Pauline Hanson first entered the political scene in the 1996 Commonwealth elections, when, after being disenfranchised from the Liberal party for her controversial views on Aboriginal issues, she was elected as an independent in the Queensland seat of Oxley. In her maiden speech to parliament, Hanson denounced Aboriginal land rights, multiculturalism and Asian immigration as policies encouraging racial separatism and national divisiveness. She called instead for an Australia of ‘one people, one nation, one flag’. Hanson officially launched her new One Nation political party in 1997. Despite predictions that the ‘Hanson phenomenon’ was transient and lacking serious public appeal, One Nation through the late 1990s became a formidable threat to the Coalition (Liberal/National) and Labor parties. It enjoyed widespread public support in rural regions in northern and western Australia, and achieved an unprecedented success in the Queensland state elections of 1998, electing eleven candidates. By 1999, however, the One Nation Party had become wracked by bitter internal disputes and defections – largely over the undemocratic structure of the party – placing its future in serious doubt.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a typical example of rural, conservative populism.^[35] It is critical of the totalitarian powers wielded by the ruling classes, the intellectual elites, and other ‘special’ groups that are perceived to have an inordinate influence on government. It demands that democracy be restored to make government more fully representative of the interests of ‘ordinary’ members of ‘mainstream’ Australia. Hanson is vigorously opposed to multiculturalism and Asian immigration. She has stated: ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians … they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate … A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united …’^[36] Hanson is against economic globalisation, stating: ‘Government … must stop kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people’.^[37] She is opposed to foreign investment in Australia and has called for the immediate cessation of aid to foreign countries, stating that governments must ‘apply the savings to generate employment here at home’.^[38]

The threat to the nation’s integrity comes not only from international capitalism and immigration, but also from within. Hanson believes that Australian indigenous people are a ‘privileged’ class who receive far more benefits than white Australians. She has called for an abolition of ATSIC, the federal government agency responsible for administering Aboriginal affairs, and which she has called ‘a corrupt organisation run by an Aboriginal Mafia’.^[39] She has called for the rejection of indigenous land rights and the abandonment of all special programs geared to improving the health, employment and living conditions of indigenous peoples. These programs, she insists, are dividing the country into ‘black’ and ‘white’, and she demands that all Australians be treated equally. Hanson’s deep opposition to indigenous people (and the deeply undemocratic nature of the One Nation party) were made all too clear when Hanson stated that, as an elected politician, she intended to fight for ‘the white community, the immigrants, Italians, Greeks, whoever, it really doesn’t matter – anyone apart from the Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders’.^[40]

What conditions allow Hanson to get away with such undemocratic and hostile political rhetoric? How is it that such an inherently intolerant, racist political party has suddenly emerged and gained such a groundswell of public support? Here I am less concerned with the political and economic conditions that give rise to such a conservative political movement – rising unemployment levels, increasing internationalisation of the economy, and backlash attitudes towards earlier Labour Government policies that sympathetically addressed Aboriginal issues. Rather, I’m interested in culturally situating Hanson’s political rhetoric – at looking at how this rhetoric draws upon and resonates with key understandings of nationhood, of history, and of settler identity in Australia.

First, Hanson defines the Australian nation as an ethnic nation. It is this Britishness that she imagines to be under attack from multiculturalism and Asian immigration. There is indeed a long tradition in Australian politics, popular culture and historiography of defining the Australian nation in terms of its British roots. Politicians at the turn of the last century were concerned with maintaining not only the cultural heritage, but also more precisely the ‘racial purity’ of Australia’s British stock as Australia transformed from a British colony to an independent Commonwealth nation. Political parties and leading newspapers warned of the dangers of racial mixing and advocated ‘Australia for the White Man’.^[41] In 1901 the Commonwealth government passed the Immigration Restriction Act, inaugurating what became known as the White Australia policy, which effectively restricted non-European immigration to Australia until the late 1940s. The increase of non-British immigration since has fundamentally challenged conservative, established notions of national identity that now sit uneasily alongside newer models of Australia as a multicultural nation.

