Few people on the left would dispute that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party represent a real threat to the working class and to oppressed groups. Backed by Australia’s wealthiest capitalist, Gina Rinehart, and given the red-carpet treatment by the corporate media, One Nation has overtaken the Coalition and is polling neck-and-neck with Labor.
One Nation’s program is vile; a grab-bag of far-right policies to enable bosses to more easily sack workers, to cut wages and working conditions, to attack democratic and civil rights. The party is committed to “slashing wasteful government spending” on programs that seek to address social and economic disadvantage and instead massively increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP. With a track record of backing every tax break for the rich, that can only mean devastating cuts to health, welfare and education.
In Victoria, traditionally seen as home to the labour movement, One Nation is now outpolling Labor. There is a real prospect that One Nation could lead a coalition government after the November poll.
In this context, recent demonstrations at One Nation events, including a 500-strong protest in the Perth suburb of Midland and a 1000-strong demonstration in Melbourne’s inner north (prompting a last-minute venue change), are a breath of fresh air.
It therefore came as something of a surprise to see Lisbeth Latham, whose blog is entitled “Revitalising Labour”, argue that a series of articles in Red Flag’s sister publication Marxist Left Review (MLR) get it fundamentally wrong in arguing that the 1990s mass protests against Pauline Hanson contributed to driving One Nation into the political wilderness for years.
While acknowledging that “counter-mobilisation still matters”, Latham argues that what is needed is “sustained community organising”. But what kind of “community organising” are we talking about? Latham’s advice is that we must “[start] from where people actually are, [demand] what their situation actually requires, and [trust] that the process of organised struggle for real demands develops the consciousness and the capacity that transformation requires”.
Latham falsely presents Socialist Alternative as singularly focused on a “reactive model”—countering Hanson’s public meetings—while making no mention of the sustained organising that Socialist Alternative members have been involved in: public meetings, suburban anti-fascist mobilisations, letter-boxing and door-knocking campaigns alongside many hundreds of Socialist Party members across the country over the past year (and for several years before that in Victoria).
In all these activities, we have drawn in hundreds of people who want to do something to challenge the rise of the far right and to build a socialist alternative both to the fascists and to the pro-capitalist mainstream that has enabled One Nation’s rise by destroying living standards and normalising bigotry. Our orientation is quite simple and should not be controversial: we have to orient to the people repulsed by the far right, to the subset of them who want to do something about its rise, and to those among them who can be organised into a larger socialist movement. One Nation has grown to around 60,000 members. The Socialist Party has around 6,000. We need to recruit more socialists so that we can engage in more sustained on-the-ground organising in more suburbs and cities across the country.
A reflection on the 1990s movement—what it achieved, what it didn’t achieve and what we can learn from it—is indeed important. Latham argues that Mick Armstrong’s MLR article, and a previous article by Tess Lee Ack, are Melbourne-centric and fail to discuss in any depth the Resistance-led national wave of high school student walkouts in mid-1998. According to Latham, it was these walkouts, not the protests outside her meetings, that were the “most significant popular expression of opposition to One Nation”.
That Socialist Alternative’s analysis has been Melbourne-centric is perhaps hardly surprising, given that the vast majority of its membership lived in Melbourne in the 1990s. But how could Resistance have possibly initiated a 14,000-strong national high school student walkout in July 1998, were it not for the many protests outside Hanson’s meetings around the country in the preceding eighteen months?
As someone who organised protests in Brisbane between 1996 and 1998, I can attest to the hard work that far-left organisations, including my own (I was then a member of the Democratic Socialist Party, or DSP), put into staging them. Our intent was never to try to win One Nation members over one at a time, but to demoralise and defeat them as a political force by demonstrating in large numbers.
At the time, I was working in the Goodna Centrelink office, in Hanson’s electorate: the formerly safe Labor seat of Oxley, west of Brisbane. Ipswich, in the centre of the electorate, had been hit hard in the early 1990s by the loss of hundreds of jobs in the local railway workshops. While many Queensland Nationals jumped ship to One Nation, Hanson was also able to swing behind her some disenfranchised Labor voters, angered by the neoliberal policies of state and federal Labor governments.
When Hanson delivered her maiden speech in September 1996, it gained wall-to-wall media coverage. Her claims that First Nations people constituted a “privileged class”, and that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”, produced widespread revulsion.
We were determined to ensure Hanson’s message didn’t go unanswered. In late 1996, we formed the Antiracism Campaign (ARC). We weren’t the first to protest Hanson, however. On 7 March 1996, less than a week after Hanson’s election, a crowd of several hundred First Nations people rallied in the Ipswich mall. As Hanson began touring the county, establishing a network of Pauline Hanson Support Groups, protests spread.
In November 1996, a “Unite against Racism” rally in Ipswich attracted 4,000 people. Six trade unions endorsed the rally, which was addressed by the president of the Queensland Council of Unions, Dave Harrison. Rally material was translated into Chinese, and hundreds of the local Chinese community attended, as well as many Aboriginal residents.
Rallies also took place that month in Sydney, Canberra, Perth and Melbourne. The Melbourne rally, organised by the Victorian Trades Hall Council and the Ethnic Communities Council, drew more than 30,000 people. A key message that the left sought to convey at these demonstrations was that newly elected Liberal Prime Minister John Howard was Hanson’s enabler, and Hanson served as his Trojan horse for a wave of anti-worker and racist attacks.
