Imagine Christmas family lunch, but everyone there is your racist uncle. Or try this: Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Seven Samurai, but instead of skilled swordsmen, it’s people who have spent years honing the art of giving people the creeps—and there are eight of them.
Last Monday, Pauline Hanson was in Melbourne to announce One Nation’s first eight candidates for the upcoming Victorian state election. Among them was Warren Pickering, the party’s state leader, who will be contesting the seat of Pakenham.
Pickering spent time in the Middle East as a combat engineer with the Australian military, but it was only later that he paid the supreme sacrifice, when he lost his job at mining giant BHP for heroically refusing the COVID jab. His pet conspiracy theory is the “fifteen-minute city”, a fanciful notion that the government is planning to build suburbs where shops, schools, and hospitals are all within easy reach. Keep dreaming, Warren!
Then there’s Colleen Harkin, formerly of the Liberal Party, who is One Nation’s candidate for the South-Eastern Metropolitan region in the upper house. She works at a hard-right think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, a natural home for someone who likened climate change education to child abuse.
The IPA does valuable research such as polling public attitudes towards the Australian national anthem, polling public attitudes towards Australia Day and polling public attitudes towards the Australian flag. Many questions still remain unanswered, however. What percentage of the Australian population know all the words to pub rock anthem “Khe Sanh”? How many Australians regularly throw a shrimp on the barbie?
Harkin’s bio on the IPA website adds that she “enjoys a good steak tartare”. There’s something unsettling but totally plausible about a vision of Hanson’s foot soldiers sitting around a table devouring plate after plate of raw meat.
The most disconcerting of the eight candidates is probably former criminal lawyer Mark Nicholson. His claim to fame is being the “brains” behind Pauline Hanson’s animated TV series Please Explain and feature film A Super Progressive Movie. A sort of third-rate, Third Reich Walt Disney. He shares with his cartoon creations a certain two-dimensional, dead-behind-the-eyes look that’s hard to unsee.
Hanson’s first announced Victorian candidates are like stock characters from the far-right universe. For all the talk of being a party of “battlers”—a label which sticks no matter how many private jets and D&G galas Hanson racks up—One Nation’s state election line-up is decidedly middle class.
Colleen Harkin hails from the traditional party of business owners big and small. Two of them—Nicholson and Aaron Sandford—are lawyers. Fiona Lopez is an HR manager and Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell a dairy farmer. Natalie Adams is a small business owner, and rounding out the list is Chris Burson, a Geelong councillor and ex-cop. In a word, the sort of people who are the backbone of the capitalist status quo. Nationalism, racism, authoritarianism and exploitation are the air they breathe.
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote incisively about fascism as he watched it come to power in Italy, then in Germany. He understood well the middle-class roots of fascist politics, writing that “a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois” (that’s French for small-business owner). His solution to the problem—a socialist society that sweeps away once and for all the rule of the many over the few—is needed now more than ever.
