CHAPTER FIVE

Howard and Hanson

Howard had lost the Liberal leadership in 1989, partly because his comments on Asian immigration — like Buchanan’s 1992 speech — had sparked outrage in the media, in the public, and throughout the political class.

Howard, however, did not abandon his strategy. Rather, he bided his time — and, when he reclaimed the leadership in 1995, proceeded with more subtlety. He distanced himself from his prior comments about Asian immigration, this time publicly and repeatedly declaring his support for multiculturalism. Immediately prior to the federal election, an obscure Queensland Liberal candidate named Pauline Hanson published derogatory comments about Indigenous people in a local paper — and Howard backed her disendorsement by the party.

But Howard had not changed his heart so much as his method. Just as Bush abandoned Reagan’s censorship to attack PC as censorship, Howard’s references to immigration gave way to denunciations of political correctness for preventing references to immigration. Howard’s old rhetoric had been received as part of a deep and continuing divide within conservative ranks, with the Liberal Party split (even after his removal) between reactionaries and modernisers over issues such as Native Title, multiculturalism, and sexual diversity. His new approach provided a basis for unity, since anti-PC could appeal to small-L liberals concerned about freedom of speech. Indeed, as Mark Rolfe argued, the early agitation against political correctness in Australia drew in many intellectuals who (at the time, at least) identified with the left: Frank Moorhouse, David Williamson, Margaret Bateman, Phillip Adams, and others.1

Howard still attacked the so-called elites, condemning ‘the noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests with scant regard for the national interest’.2 But he did so in a way that presented the delegated politics of the social movements as a credible scapegoat for the social anxiety produced by the Hawke–Keating reforms.

In John Howard’s first year of leadership, he addressed the question of ‘national identity’, denouncing Keating for corralling the Australian people into a particular model of patriotism. In the past, he said, the country had been ‘less in the grip of stifling orthodoxies like political correctness’.

Then, after the Liberals’ landslide electoral win in 1996, the new PM declared a victory over PC. The election would, he said, enable ‘people … to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about what they feel’.3 The implication was that the perfidious elites had reshaped the country — and then deployed political correctness to prevent Australians from objecting.

Howard’s old opposition between the new-class elites and the battlers could now gain traction. Multiculturalists, feminists, progressive academics: after thirteen years of activists committed to delegated politics working with Labor’s neoliberalism, the idea of an elite reshaping society while they sneered at and belittled ordinary folk and their travails possessed a new plausibility.

The country had, after all, been remade, in ways that many people did not like, with the delegated left often featuring both as the architects and the beneficiaries of that remaking. On this basis, Howard could contrast PC and the liberal elites with ‘families battling to get ahead … young Australians battling to get a decent start … older Australians battling to preserve their dignity’.4

Of course, Howard and his team might have attacked elites, but they did not oppose neoliberalism. On the contrary, the new government intensified the free-market project that had been initiated by Labor. But where the ALP (at least initially) proceeded in the name of consensus, Howard sought to destroy union power.

This difference necessitated and facilitated the culture war ‘virtuous circle’. Social conservatives didn’t instinctively enthuse about neoliberalism: the market tended, after all, to break down the family values, national traditions, religious rituals, and so on that they championed. But Howard could draw Christians and traditionalists behind his market agenda because of their horror at Hawke and Keating’s support for feminism, for ethnic minorities, for Indigenous rights, and for other socially progressive causes.

Culture war, in other words, helped organise the various shades of the right behind the new administration. At the same time, Howard used anti-PC to exploit and widen the gulf between the delegated left and its traditional supporters.

John Howard was a career politician leading a mainstream political party. When he — and the media that supported him — attacked multiculturalism, feminism, Indigenous reconciliation, and similar policies, the ultimate target was always the ALP. Howard’s culture skirmishes presented the Liberal Party as the alternative to the ‘new class’, in an anti-elitism that targeted his political enemies but not the political structure as a whole.

His version of culture war could be described as ‘insider anti-elitism’ — and contrasted with a different but related ‘outsider anti-elitism’.

The most significant articulation of mid-1990s outsider anti-elitism was, of course, associated with Pauline Hanson. Despite disendorsement from the Liberal Party, she won her seat and then, in her notorious maiden speech, raised the kind of explicit anti-Asian and anti-indigenous rhetoric from which Howard had retreated.

Hanson positioned herself as an outsider, a maverick who identified the new class not merely with party rivals but with bankers, corporations, and politicians as a whole. Her supporters spelled out the implications of this in a bizarre book entitled Pauline Hanson: the truth on Asian immigration, the Aboriginal question, the gun debate and the future of Australia, a tract that took her version of culture war to its logical conclusion.

Its author, retired academic George J. Merritt, argued that Australia’s elites were promoting ‘a new religion of internationalism, of anti-white racialism, multiculturalism, feminism and Asianisation’. The schemes of the new class would, he said, come to a head in 2050, by which time the nation would be ruled by Poona Li Hung, a part-cyborg lesbian of multiracial descent ‘felt by the World Government to be a most suitable president’.5

In 1996, six weeks after her maiden parliamentary speech, Hanson appeared on the TV current-affairs show 60 Minutes. When journalist Tracey Curro asked if she was xenophobic, Hanson didn’t know what the word meant. Her puzzled reply, ‘Please explain,’ was widely mocked, even by progressives.

