It is no revelation that an increasingly unabashed discourse of racism, nativist superiority and religious intolerance floats on ignorance.
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Hanson shut down
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Watch One Nation leader Pauline Hanson get shut down by the head of ASIO over her questions about Islam, Muslims and terrorism.
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Hanson shut down
Watch One Nation leader Pauline Hanson get shut down by the head of ASIO over her questions about Islam, Muslims and terrorism.
But for Pauline Hanson – a parliamentary leader for whom the expansion of these prejudices is the central project – being outed as bigotry's uncritical conduit was less revelation and more like hitting a brick wall. At speed.
The collision of prejudice and evidence came late on Thursday, once Hanson had finally deigned to come to Canberra to meet her core responsibilities in the "house of review" – namely, scrutinising the executive's taxing and spending priorities via budget estimates committees of the Senate.
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It continued downhill from there.
After injudiciously attending proceedings in which the contestable ethics of her eponymous party were themselves in question, Hanson deployed her tremulous grip on parliamentary privilege to cross-examine Australia's spymaster on the undoubted causal relationship between Islam, refugees and terrorism.
It would be a slam dunk, right?
The Queensland senator proceeded with all her customary thoughtfulness. "Can you confirm that the four terrorist attacks and the 12 foiled, that has [sic] happened on Australian soil, was [sic] committed by Muslims and, if not, who?" she asked Duncan Lewis, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Lewis – an outstanding public official respected on both sides of the aisle – had been slammed in the conservative press in late 2015 for counselling Coalition MPs to temper their language around terrorism to protect vital intelligence links. In light of that, he may have played safe. Yet he was frank, explaining that one of the thwarted attacks involved a right-wing extremist.
"So the answer is no, they have not all been carried out by Muslims. But I've got to stress, senator, this is very important, ASIO does not make its inquiries or its assessments on the basis of somebody's religion. We are only interested in people who are exhibiting or offering violence and to the extent that there is extremism, which is very frequently inspired by a warped version of Sunni Islam, that's when our interests are invoked."
Another incoherent Hanson preamble followed, before: "Do you believe that the threat is being brought in possibly from Middle-Eastern refugees that are coming out to Australia?"
Lewis: "I've absolutely no evidence to suggest there's a connection between refugees and terrorism."
The spymaster's testimony was a hammer blow to Hanson's prejudice – an evidence-based exemplar of frank and fearless advice.
Hanson's contribution, however, was its polar opposite.