Pauline Hanson has retired again. This time, however, any comeback to a position of power or influence in the One Nation Party looks remote. Moreover, though she has retained party membership and reserved the right to seek One Nation pre-selection for a seat in Parliament, it is unlikely she will get it. She had a run in the last federal election and failed to get a Queensland Senate seat largely due to the fact that One Nation failed to secure any preference deals of significance. And at the previous election she failed to get re-elected to the House of Representatives after her seat of Oxley was cut in two during the redistribution.
As things stand, the powerbase of One Nation has shifted from Queensland to Western Australia, where there are three One Nation Legislative Council members.
Further Ms Hanson has other things on her plate. She says she has seven legal cases to contend with. She faces a committal hearing in April on fraud charges arising from the registration of the One Nation party in Queensland.
With Ms Hanson gone, it is likely that One Nation will fade. It has imploded because of internal bickering and mismanagement. And it has suffered from attacks from without. At the last election, the Coalition pulled the rug out from One Nation by stealing a lot of its thunder. Ms Hanson came on to the political stage after a fluke win in the seat of Oxley in 1996. She had been disendorsed by the Liberal Party, but not in time for the party to substitute a new candidate or to erase the Liberal label from next to her name on the ballot paper. It had been hitherto a safe Labor seat, but Ms Hanson was elected. In her maiden speech she said Australian was in danger of being “”swamped by Asians”. That struck a response. In the next Queensland state election One Nation did well. It did well in the 1998 Federal election, but it did not sound in seats. Since then, the Coalition’s tougher stand on immigration resulted in it winning back much of the vote it had lost to One Nation the election before.
It may be that some time in the future the Coalition can moderate its immigration stand without fear of losing votes to an off-beat party.
Ms Hanson said that her greatest contribution was to end what she called “”political correctness” so that people could “”say what they think without being ridicules or called names”. It is a non-achievement. Australians in the past have had little difficulty with saying what they think – and part of that has been the very capacity to say what they think of people who utter racism and xenophobia.
She has done Australia a great deal of harm in Asia with her intolerant utterances. She has created some division in Australia, but that has perhaps been ephemeral. Insofar as anyone elsewhere in the world took her attitudes as representative of Australian attitudes in general, she served her nation poorly, holding Australians up to ill-deserved ridicule.
Perhaps her main contribution has been as a catalyst to draw attention to the growing city-bush divide so that the major parties had to do something in response.
On balance, though, Ms Hanson’s political activities have been negative. Her poisonous utterances, if suitably ignored, would have amounted to nothing. But they became the spark which caused both major parties to give up leading in a bipartisan way of immigration and multiculturalism and made them respond to baser attitudes. And Australia is the poorer for it.