A generation earlier, direct leftists committed to mobilising ordinary people might have been more careful about their attitudes to someone with limited education. But the nature of delegated politics — with its base among well-educated politicos — predisposed many to see the gaffe as evidence of Hanson’s unfitness for public life.

For Hanson’s supporters, by contrast, the exchange — and the liberal media’s response — illustrated the politically correct mindset against which Hanson had been railing. Many of them might not have understood the word ‘xenophobia’ either, and they took the condescending reaction from the well-educated as representative of a broader disdain for people like them.

By the mid-1990s, as the academic Damien Cahill explained, the ‘new class’ had become shorthand ‘for a range of right-wing attitudes towards the welfare state, contemporary culture, Australian history and national identity, Aboriginal rights, feminism, environmentalism and multiculturalism’.6

The widespread acceptance of the schema depended on the contradictory relationship between insider and outsider anti-elitism. That is, when Hanson’s victory, on an explicitly racist platform, sent shockwaves throughout the nation in 1996, Howard refused to join the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary, he discussed the outcome using the language of anti-PC — defending Hanson, and her right to speak, against her politically correct censors.

Howard understood that Hanson’s rhetoric made his own culture wars more effective. He didn’t need to make the kind of interventions that had cost him the leadership. He could leave the rhetorical bomb-throwing to Hanson — and then watch as the left became embroiled in often esoteric debates about history and national identity.

As for Hanson, Howard’s interventions in the history wars — and his deployment of anti-PC — provided her with invaluable political cover in the public arena. No less a figure than the PM was defending her right to speak; no less a figure than the PM was denouncing political correctness and the dreaded ‘new class’.

But a full understanding of the relationship between insider and outsider anti-elitism requires a closer look at the audience for culture war.

The rhetoric of culture war presented ordinary workers as being innately hostile to progressive elites. Accordingly, John Howard always spoke as if he represented suburbanites aggrieved at PC idiocy. Yet the Liberal Party remained, by and large, an organisation talking for — and supported by — the privileged and the wealthy.

After thirteen years of Labor’s neoliberalism, workers might have grown cynical about the ALP and apathetic about trade unions, but there was little evidence of active working-class support for Howard.

Hansonism was different. As an outsider political formation, it could appeal to a more plebeian demographic. John Howard looked and spoke like a professional politician of the mainstream right; Pauline Hanson, on the other hand, conveyed an image of angry amateurism, like an aggrieved suburbanite who’d somehow stumbled into the parliament.

In the 1990s, commentators often assumed that Hanson’s support came primarily from disaffected blue-collar workers. But the confident assertions about One Nation’s ‘working-class base’ also reflected the growing acceptance by journalists of neocon ideas about the bigotry of ordinary people.

In the past, the left had taken for granted the progressive credentials of the working class. Wage labour, by its nature, fostered collectivity and solidarity. Workers toiled, for the most part, alongside others. They couldn’t necessarily choose who those others were. Yet they needed unity if they were to win improvements to wages or conditions. There was, then, an imperative for, as the old slogan put it, workers of the world to unite.

This didn’t mean that workers couldn’t be prejudiced — or, for that matter, sexist or homophobic. If the fundamental competition between nation states necessarily fostered racism, so too did the competition foisted upon working people scrambling for jobs, housing, and resources.

‘Workers are not only collective producers with a common interest in taking collective control over social production,’ explained political theorists Bob Brenner and Johanna Brenner. ‘They are also individual sellers of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs, promotions, etc. This individualistic point of view has a critical advantage in the current period; in the absence of class against class organisation, it seems to provide an alternative strategy for effective action — a sectionalist strategy which pits one layer of workers against another.’7

On this sectionalist basis, outsider anti-elitists could — and sometimes did — attract a working-class following. Blue-collar workers voted for One Nation; some even joined the party. But working-class racism tended to take a different form.

The Australian academic Peter Browne looked at racial attitudes towards the end of Howard’s term, a period when Australians were generally believed to be deeply invested in anti-immigrant racism. He argued that the popular sentiment — that is, the sentiment amongst working people — varied according to the question being asked. Those polled directly about ‘boat people’, ‘refugees’, or ‘immigration’ expressed strong feelings. But when they were asked which issues shaped their votes, such topics barely registered. Very low numbers nominated ‘refugees and asylum seekers’ as either the most or second-most important issue, with health, education and tax scoring more highly (in that order).8

When working people — far more likely than the very wealthy to live, work, and socialise with those of different ethnicities — embraced racism, they often did so not so much on a deep ideological basis but as a proxy for the material issues that affected their lives directly: assuming, for instance, that immigrants would strain already overloaded services.

The commentators who described Hanson as a figure rallying the working class did so in many cases because they simply assumed that workers were xenophobic and bigoted. But the available research painted a different picture.

