Why the far right isn’t going away
One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson has spent the first two months of the 47th parliament engaging in increasingly vitriolic far-right outbursts. When parliament opened with an acknowledgement of country on 26 July, Hanson interrupted the proceedings, shouting “No, I won’t and I never will” before storming out. In a Facebook video posted later the same day, Hanson explained that she had decided to disrupt the acknowledgement because of a proposal to place the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian flag on the floor of parliament. She condemned such a move as “divisive for this country” and the Liberals and Nationals as “gutless” for refusing to oppose it.
Then on 9 September, in response to a tweet by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi that was critical of Queen Elizabeth II, Hanson tweeted, “Your attitude appals and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”. When the Greens moved to censor Hanson for her comments, she doubled down, saying that she would gladly drive Faruqi to the airport. Hanson has also recently attacked the proposed increase to migration numbers, campaigned for nuclear power stations and condemned any move to reduce CO2 emissions.
Hanson’s outbursts might appear chaotic, but there is a strategy involved. The decisive defeat of the Liberals in the May federal election, and in particular the loss of a number of traditionally conservative seats to teal independents, has opened up a debate about how the right can return to power.
The far right both inside and outside the Liberal Party are pushing against the idea that mainstream conservatives should move back to the centre in order to win back disillusioned Liberal voters. Instead, they argue that conservatives should shift hard to the right in a similar style to Trump’s Republicans and the European far-right parties.
This discussion was on display at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney. At a panel entitled “The Road Back for the Coalition”, federal Liberal Party vice-president Teena McQueen referenced that a number of “moderate” Liberal MPs weren’t re-elected, telling the conference, “We should rejoice in that. People I’ve been trying to get rid of for a decade have gone; we need to renew with good conservative candidates”.
Even former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was a target for criticism, with UK far-right politician Nigel Farage describing him as a “let down” and former Liberal Senator Ross Cameron calling him the “worst prime minister in our history”.
Sky News Outsiders hosts Rita Panahi and Rowan Dean likewise complained about there being too many “bed wetters” in the Liberal Party, while former Liberal finance minister Nick Minchin was booed and heckled when he told the conference he didn’t think that the Liberal Party “needed a lot of changing”. Even McQueen was heckled after she argued to the audience to join the Liberals rather than support other far-right parties.
This is the context in which Hanson is ramping up her rhetoric in order to galvanise her supporters and remind everyone that she isn’t going anywhere. Her aim is to win the battle to be the main force to the right of the Liberals and sideline the other minor far-right parties that have the same aim.
The far right is facing a number of challenges, though. Last year, it was able to lead a series of large demonstrations around the country against mandatory vaccination and other public health measures. These were some of the largest right-wing demonstrations in years, if not decades, and they mobilised or appealed to layers of people not traditionally interested in or sympathetic to the politics of the far right. Today, however, anger about lockdowns and vaccines has largely abated, as the last of the remaining health restrictions are abolished.
The federal election in May delivered a mixed result for the far right. While Hanson was re-elected and there were substantial minorities voting for far-right parties in seats across the country, this failed to translate into a significant number of new parliamentarians. As well, the defeat of the Liberals, and the honeymoon period for the Albanese government, have so far squeezed the space for the far right.
Another problem for the far right is the strained relationship between it, the Liberal Party and the capitalist establishment. McQueen’s comments celebrating the loss of “moderate” Liberals in the recent federal election generated a significant backlash, with leading Liberal moderate Simon Birmingham calling on her to resign from her position on the party federal executive and other party figures distancing themselves from the comments. Even Liberal leader Peter Dutton, from the far right of the party himself, argued in an interview on Sky News that the Liberals needed to appeal to “a broad section of the broader Australian community” and that “locking in 15 or 20 percent primary vote is a way to keep yourself in opposition forever”. He went on to criticise obliquely many of the conservative speakers at the CPAC conference, stating, “There are a lot of people who offer free advice at the moment ... who have never formed government, have been members of parliament but have never been ministers in the government. A lot of people need to start turning their sights on the Labor Party as opposed to fighting internally, and I’m just not going to tolerate that”.
The future direction of the Liberal Party will shape the contours of the Australian far right. So far, the party hasn’t taken a hard right-wing turn, preferring to hedge its bets for now. This is obvious regarding the debate over an Indigenous voice to parliament, in which Dutton has repeated a number of the hard right’s criticisms of the proposal without confirming whether he will actually oppose it or not.
While CPAC showed that the far right is still able to pull off a conference of 800 or so people with a number of current and former politicians, it is still a minority current, and that will affect its relationship with mainstream conservatism. One sign of its isolation from the mainstream is the fact that, for the first time, no company within the ASX100 is willing to donate to the far-right think tank the Institute for Public Affairs. The reality is that the far right has not so far been able to radicalise the core base of conservative politics to same extent as their equivalents in the US or Europe. While overseas far-right ideas have impacted Australia, they have not yet cohered into a substantial movement able to reshape conservative politics as they have elsewhere.
Perhaps they will in the future. Undoubtedly, far-right adherents will be buoyed by the electoral victories of their co-thinkers in Italy and Sweden, as well as the continuing radicalisation of the US Republicans.
The ALP cannot be relied upon to combat the far right. When the Greens moved to condemn Hanson’s recent racist comments, Labor joined with the Liberals to amend the motion to remove any reference to Hanson and her comments, replacing them with general platitudes about respectful parliamentary discussion.
More significantly, Labor has little to offer in the face of economic crisis and deteriorating living standards. These conditions open up possibilities for the far right to grow, as neoliberal centrist politicians of all stripes struggle to hold together increasingly unstable, unequal and polarised societies.
