Sometimes it feels like there are two Pauline Hansons. The first is the actual person, absent from the political stage for the past 20 years, but still as familiar as sunburn. She is the flame-haired girl from the fish and chip shop in Ipswich, the former wife of a Polish refugee, the politician whose maiden speech warned about Australia "being swamped by Asians", the criminal imprisoned for electoral fraud (later successfully overturned on appeal), the performer on Dancing with the Stars, the paid commentator on Channel Seven's Sunrise, the newly elected senator who excoriates the media for not giving her a fair go, the savvy cultural warrior whose Facebook page carries the wickedly ironic tagline "Pauline Hanson's Please Explain", a reference to her legendary 1996 interview on 60 Minutes when she learnt the definition of "xenophobia".
The second Pauline Hanson is a political symbol, an "ism". Hansonism has become shorthand for the barely repressed racism in the psyche of a colonial nation that once embraced the White Australia Policy. In the 1990s the term felt like a verb because it carried catastrophic potential: Hansonism unleashed, the commentators warned, could see Australia riven internally and isolated internationally. With Hanson's triumphant return to the political stage, and One Nation expected to clinch three Senate seats, a self-conscious meta-debate has erupted about how to debate her.
Seems we can't stop fetishising the woman.
In the election aftermath, John Howard said he was critical of people who branded everybody who supported Hanson as a racist because that is "nonsense". The former prime minister warned the media and politicians not to treat Hanson like a "scorned species" because isolating and attacking her only added to her battler appeal. This is commonsense advice. When during the election campaign Malcolm Turnbull declared that Hanson would not be "welcome" in the new Parliament he arguably goaded people into voting for her. Now, in a direct snub to mainstream Australia she's made it to Parliament, welcome or not, her democratic legitimacy beyond question.
Pauline Hanson is not her supporters and her supporters are not an exotic species. She is not a martyr. She needs to be stripped of her mystique.Credit:Facebook
But that doesn't mean her supporters should be pandered to any more than they deserve to be demonised.
Journalist Margo Kingston, who wrote the book Off The Rails about Hanson's run for the seat of Oxley in 1998, caused a predictable storm last week when she urged "right-thinking city folks", to learn from the Hanson nightmare decades back. Listen to her: do not lampoon, Kingston says. Welcome Hanson to Parliament; she has a right to be there. Talk to her voters who are "by and large nice people with little money" suffering from the impact of economic rationalism.
My instincts tell me Kingston's message is one urban elites need to hear. Critics accused her of white privilege – because the shrill logic of identity politics dictates that whites can't experience racism so only a white person would suggest afternoon tea with "nice" racists. In fact, brown people have also proposed respectful dialogue with Hanson supporters. When the merits of an argument matter less than the race or ethnicity of the person putting it then the Hansonites have all but won. And these critics of Kingston's proved her point about the lazy class prejudice that stains all her voters as pitch-forked bigots rather than ordinary people with complex and sometimes contradictory motivations. This week I read a New York Times vox pop with a man who said now that Bernie Sanders has lost the presidential nomination he'd be voting Trump. I also heard a radio interview with a man in the UK who said he honestly can't explain why he voted Leave in the Brexit poll but he sure regrets it now.
That said, Hanson does not deserve a special welcome to Parliament. Nor should city folk feel compelled to hear or understand the concerns of Hansonites above those of other battlers who did not choose representatives peddling odious messages.
Illustration: Matt DavidsonCredit:Matt Davidson
And it ought to be within our skill set to avoid playing the woman, while robustly attacking her politics. However "nice" Hanson might be, her proposal to ban mosques, stop Muslim immigration and hold a royal commission into "Islam" amounts to bigotry and racism. Call it that.
By the same token the public should not flinch from debating "Islam", for want of a more precise designation, for fear it might bolster Hanson's agenda. Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane argues convincingly that Australia has grown more tolerant and diverse since Hanson was last on the scene. In the 1990s Hanson singled out Asians for prejudice, he writes, whereas these days "it is Muslim Australians who are frequently labelled as a public threat". He demurs from pointing out the obvious difference between the prejudice against Asians then versus the prejudice against Muslims now: these days a small number of Australian Muslims are a public threat. The prejudice of Hanson redux is more potent because it feeds on rational fears about terrorism. Downplay the terrorist threat and people have a rational reason to flock to her camp.
Among the "brown" people promoting engagement with Pauline Hanson is the newly elected MP and counter-terrorism expert, Anne Aly. A secular Muslim, Aly rightly sees Hanson's election as an opportunity for "transparent" factually based discussions about Islamic extremism.
It is true that we ought to be wiser second time around. Hanson is not her supporters and her supporters are not an exotic species. She is not a martyr. She needs to be stripped of her mystique.
Julie Szego is a Fairfax columnist.