Michael Pusey conducted extensive interviews throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s to assess the impact of neoliberalism in Australia. He discussed conversations with the people he called ‘battlers’ or ‘Hansonites’, who were a large proportion of his focus groups in an older outer-western Sydney suburb and a significant factor elsewhere. They were, he said, unremittingly hostile to the economic reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and had not recovered from the recession of 1991. They complaining of being stressed, of working long hours in insecure conditions, and of barely managing with their allotted tasks. The ‘battlers’ were angry, but in a reactive and unfocused fashion. They saw themselves as vulnerable and under siege, and loathed ‘politicians, big business, free-loaders, elites and anyone who seems to be making claims on “the system” that appear to give them an unfair advantage in the merciless struggle to stay afloat’.9

Neoliberalism was experienced as particularly traumatising by those confronting remorseless competition in situations where they weren’t protected by any kind of solidarity. The wageworkers Pusey described were generally employed in declining industries where the working class was fragmenting. They didn’t, by and large, belong to unions; they felt themselves on the verge of unemployment. In rural towns and on the suburban fringes of big cities, in particular, older blue-collar workers were still unlikely to support Howard.

They could, however, be convinced to back Hanson.

Yet, overwhelmingly, the people Pusey quoted were not workers at all, even though many of them performed physical labour and conformed to the cultural stereotypes associated with the neocon depiction of the working class. He describes them as typically ‘self-employed in their own business, for example, as courier operators, truck drivers, handyman repairers or car cleaners; they are doing virtually the same work as before but as subcontracted providers for often large companies’. In Marxist terms, they belonged to the blue-collar middle class: they were small-business operators desperately trying to keep themselves afloat amid the intensified waves of competition unleashed by industrial reform.

Historically, this was the traditional constituency for populism, a layer of people terrified of big companies (which drove them out of business), but also fearful of falling back into the working class (from which they felt they’d escaped). It was a milieu that could involve low educational levels but not necessarily low income levels, and one that could become anti-business or anti-labour, or a strange mixture of both.

Hanson’s culture-war rhetoric resonated with such people by presenting them with an explanation for why they felt so permanently besieged. The anxiety that governed their lives, she implied, came from the nefarious elites who sneered at their work and their values.

Throughout this period, the other conservative parties were competing with the Hansonites for the same constituency, particularly outside the big cities. Murray Goot, for instance, looked at polling related to One Nation between 1996 and 1998, and concluded that ‘many of those attracted to One Nation are voters who would otherwise support one or other of the Coalition parties — with the National Party, proportionately, bearing the greater loss’.10

But as an outsider anti-elitist, Pauline Hanson could present herself as the natural champion of the rural lower middle class. She came from the same small-business background herself — she’d run a fish-and-chip shop in Ipswich, after all. Her rambling, unpolished addresses often consisted simply of a list of scapegoats (such as Aborigines, Asians, elitists, and bludgers): a presentation that suited her audience’s sense that they were being somehow done down by powerful forces all around them. At the same time, One Nation could openly attack the banks, big business, and ‘economic rationalism’ in a way that Howard and the Nationals simply couldn’t.

For a period of several years, Hanson seemed to be the primary beneficiary of the strange symbiotic relationship between insider and outsider anti-elitism, a relationship that gave new-class theory and anti-PC a prominence that they never subsequently lost. In the 1998 Queensland election, One Nation won 22.7 per cent of the vote — at the time, an astonishing result.

Yet rather than consolidating this success, the party went, almost immediately, into a prolonged internal crisis that saw many of its leading figures leave. Hanson resigned from One Nation in 2002, and was convicted of electoral fraud the following year (in a verdict that was overturned on appeal). Howard, by contrast, continued to lead the Liberals until 2007.

Their contrasting fortunes reveal the different dynamics of the two types of anti-elitism. Howard pursued culture war as the leader of a major party. He pitched his rhetoric to Pusey’s small-business ‘battlers’, but he wasn’t dependent upon them in the fashion that Hanson was. The Liberal Party relied far more on big corporations than it did on, say, handyman repairers in far north Queensland. The businessmen and bankers who supported the Liberals wanted Howard to deliver an economic climate conducive to profit-making — and, if culture war helped him do that, they had no objection. But they themselves cared more about profits than exposing the schemes of Poona Li Hung.

As a result, Howard enjoyed, in the 1990s and early 2000s, a stability that was quite lacking in One Nation.

Hanson’s proximity to her supporters meant she could tap very effectively into their anxieties. But it also made her reliant on a base with no particular structural coherence. Small-business people were not predisposed to collectivity in the same way that the working class was. An owner-operator or a shopkeeper related to other owner-operators and shopkeepers as competitors, not as allies. That was why, historically, right-wing populist movements depended on strong — even dictatorial — leaders to hold their forces together. A charismatic figurehead could draw together the atomised individuals of the lower middle class in the same way that a magnet could amass iron filings. Yet this attraction depended on success — and as soon as the figurehead faltered, the filings dropped away.

In the Howard era, the insiders successfully exploited anti-elitism to use — and then defeat — the outsiders. A decade later, however, that dynamic would fundamentally change, as outsider anti-elitism moved to centre stage.