Abstract
This brief contribution explores how the 2020 COVID-19 crisis has been exploited by Australian populist radical right politician, Pauline Hanson. In particular, I discuss how Hanson, through her political communication on Facebook, has used the COVID-19 crisis to prosecute her longstanding nativist policies on issues like immigration. I further discuss how Hanson’s anti-Asian and Sinophobic rhetoric has occurred alongside an increase in anti-Asian racism in Australia throughout the COVID-19 crisis. I conclude by discussing the implications of this as well as foreshadowing future empirical work on this topic.
Highlights
The unprecedented scale of the COVID-19 crisis has necessitated an enormous global public health and economic response
Australia has experienced an increase in racist attacks against Asians and Asian Australians throughout COVID-19 as documented in the COVID-19 Coronavirus Racism Incident Report (Chiu and Asian Australian Alliance, 2020), and it is important to interrogate the role of influential elite political actors such as Pauline Hanson in promoting this racism
Social media sites like Facebook offer the far-right a relatively, albeit not entirely, unmediated platform to communicate directly with their supporters when compared to other forms of communication
Summary
The unprecedented scale of the COVID-19 crisis has necessitated an enormous global public health and economic response. COVID-19, Facebook, Pauline Hanson, populism, populist radical right, social media The far-right, and in particular, the populist radical right (Mudde, 2007), has historically exploited great crises in order to scapegoat minorities and legitimise a range of exclusionary immigration policies (Mudde, 2019; Wodak, 2015).
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