” and nuclear power, combined with climate denialism.
Despite all this, there is nothing like the popular hostility and outrage against Hanson that was so widespread in the 1990s. She has to a considerable extent been normalised by the media and the political establishment while gaining the support of some of the wealthiest Australian capitalists, including Gina Rinehart. National Party leader David Littleproud has not ruled out working with One Nation, while Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently officially met with Hanson for the first time.
Part of the reason that Hanson does not seem so extreme is that both Labor and the Liberals have implemented some of her most reactionary policies on refugees and asylum seekers and hostility to workers’ rights. Both mainstream parties have repeatedly whipped up Islamophobia, implemented a law-and-order agenda that targeted Aboriginal people and African migrants and backed the genocide in Gaza, while undermining basic health services and the living standards of workers to boost the profits of big business. In this context, anti-immigration sentiment has grown over the last few years.
International trends have also had an important impact, with the far right becoming an established force in country after country. Sections of the capitalist class have been enthused by the success of Trump and the UK’s Nigel Farage. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and the Australian have played a key role in consolidating far-right talking points on a range of issues like climate change and support for Israel. They have helped develop a cadre of far-right and openly fascist influencers and operators. They have fuelled support for the likes of Jacinta Price and Andrew Hastie on the extreme right of the Liberal Party, as well as for Hanson.
In many rural areas and regional centres, especially in NSW and Queensland, support for far-right politics has consolidated over several years. One Nation is now making inroads into some suburban areas. As well as taking votes from the Nationals and Liberals, and to a lesser extent from Labor, One Nation, which obtained 5.7 per cent at the last Senate elections, is soaking up the votes of the assorted far-right micro parties. A further worrying sign is that One Nation has gained a massive surge of followers on social media over the last six months. It will take a major political mobilisation to push back this threat.
Along with Barnaby Joyce, One Nation’s recent prominence has attracted a cohort of sordid bigots and reactionary wannabees. Adam Giles, the former Country Liberal Party Northern Territory chief minister, is typical of this crew. After losing office, Giles became a Sky News host, notoriously running a favourable interview with Blair Cottrell, the head of the openly Nazi United Patriots Front. Today, Giles is employed by Gina Rinehart as chief executive officer of Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co.
Heading the One Nation upper house ticket for the South Australian elections is Cory Bernardi. A former Liberal senator, Bernardi argued for tougher anti-worker industrial relations laws, denied global warming, opposed abortion rights for rape victims and declared that permitting same-sex marriage would lead to legalised bestiality. Given his hostility to multiculturalism, support for a ban on wearing the burqa and his claim that Christianity is under siege, he will fit in nicely with Hanson.
Another recycled bigot rallying to the One Nation cause is former Liberal MP Bernie Finn. He was expelled from the Liberals for “a series of inflammatory social media posts”, including calling for abortion to be made illegal in all circumstances and comparing Labor Premier Dan Andrews to Adolf Hitler.
There is great turmoil and reorganisation taking place in right-wing politics. The surge in support for One Nation has sharpened the crisis in the conservative parties, which shows no sign of being resolved anytime soon. Exactly how things will develop over the coming months is far from clear. Despite One Nation regularly polling more than 20 percent, Hanson has not yet demonstrated the capacity to build and maintain a far-right movement on anything like the scale of Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France or Trump in the US. In the 1990s, Hanson failed to develop a network of strong branches and a solid core of committed party activists. Her party has long been plagued by splits and defections. This time around, One Nation is attempting to build a solid branch structure. How successful it will be is too early to tell.
One Nation is far from being the only threat. The Liberal and National parties have also shifted well to the right, partly inspired by Trump and Farage and in response to the pressure from One Nation. New Liberal leader Angus Taylor seems set to move the party further right, while Andrew Hastie waits in the wings, itching for full Trumpification.
At the end of last year, we also saw a brief flurry of racist street protests in which the openly Nazi National Socialist Network played a leading role. However, the far-right sentiment at this stage largely remains electorally focused and has not led to anything like the scale of violent attacks on migrants and refugees that have repeatedly occurred in Europe. The far-right terrorist attack on the Perth Invasion Day rally is, however, a dangerous warning sign. And in the wake of Bondi, there have been increasing attacks on Muslims.
The far right internationally has entrenched itself as a serious political force—dominating the US Republican Party, in government in Italy, India, Israel and Hungary and leading the polls in Britain and France. Reactionary Nazi-style attitudes are widespread among important sections of the US capitalist class and key operatives in the Trump administration. Australia is now rapidly going down the same road.
The far right is not simply some bizarre anomaly separate from capitalism. It is integral to the capitalist system. Fascism is a force the capitalist class have repeatedly turned to when it has suited their needs of pushing politics in a harsher, more authoritarian direction. This is vital to understand. Fighting fascism can’t be separated from the broader fight against capitalism and the mainstream political parties whose racist and reactionary policies give the far right succour.
Fighting the far right doesn’t just mean combating them on the streets. The left must also prioritise standing up for workers’ rights, opposing imperialist war, mobilising in support of Palestine, defending democratic rights, building strong socialist election campaigns; indeed, every fight in which our side stands up against the rich and powerful is essential to combating and offering an alternative to the far right. It also means building the sort of strong grassroots organisations in working-class communities that have been central to the fight against ICE in Minneapolis.
As long as capitalism exists, there will continue to be a space for the far right to grow. As the capitalist system moves deeper into social and political crisis, that space is set to expand. We can’t rely on small-l liberals or reformists to oppose fascism consistently. At best, the liberals will equivocate. At worst, as they have repeatedly done in the past, they will go over to the fascists when they feel their class interests are threatened. We are in for a long fight, and it is vital to build up the forces of the revolutionary left so that we can play a decisive role in the battles to come.