Howard refused to rebut Hanson’s racist claims, defending her “right” to freedom of speech. At the time, Howard was keen to distract attention from his anti-worker industrial laws. Additionally, stoking the flames of racism towards Aboriginal people prepared the ground for winding back native title rights and, later, abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
In April 1997, Hanson launched One Nation at the Ipswich Civic Centre. ARC initiated a counter-protest that forced Hanson and her supporters to run a gauntlet of angry protesters. In the coming months, similar scenes were repeated around the country. The next month, Hanson travelled to Perth to launch One Nation at Challenge Stadium. She faced a 2,000-strong protest in what she later recalled as the “worst 24 hours of my life”.
A One Nation launch at Hobart City Hall the following week proved even more disastrous for Hanson. The Sun Herald reported that before the event organiser had finished introducing Hanson, “a surge of protesters flooded the hall, drowning out his opening remarks with a deafening chant of ‘Pauline Hanson has to go’”.
At her Newcastle launch at the end of May, Hanson hoped to appeal to a community reeling from the announcement that the BHP steelworks would close. However, the meeting faced a protest of 2,000 people chanting, “No White Australia!” and “Racist scum, go home!”, according to a Sydney Morning Herald report.
Protests also took place in numerous regional centres, wherever One Nation tried to establish a branch, including Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo and Queanbeyan. In Geelong, 500 protesters stormed the venue of a One Nation meeting, forcing it to disband. Latham disparagingly refers to these tactics as “venue chasing”, which is described as “exhausting and demoralising”:
“When inner-city activists travel to outer suburban or regional communities to protest One Nation events ... they arrive as outsiders declaring who is welcome, confirm every suspicion One Nation cultivates about who the left represents, and go home having built nothing.”
Yet, my own experience was that when we travelled to Toowoomba, an hour and a half west of Brisbane, to protest a One Nation launch, we were able to link up with local protesters, building each other’s confidence. Together, we chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear, racists are not welcome here!”
Nonetheless, sharp debates emerged within ARC about protest tactics. At a Gold Coast protest, International Socialist Organisation (ISO) members attempted to block the path of those entering the One Nation meeting, leading to physical confrontations, despite One Nation supporters vastly outnumbering us. Within ARC, the ISO argued we needed to “nip fascism in the bud”, and therefore, the disruption of One Nation meetings was more important than the number of protesters who attended.
DSP members countered that we should avoid physical confrontations with Hanson supporters as this would be an obstacle to growing our numbers and assisted the media’s campaign to frame us as “violent” and opposed to “free speech”. We argued that protests should be angry and that we should condemn Hanson as a racist. But we also argued that demonstrations needed to draw in broad layers of people, especially workers, and that we should make every effort to draw in the campaign, trade unions, and migrant and Indigenous organisations.
Were the protests effective?
By the end of 1997, One Nation had recruited around 18,000 members and established 250 branches nationwide. The party proved a magnet for the far right, with the antisemitic League of Rights and openly fascist National Action involved in the establishment of local branches. With Coalition preferences, One Nation secured eleven seats in the Queensland election in June 1998.
However, the protests were the best tool we had to demonstrate opposition to Hanson’s rise. And they shifted the terrain of the debate. In the wake of the Queensland election debacle, protests escalated. The mass high school walkouts, which drew tens of thousands of students into the streets, put pressure on the Coalition not to preference One Nation in the October 1998 election, resulting in the party failing to win a single seat. In 2001, Green Left Weekly writer Alison Dellit observed:
“When hundreds of people demonstrated outside every meeting Hanson spoke at, Coalition ministers started to openly condemn Hanson’s racism. In 1998, when tens of thousands of high school students organised by the socialist youth group Resistance walked out of school and took to the streets in protest, the Liberals announced a preference swap deal that amounted to an electoral lockout to ‘destroy’ One Nation” ... These demonstrations had a real effect. They forced Hanson off the political scene for a while, and damaged the political value of the race card for her.”
While the 1990s anti-racist movement forced Hanson to retreat for a time, the neoliberal policies that contributed to Hanson’s popularity have only intensified. After four decades of neoliberal onslaught, Australia today is a much more unequal and authoritarian country. As well, anti-refugee racism has been normalised in federal politics
With the far right on the march internationally and support for Labor and the Coalition continuing to erode, it is hardly surprising that Gina Rinehart, other right-wing ideologues, and sections of the corporate media have backed the return of One Nation.
Today, we need not only protests but the revival of working-class struggle, led by a socialist party that can challenge the pro-business, anti-worker policies of the traditional parties and the politics of hate and far-right reaction spearheaded by One Nation. That’s why Socialist Alternative members around the country are knocking on doors, hosting meetings and plastering the suburbs with posters to build the Socialist Party.
The protest against Hanson’s Midland fundraiser on 10 June was the first item on the national news on every TV channel that night. For the first time in decades, the media debate shifted to discussing Hanson’s racism. Moreover, the WA Socialists were widely acknowledged as the organisers of the protest. The brand recognition this coverage generates is of enormous value when we knock on doors to discuss the threat One Nation poses.
Of course, this protest—and others like it—won’t stop One Nation. But they offer the message that there is an alternative. That alternative is not the politics of a bland multiculturalism devoid of any meaning, but a socialist alternative: one that argues for a profoundly different society where working people—not bosses—decide how our society is run.
