Trump in Drag

 

Pic courtesy The Australian

Last Wednesday we saw Pauline Hanson front the Press Club.

She was given a free pass to talk for almost twice as long as most speakers, and we were exposed to all the ugliness of her grievance politics.

She abused journalists, trotted out a range of the same cliches that she's been whining about for over thirty years, and continues to be unable to pronounce the name of our country. That ought to tell you something.

But to me, the most alarming feature of her address was its resemblance to the style and delivery of Donald Trump.

First of all, like Trump, her style is incoherent and aggressive. Her delivery was peppered with half-truths, insinuations, and condemnations.

It was an appeal to the darker sides of our national characteristics, those of xenophobia, arrogance and paranoia. The Australian values of tolerance, a fair go, and generosity didn't get a guernsey.

And her speech was replete with figures which, when subject to analysis, are largely confected.

She said - 

Again, the 2021 census showed that 1 in 4 people, 23% speak a language other than English at home, the most common being, Mandarin and Arabic.

Then -

How can you generate social cohesion if people can’t speak the language? In that same census, 872,000 people self-reported, as speaking English “not well” or “not at all.”

well. 

When this is examined, there is a clear inference that 23% of people who speak a language other than English at home are a problem. She tries to conflate dual lingual Australians with non-English speaking Australians. Whilst she doesn't explicitly state it, her followers will conflate the two sets of statistics. It's not what she said that's the problem, it's what her followers heard. That's classic dog-whistling.

Then there was this -

Forty-three per cent of low-income renters were experiencing rental stress. Up to 3.2 million people in Australia were at risk of losing their home, and we know that around 130,000 Australians are sleeping rough every night.

She provided no definition of "low-income renters", nor did she reference her figures. Then she said - 

According to official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics  7,600 people sleep rough on any given night across Australia. 

This figure represents roughly 6.2% of the total homeless population, which exceeds 122,000 individuals. It looks as if she's done some more dodgy conflation, inferring that all people classified as "homeless" always sleep rough. Again, she talks about two separate sets of statistics, and uses the breakdown of one set, then applies them to both. She doesn't do this explicitly, but the inference is enough for many of her followers who can't see past the confected outrage, to wrap them up together. 

Again, her statistics are dodgy, as is the notion that there is a direct connection between the homeless crisis and immigration. It simply doesn't add up. She confuses common sense with ignorant assumption, and encourages her followers to do the same.

She talks about the Salvation Army's Red Shield report, and lists a series of figures from the respondents to that survey. Again, she neglects to mention who those respondents were. The survey pool was a total 4400 respondents across the country. The respondents were vulnerable community members who had accessed the charity's Emergency Relief services (such as Doorways services) within the prior 12 months. So again, she's referencing 4400 people from a population of 28 million.

She then goes on the quote percentages from this group of 4400 people, and pretends to apply it to the total population. Again, she doesn't explicitly do this, but leaves it to her supporters to join the dots, even though what they will come up has only a casual relationship with the truth. This is textbook Trump.

 Food insecurity is unacceptable in a country like Australia, but with a population of 28 million, it's nowhere near the crisis that her dodgy statistics imply. Most of what she says is skillfully designed to generate outrage, and outrage plays well with semi-literates on social media. It feeds the algorithms, puts money in the pockets of big tech, and contributed in no small measure to the popularity of Trump. 

Trump's relationship with Musk puts the social media-populist politician relationship in stark relief. Hanson's relationship with Rinehart is a horse of a similar colour. Many billionaires are quick to chum up with politicians that can get into a position of power, and legislate to enhance their portfolios. Besides, Rinehart's father was renowned for his answer to what he called the Aboriginal problem, He advocated that indigenous Australians should be bred out by doping their water supply to make them sterile.

Much of what I see in Hanson resonates with my lived experience in the sixties and seventies. The injection of fear into our political culture at that time had me sent to a futile war as a conscript. The fear was communism, used by a lazy Coalition government. The political manipulation of that fear went close to costing me my life, and it killed a couple of my mates. 

Hanson sells fear of Muslims, Asians, and Aborigines. Selling fear to gain power is often catastrophic. A quick scan of twentieth century history reveals this solid truth. 

Australian voters woke up by 1972, but much harm had been done by then. Let's hope they wake up to Hanson a bit sooner.

She resembles, after all, Donald Trump in drag.