Barnaby Joyce says One Nation has changed. Is he right?
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Barnaby Joyce claimed at a candidate’s forum on Monday night that the anti-immigrant, nativist One Nation party led by Pauline Hanson had changed.
“The party of 10, 15 years ago is not the party of today,” Joyce said. “Things change. Mollify.”
The National party leader was defending his decision to put the little-known One Nation candidate Richard Thomas second on his how-to-vote card in the seat of New England for the upcoming federal election.
The One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, was first elected in 1996, shooting to notoriety after being disendorsed by the Liberal party for comments about Indigenous Australians. In her maiden speech she said Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”.
So has the party changed since then, or specifically in the past 10-15 years? Here are some notable incidents since Hanson herself returned to the Senate in 2016:
In her first speech upon re-election, she harked back to that 1996 maiden speech, which largely consisted of attacking social support for Indigenous people, and demonising Asian immigration. “That speech was relevant then and it is still relevant today,” she said in 2016, before warning that Muslims were responsible for organised crime, violence, “collapsing social cohesion” and numerous other social ills.
In 2017, Hanson used a Senate debate on the Turnbull government’s proposed school funding overhaul to call for autistic and disabled students to be removed from mainstream classrooms, saying other students were being “held back” by “do-gooder” teachers who advocated for their inclusion. Hanson refused to apologise, saying her comments had been “taken out of context”.
Two months later, she turned up to the Senate for question time dressed in a burqa. The stunt – roundly condemned in a speech by then attorney general, Liberal senator George Brandis, earning him a bipartisan standing ovation – was intended to support her long-running anti-Muslim campaign, which at the time was focused on banning the garment.
Earlier that year, she said: “Islam is a disease; we need to vaccinate ourselves against that”. Joyce denounced those comments as “bat poo crazy”. “This kind of stuff does not help anybody,” he said. “It was just stupid, it was plain dumb.”
In 2018, Hanson put a motion to the Senate that reproduced the rhetoric of white supremacist groups, stating there had been a “deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation” and insisting “it is OK to be white”.
In 2019, an Al Jazeera investigation exposed senior One Nation figures James Ashby and Steve Dickson seeking millions of dollars of political donations from the National Rifle Association in an attempt to seize the balance of power in Australia and weaken the country’s gun laws.
As recently as Sunday night, in response to the leaders’ debate on Channel Nine, NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham made a racist joke on Twitter at the expense of the debate’s moderator and Indigenous Australians. The NSW treasurer, Matt Kean, said Latham’s “thinly veiled racist comment here is clearly deliberate. Race is not a political punchline – words like that are hateful and divisive.” Latham has denied the tweet was racist.
Associate prof Paul Williams, political analyst at Griffith University, said that if One Nation had changed, it had merely become more media savvy.
“The idea that Pauline Hanson and One Nation have become just another acceptable, middle-of-the-road party is nonsense,” Williams said. “I would argue the party is just as unpalatable – perhaps less palatable – to middle, mainstream and urban Australia than it was in the late 90s.”
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The major difference between the party then and now, Williams said, was that it has “dropped pretty much all pretence to an economic agenda” – referring to the party’s early protectionist policies.
“In the more recent years it’s just become a culture war party.
“Joyce is intimating that it’s a changed party and more palatable to middle Australia. I would say no, it isn’t, because it’s no longer making an economic argument.”