Australian politics is at a turning point. One Nation’s polling numbers have gone from disturbing to disastrous in just a few months. The party is now a serious electoral challenger, and its leaders are moving quickly to build a serious far-right movement. Across the country, it is establishing branches, recruiting wealthy backers and attracting support from every corner of the right, from disaffected Liberals and Nationals to neo-Nazis.
In November, Pauline Hanson visited US President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Trump is unpopular in Australia, even among those considering voting for One Nation. But the visit signalled that One Nation is the official Australian section of the global far-right revival, the political kin of its most influential leader and every bit as prepared to smash the left, migrants and workers.
Barnaby Joyce’s appearance at a recent anti-abortion rally in Sydney was similarly revealing. As he admitted from the platform, opposition to abortion rights is not currently popular. It is, however, a favoured cause of the far-right lunatic Christian fringe—the rally-goers Joyce urged to sign up as One Nation activists.
Socialists are the natural enemy of the far right. We reject everything they stand for, as well as the system that cultivates them. We need more people to stand up and be part of the fight against fascism. That fight has to be waged everywhere: in street protests, at elections, in our workplaces and in our neighbourhoods.
It’s one thing to talk about resisting the far right. But what does it mean in practice?
In recent weeks, there have been important protests against One Nation fundraisers in Perth and Melbourne, which attracted hundreds of people at short notice. Protests matter because they demonstrate active opposition. It is not enough to oppose the far right only in conversations among friends or at the ballot box. They need to be challenged in the public square.
One Nation is being given a red-carpet welcome into the mainstream. Hanson is treated with respect, if not deference, by most of the media. Protests are a way to challenge this normalisation. They give a voice to everyone sickened by everything Hanson and her band of far-right creeps stand for. In contrast to the endless liberal commentary about this or that policy, this or that candidate, this or that poll, protests are a way of democratically and actively mobilising the people who reject everything One Nation represents.
The left has a long history of fighting the far right through street mobilisations. At times, this has meant outnumbering them and undermining their organising efforts. Sometimes, protests are an effective way to peel away less ideologically committed people who are gravitating towards the far-right nucleus, preventing it from gaining a critical mass. For example, big and ongoing mobilisations played an important role in checking One Nation’s rise in the 1990s.
Today, One Nation is too strong for protests alone to seriously undermine it, although we should still mobilise opposition when we can (Hanson and Joyce being forced to skulk away to another venue at late notice in response to the Melbourne protest was a sweet moment—see page 4). Yet protests matter for another reason. Think how differently the world would view Trump’s presidency without the sustained resistance and bursts of mass protests that have opposed him. The left must find ways to enable the large numbers of people who oppose the far right to resist it visibly and meaningfully.
The most important aspect of protests is often their effect on our side. Collective action breaks the isolation and despair that capitalism creates. The ruling class would prefer that we remain spectators while they make decisions and politics plays out around us. Protests—often called “demonstrations” because they demonstrate that many people care about an issue and are prepared to act on it—can increase participants’ political confidence and help build and strengthen traditions of resistance, as well as organisations. This is crucial to laying the basis for future struggles.
We also need to fight the far right in elections. Elections have always been important arenas for testing public opinion and the strength of various political currents, although it is only recently that socialists in Australia have rebuilt organisations strong enough to participate more seriously in this arena. We are not going to defeat One Nation overnight, but building a pole of serious opposition to them is crucial. So the expansion of Victorian Socialists into a nationwide Socialist Party of more than 5,000 members is not only the most significant development on the far left in generations, but also a crucial pole of opposition around which we can build a serious alternative to establishment politics.
The November Victorian election is a major challenge. Victoria, the most left-wing state in the country, could, by November, be governed by a One Nation-Liberal coalition. That would represent a seismic shift in Australian politics. We need to challenge the far right while refusing to line up behind the appalling Labor government. Victorian Socialists are determined to make that intervention this November.
Fighting One Nation is also a battle of ideas. We need to be clear: Hanson wants to make society more authoritarian, more unequal, more dog eat dog; a more opulent paradise for capitalists and a closer approximation of hell for workers. She does not represent people with all manner of economic and political “grievances”—hers is the party of far-right grievances. One Nation is undoubtedly attracting more than the hard-core far-right sections of the population behind it. But its base, its orientation and its ambition are hard-right reaction.
Until recently, there was widespread complacency, both on the progressive left and in the political mainstream, about the rise of One Nation. We were repeatedly told that it was merely a temporary blip. The ALP set the tone. Many people view Labor as a lesser evil and Labor governments as a firewall against One Nation. Labor’s initial relish at One Nation taking a wrecking ball to the Liberal Party had a demobilising effect on the left. So too did Labor’s self-congratulatory spin about its supposedly historic electoral successes that put it in office federally and in almost every state. Yet even a cursory understanding of Australian politics reveals Labor’s primary vote has been declining for decades, and its support is increasingly shallow.
The complacency is now beginning to lift, largely because One Nation is no longer simply smashing the Liberals. It is increasingly threatening Labor electorally as well. As a result, Labor politicians have become more willing to talk about One Nation’s racism, its billionaire backers and its record of voting against working-class interests.
But anyone with a nose can smell where this comes from. It is not motivated by genuine political opposition to these scumbags, or concern for migrants or workers and the damage One Nation’s politics would inflict on them. The ALP has repeatedly shown itself willing to attack workers and the oppressed—often more effectively than the conservatives. Labor is primarily concerned about losing votes and seats on the parliamentary gravy train.
The unions should be using their muscle to build a working-class fightback against declining living standards. They should be offering an alternative to the far right based on class solidarity. Instead, they are little more than a cheer squad for right-wing Labor governments—and the biggest defenders of the capitalist status quo that so many workers are fed up with.
The Greens are no solution either. They mouth some of the right phrases, but they have spent so long positioning themselves as Labor’s soft-left conscience that they are incapable of mounting serious resistance either to Labor or to the far right. At the root of this is their acceptance of capitalism and the idea that some people—business owners, managers of the state bureaucracy, the professional classes—should rule over others.
Unfortunately, many on the left take their political cues from the dominant forces of the centre and centre left. This has contributed to the lack of serious opposition to One Nation so far. It has also encouraged a range of misguided political conclusions, including endless agonising about the workers who vote for One Nation.
Workers have always voted for the Liberal Party in significant numbers. Yet left-wing commentary about the Liberals rarely begins by agonising over this fact. To make it the starting point for analysing One Nation is to concede one of the far right’s central claims: that it represents battlers, the forgotten and the left behind.
Of course we should analyse why some workers are attracted to the far right. But this is not the central political question. Much more important is the nature of One Nation’s social base, its cadre and its political project. Even more important is what we do to fight them.
The sides are not evenly matched—our forces have a long way to go before they can win. But confronting the far right and building our side go hand in hand. If we are to rise to the occasion, we need to get serious about both. We need to challenge the far right wherever it appears, while building a socialist organisation capable not only of resisting One Nation, but of challenging the system that produced, and continues to foster, it.
