Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: Right-Populism in a Neoliberal World

Abstract

When Pauline Hanson’s One Nation right-populism emerged as a political force in Australia many took it to be a radical threat to the health of political democracy. It was nothing of the sort. It was, rather, a symptomatic expression of the failure of that democracy as elites of the traditional labour and business parties embraced a shared policy orientation that undercut their ties to their traditional working-class and middle class bases. Hanson’s right-populism emerged from the increasingly status anxious traditional Liberal Party base as it drew upon and reasserted the class-repressing, status elevating, middle class ideology of home that the founder of the party, Robert Menzies, had laid out in the 1940s. This ideology defined the status of the traditionally conservative middle classes as patriotic and self-reliant; frugal savers whose status demanded government refuse the entitlement claims of those perceived as the more feckless and less prudent in the community, and protect them from the philistine monetary aspirations of those Menzies derided as occupants of “great luxury hotels.” Today, this conception founds a nostalgic populism of personal and nationalistic pride in being “at home”, and having worked hard for that “home”. Its broader politics are that of “border control” and a rigid control of access. Those “invited in” must share and respect the values of the household, and, domestically, of a powerful antipathy to government redistribution downwards that reflects a need to divide the deserving from the undeserving on the basis of the amount of pride one takes in one’s home, its values, maintenance and cohesiveness.