Whenever Australia’s rich throw their support behind a ‘future leader,’ you can rest assured they tend to get their way. That is because that ‘leader’ is their political proxy, who will commit to policies favourable to their interests. It is also why Gina Rinehart is throwing so much ‘benefaction’ Pauline Hanson’s way.
Pauline is the ‘populist’ candidate. The term ‘populist’ is frequently used as a pejorative to discredit candidates or positions that command substantial public support, particularly when those positions challenge the prevailing views of political, media, or bureaucratic elites. This usage is in tension with a basic democratic premise: that legitimacy ultimately derives from the ability of the political system to reflect, however imperfectly, the preferences of the larger number of citizens. When the label is applied primarily to movements that succeed in mobilising widespread discontent rather than to a specific ideological structure, it functions less as analysis and more as a rhetorical device for delegitimising popular challenge to elite consensus.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. Anyone who thinks that Pauline Hanson would augur a regeneration of the erstwhile ‘Aussie Spirit,’ tackle the ghettoisation of Australia’s major cities by prospering non-white immigrants, and put ‘Australia First’ in all things is obviously planning to vote for her. They will look past the evidence right before them and lap up the ‘populist’ rhetoric, imagining those sentiments constitute the woman’s totality — the positions that consistently and single-mindedly motivate her. And they’ll be wrong. But that is the whole point of ‘populism’ and where it derives its contemptible essence.
When Samuel Johnson coined the phrase ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ he spoke of someone sheltering their true objectives behind noble causes. To investigate Pauline Hanson’s genuine motives wouldn’t help much because she doesn’t have any beyond acquiring wealth and status. But that is exactly what the typical punter won’t be looking out for. They will forget that she was once a small businesswoman who joined the Liberal Party as a representative of the aspirational class. Her ‘Swamped by Asians’ maiden speech reflected the worksheet that she had appropriated from the late Perry Jewell and his Confederate Action Party (CAP). Before he died, Jewell lamented ever handing her their mailing list and platform because she saw it — not in the radical sense that Perry did — but as a good way to get the plebs onboard.
Pauline wraps herself in other people’s patriotism: she cloaks herself in the disguise of nationalism in the rudimentary manner of the garden-variety reactionary. When tested, she proclaimed, “You don’t have to be White to be Australian,” while petting two female pickaninnies on the One Nation stage. She meant it, too, because Pauline is from the dinosaur breed of multiracialists who accepted non-Whites but on the basis that they ‘assimilate.’ She belongs to those who lost the battle against multiculturalism in the early 1970s, alongside the integrationists — the assimilationists! Eventually, they would all be replaced by the ‘anti-racists.’
Nationalism is a radical ideology and has no place for compromise, and ‘assimilation’ is the acceptance of the absorption of extraneous races into the national gene pool so long as ‘they’ walk, talk, and act as we do. Without debouching into a screed about the origins of multiculturalism, let’s say that assimilation was the post-WW2 expectation of the Australian government as it looked to broken Europe to replace our fallen and build the nation. By the 1970s, when the mafia-associated Labor Immigration Minister Al Grassby declared, “A multicultural society for the future!” this new attitude to immigrants, and from whence they were sourced, had politically bipartisan support, save for a few holdouts.
Among those who most objected were the rural working class — the very people that Perry Jewell turned to in the mid-1990s when he heeded the call of political reform. Now, pay attention to that, because — from England, to America, to down under in Australia — the most maligned section of society are the so-called working class, or the poor. In England, for example, Keir Starmer’s entire regime is built upon a visceral disgust of the native working class. While Anthony Albanese comes from the former working-class foundations of the Labor Party, he joined at a time that they left behind those roots and values in favour of progressive causes. He was a product of the new anti-racist left, which needed union money, yet despised the sweaty lumpen that provided it. They set about re-educating those union rank-and-file to the new identity-based causes.
The vision splendid of our nationalist forebears was an egalitarian, uniquely Australian style of socialism (for want of a better name) wherein opportunity availed itself to all, without hindrance from the obdurate exploiter class. A monocultural, White Australia was mandatory to that vision, for reasons now making themselves clear in the age of mass migration. The long labourist struggle for worker’s rights and social equality attests to that vision defeated by the two wars. But, to cut a long story short, nationalism splits at the level of the business owners. What, did you say? The business owners?
The primary goal of any business owner, large or small, is to make and increase profit. In practice, this requires a functional colour-blindness: you sell to, buy from, hire, or partner with whoever can deliver value. The horticulture and fruit-picking industries are a perfect example. Many smaller growers and packers in regions like Shepparton, Stanthorpe, or Wide Bay rely heavily on temporary foreign labour — backpackers on Working Holiday visas and Pacific workers under the PALM scheme — to get perishable crops harvested and packed during peak seasons. Without that flexible, low-cost workforce, a lot of these operations would struggle or fold. Exclusivity based on race or ethnicity is a luxury few of them can afford. It remains largely the preserve of a fringe, even within traditionally Anglo-Australian small-business communities. The rest operate on commercial realism: markets and labour pools are what they are.
This is the outlook that Pauline Hanson reasonably represents — only dressed up in Australia Day bunting. Having run a fish-and-chip shop herself, she embodies the pragmatic conservatism of the aspirational small-business class rather than radical nationalism. Hanson is opposed to Islam. That’s because she’s a Zionist. She has no critical skills where Israel is concerned. Neither do those who are throwing money at her. But, at the end of the day, it’s the working class who get uprooted, crowded, and undercut by immigration. Pauline has no intention of ending immigration, nor from any specific countries; she just wants to slow down the numbers. She wants them to wave flags and say ‘G’day.’
The tragedy is that the greater proletariat affected by immigration — who are too guttersnipe to appreciate the progressive social agenda — could potentially raise them on their shoulders. They will do so through the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, this is when voters with limited policy knowledge confidently assess complex proposals based on superficial understanding — seeking simplistic solutions to multifaceted problems. ‘Remigration’ is one of the simplest of these, not that Pauline is even touting that as a policy.
The common voter will not see that the one thing all major parties (and we’re going to now include ON in that league for the sake of argument) have in common is the notion of ‘status’. The entirety of capitalist western society is founded on the idea of status and improving it all the way to the top of the pyramid. You can see this chauvinism everywhere — from the elitism of the progressives to the air of superiority that abounds in the extreme right. None of them wants to be ordinary, none of them wishes for a humble existence. Everyone wants power.
Pauline will betray the working class — those who have limited skills to trade and whose lifestyle expectations don’t involve three-storey mansions in Vaucluse — just as those fools in England who abandoned the National Front to vote for Maggie Thatcher instead found out. Pauline sees herself as an occidental Maggie, and she’ll be groomed for that appearance. But when the crunch comes, she’ll be working for the industrialists like Gina, who’d have us working for two-dollars a day.