"It starts with toilets and ends up costing us our Australian way of life."
Cancel the rest of the year, that's the winner: the political quote of 2016. It's the kind of thing you can imagine as a tag to a sketch in one of those comedy shows that used to rule prime time in the 1990s. Who knows. It possibly featured in a skit where they lampooned Pauline Hanson. And yet, there it is, at the hand of Pauline herself on her 2016 Facebook page – right beneath a video in which she shared her exasperation at the Australian Taxation Office installing squat toilets in its building. You know, one of those ones they use in Asia or somewhere. Hence: "If they don't know how to use our toilets …" That quote, by the way, might be the runner-up.
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Pauline Hanson criticises ATO squat toilets
Appearing on ABC's The Drum, the Lebanese Muslim Association's Mostafa Rachwani and Fairfax Media's Mark Kenny respond to Pauline Hanson's comments regarding new toilets being installed at a Melbourne ATO office. Vision courtesy ABC News.
On some level, I get it. Hanson's big idea is that Australia is under relentless attack from minorities that swamp us without assimilating. That was her story in the '90s and it's her story now, with Muslims mostly substituted for Asians and terrorism adding some extra edge. And when you have a big idea like that, the small examples are the most powerful. Fixating on toilets might seem strange, but if you're on board Hanson's narrative, it's evidence of just how thoroughgoing the threat really is. Its seriousness derives precisely from its smallness. You can imagine how this might go: "It's not enough they take our jobs, they're even taking our toilets!" ... "We can't even shit our way in our own country anymore!" Etcetera.
These sorts of stories have long been a staple of reactionary nationalists. Often they're just made up – like that one about how a British bank had stopped using piggy banks in their advertising because they were deemed offensive to Muslims. But here's the thing about those conspiratorial panics: they're always discussed so breathlessly. The people invoking them are deadly serious because they're trying to portray some grave cultural threat. And that's what's striking about Hanson's video: she's not particularly serious. In fact, her delivery is marked by its conspicuous lack of gravity. She seems to find it all pretty funny, like she's in on the joke.
![Illustration: Andrew Dyson](/web/20160819120900im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/w/3/6/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqv6hm.png/1471607017502.jpg)
I can't imagine Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage doing it this way. Maybe that's because Hanson's a less demagogic character; less practised in rousing a crowd and leading a movement of millions.
Maybe it's because Hanson has been a quasi-celebrity presence, emerging everywhere from Dancing with the Stars to whatever election happens to be going, often with little hope of winning but with some hope of collecting a pay cheque. But I can't escape this weird feeling that maybe Hanson isn't fully buying what she's selling.
Prior to her election there was no real sign she'd been building a movement so much as a profile; no real sign she's particularly close to the lives of those she is now representing. Hanson doesn't seem to be the person who has been overwhelmed by the pain of the left-behind and fashioned it into a relentless, coherent complaint. What if she was elected because, in this environment of such major-party disillusionment, she was clearly contrarian and she was there?
Now consider that hunch in the light of Malcolm Roberts' Q&A; performance this week. Climate denialism isn't anything new on the reactionary fringes of Australian politics. But Roberts' specific type of denialism is something else. Presenting climate change as nothing less than a vast conspiracy of the United Nations and NASA is what you get when you've spent too much time drowning in the wingnut blogosphere.
![Illustration: Simon Letch](/web/20160819120900im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/v/u/k/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqv6hm.png/1471607017502.jpg)
It's not a view that comes from the soil; from the lives of the hard-done-by. No one loses their job in a corporate restructure and immediately thinks, "bloody hell, I've had it with NASA and their plan to control the world". You have to be a dedicated conspiracy theorist to get into that stuff; the kind who was once prepared to believe the government uses grammar to control us; the kind addicted to heckling at town hall meetings and obsessively spamming politicians and academics. The kind who cares only about "facts" and "empirical data" but then dismisses any such data as the result of a conspiracy. The One Nation vote might be a cry from the heart of the downtrodden. But no cry sounds like that.
And Roberts sounds nothing like Hanson. Sure, he's not a fan of the Racial Discrimination Act, but he doesn't seem especially fixated on Muslims – or toilets for that matter. That's even truer of Rod Culleton, who will be One Nation's senator in Western Australia. He hates banks, probably because one of them took his farm.
![Pauline Hanson has been a quasi-celebrity presence, emerging everywhere from Dancing with the Stars to whatever election ...](/web/20160819120900im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/l/n/j/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqv6hm.png/1471607017502.jpg)
But when asked recently about One Nation's dogma that multiculturalism has failed, he replied: "I wouldn't say it's failed. I respect multiculturalism. You know, I've married a very beautiful Greek woman and her family love me like a son." That woman, by the way, was also a One Nation candidate in Western Australia. Ask her about Hanson's proposed royal commission into Islam and she says, "that's one of the ones that, again, I will not be in agreeance with".
Well, that's quite a disagreement. It's remarkable that Hanson would have candidates so at odds with what, until now, has seemed her party's political reason for being. But it soon becomes apparent why. "I didn't put my hand up," said Culleton. "I was asked to join." He's a conscript who chose One Nation only because the major parties, "haven't done anything for the Australian people … and the Nationals have just been a toothless tiger". He's not merely a protest vote, he's a protest candidate.
![One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts denied the existence of climate change and said that NASA had 'manipulated' data on Q&A.](/web/20160819120900im_/http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/t/9/l/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqv6hm.png/1471607017502.jpg)
We'll only figure out what that all means over the next three (or six) years. But the starting point is that Hanson presides over nothing particularly organic. Drill to the bottom of One Nation and you find varieties of disillusionment, but not always xenophobia. It's just not that coherent. The last time we saw this – a team of novices including people who were recruited despite not particularly sharing the party's main beliefs – was when Clive Palmer choppered into Parliament with his team of misfits. Hanson isn't Palmer. She'll be more politically skilled for starters. But they might have more in common than they seemed to a month ago. That includes the same proclivity for bizarre video stunts. And you know that old saying: it starts with toilets and ends up costing your political authority.
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
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