A confronting thought hit me this week as I watched the Greens walk out on Pauline Hanson's speech to the Senate: "Everybody wins". I can still hear the tone of my internal monologue, too. Neither despair, nor game show-host exuberance. Not anger, either. Just resignation. Like everything was following a pre-determined script there was no point even evaluating. Like I'd become a mere spectator to some dreary inevitability. A bit like watching a game of footy you've recorded when you already know the result. Except this time the teams are playing different games, and looking at different scoreboards where they're always in front.
Hanson wins. She wins because there can hardly be a better look for her than having the Greens perform their rejection so publicly. That, in a sense, is her reason for being there. She's the outsider giving voice to the left behind: those who have no place in progressive culture. She needs to be unapologetic, scandalous, in your face. And what better way to demonstrate her bona fides than to outrage the party that, more than any other, symbolises everything her voters are railing against, to be a victim in that cause? I won't go on about this at length, partly because plenty of others have made this point, but also because it's only half of the story.
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Pauline Hanson's anti-Muslim manifesto
The Greens walk out during the One Nation leader's maiden senate speech as she calls for the burqa to be banned, Muslim immigration to be stopped and the construction of mosques to be halted.
That's because the Greens win, too. There's a reason Green senators were tweeting and firing off emails about their walkout almost immediately. This was choreography for an audience it understands especially well. This party works by selling a message of moral conviction the major parties simply cannot. It's unashamedly pro-diversity, pro-equality, pro-tolerance, pro-refugee and anti-privilege. Indeed, it is conspicuously so, which is why nothing can look better for it than to make as demonstrative a protest against someone like Hanson as possible.
Now it's the party who stood up to Hanson in a way no one else did. Have the Greens ever had a better foil? Hanson's a kind of perpetual motion machine churning out all the things they delight in whacking. It's a little simplistic to dismiss the Greens as a "party of protest" as Julia Gillard once did, but even so, protest works best when there's something stupendously obvious to protest against. "We're in danger of being swamped by
Asians
Muslims" is that.
It's quite the symbiosis, this. I don't doubt each camp genuinely despises the other. I'm not saying this is purely manufactured. But so mutually reinforcing are they that this week, each has likely contributed to the other's success.
Of course, the major parties contribute, too. They've long given enough ammunition to the Greens, whose best moments happened well before One Nation's return. And One Nation trades explicitly on the major parties' abandonment of the white working class. But as symbols against whom each can define themselves, One Nation and the Greens are about as perfect as matches get.
All of which means we're in a particularly difficult situation now. Our public discourse, and with it our politics, has evolved to a point where it has never been easier to prosper by pitching your tent as firmly as you can within a subculture. We're not so keen to speak with anyone anymore. We'll speak at, and we'll speak for – we'll call out and we'll represent. But we don't really engage. It's confessional. It's declaratory. But it's not even trying to be particularly persuasive. We're in a phase of mutual amplification: a race to express pre-determined views as loudly as possible for the thrill of those who share them. Neither Hanson nor the Greens were hoping to win over anyone in this episode.
None of this means the Greens were necessarily wrong to walk out. It is quite a thing for a parliamentarian to rise before the Senate and proceed to abuse a minority at length. The predictable objections that Hanson was elected and has a right to speak simply miss the point: the Greens didn't cut her microphone. They expressed their opposition as they're entitled to. Their walking was their speech. And there's no doubt plenty of people from minority groups who feel especially besieged right now will have taken heart. So, fine. But the point is this: whether or not the Greens were justified in doing this is now the least interesting, least consequential question to ask.
That's because beneath the fireworks, there's a far bigger problem that, as far as I can tell, no one has even the slightest idea how to solve.
The thing that makes Hanson such a conundrum for this Parliament is that, much like Donald Trump, none of the traditional tools will work. You can't bludgeon this out of existence, but you can't reason it away either. This Parliament – indeed this country – seems divided in a way we haven't really seen before. People don't simply disagree now: they inhabit different universes. Walk out or don't, that won't change.
Perhaps the greatest civic task we face is to figure out how we are going to handle this in the long run. What happens when we realise that the people we so viscerally oppose aren't going anywhere? Indeed what happens when your opposition only strengthens them? And what happens when it turns out that if we keep playing this game where "everybody wins", soon enough no one does?
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a host of The Project.
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