Australian identity has been traditionally constructed not just in terms of Britishness but also in opposition to Asia. Hanson opposes not just immigration, but Asian immigration in particular. Her rhetoric is an expression of what scholar Ien Ang has called the ‘psycho-geographic logic’ of the Australian national imagination.^[42] Since Federation, Ang argues, Australia has had a split identity emerging from its unique geographical position in the southern hemisphere. On the one hand imagined as a British colony, Australia was yet far from Britain, isolated in the southern hemisphere and surrounded by Asian countries often imagined as foreign and potentially threatening. Indeed, at the turn of the last century the threat of an Asian invasion was one of the most pressing issues faced by the new federal government, a fear reflected in an outpouring of ‘invasion novels’ that embedded this perceived vulnerability in the popular imagination.^[43]

More recently, the fear of an Asian invasion was again raised in public debate in 1984 when controversial historian Geoffrey Blainey publicly condemned what he saw was a ‘massive increase in immigration from Asia’.^[44] Significantly, he criticised Asian immigration using the rhetoric of military invasion. In the subsequent furor, Blainey defended his views in letters to leading national newspapers, stating: ‘I do not accept the view … that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless’^[45] and ‘So we jump as a nation from extreme to extreme. The old White Australia policy said rudely to half the world: Keep out. The new Surrender Australia policy says to that half of the world: Come in’.^[46] Other anti-immigration proponents likewise made use of militaristic metaphors to describe the perceived Asian threat. Ian Sinclair, the leader of the National Party, supported the anti-immigration movement, arguing ‘If there is any risk of an undue build-up of Asians as against others in the community, then you need to control it. We need … to reduce the number of Asians’.^[47] Extremist organisations spread posters and graffiti urging governments to ‘stop the Asian invasion’.^[48] Pauline Hanson’s concern with being swamped by Asian immigrants is a direct reflection of these established modes of conceiving and defining Australian nationhood in terms of its geographic, military and demographic vulnerability to an Asian takeover. These military themes illustrate how Australian nationhood is imagined to be chronically vulnerable to external Asian threat, and how Australians should be compelled to react swiftly, aggressively, and defensively to protect the nation’s integrity.

Pauline Hanson’s call to aggressively defend the Australian nation from perceived threats also taps into wider concepts of settler identity and history. Historian Ann Curthoys has argued that master narratives of Australian history typically are stories of victimisation.^[49] In contrast to frontier narratives in the United States, in which settlers confidently, aggressively encounter and ultimately triumph in their battle against the wilderness and Indians,^[50] and in contrast to those frontier narratives in Canada in which settlers are surrounded by and passively endure a fearful landscape and are frozen into passive inactivity in the process,^[51] in Australia the master narratives are of a kind of victimisation that necessitates not a passive endurance but an ongoing, aggressive battle for survival. This master narrative ‘is a story of battlers, victims of huge forces, their heroism one of survival, in war as in peace. The frame-story begins with a tale of convict suffering, of pioneers who had to endure the harshest continent on earth, endless drought and flood … near starvation …’^[52] These narratives also extend to accounts of war, of being used as ‘cannon fodder for the British military in World War One’ and of chronic vulnerability as a continent to attacks from foreign nations.^[53] One of the best known of the battler narratives is the Anzac legend, which emerged from the tragic deaths of thousands of Australian troops at Gallipoli in 1915. The Anzac legend has become one of Australia's most important founding myths, in which war is glorified as the proving ground for the Australian nation and national character, and death in war is upheld as the ultimate nationalistic sacrifice.^[54] But this heroic victimisation also comes from within: Aborigines, too, are the aggressors, ‘inflicting violence on the innocent settler and his family’.^[55] And the landscape also victimises settlers and explorers. Australia’s explorer-heroes – Burke and Wills, Edmund Kennedy, Leichhardt – are all individuals who died a heroic, mysterious death while exploring the continent, disappearing into the vast outback never to be found. In all, these master narratives of history reinforce the obligation, the ongoing imperative, to fight aggressively and defensively to protect one’s rights, property and nation. Battling, in short, is an Australian imagined tradition.

These national themes and images pervade Hanson’s rhetoric. She presents herself as an ordinary battler standing up to defend her nation. Her rhetoric is full of militaristic images of a nation under attack both from outside and within. In her 1997 speech at the launch of the One Nation party Hanson rallied her audience with a virtual call to arms: ‘Australians can no longer afford the luxury of apathy. We must stand up. We must win this battle, or lose the war’. The One Nation Party, she claimed, represented ‘a chance to stand against those who have betrayed our country, and would destroy our identity by forcing upon us the cultures of others … if we fail … we will lose our country forever, and be strangers in our own land … Ladies and Gentlemen, who of you would not join this fight? Who of you would not stand up for your country?’ She explicitly aligns her struggle with the heroic Anzac battlers of World War One: One Nation offers ‘the chance to turn this country around, revitalise our industry, [and] restore our ANZAC spirit and our national pride’. She says: ‘We must always remember the sacrifice of so many Australians who fought to save our country from outsiders who would have taken it. We must not now allow our country to be taken from within’.^[56]

Similar images of nationhood and national history permeate Hanson’s anti-native title rhetoric. She argues for the extinguishment of native title, the abolition of ATSIC, and the end of all special programs for indigenous people. These arguments are framed by a series of concerns having to do with a demographic and pseudo-military takeover of Australia from within. She expresses alarm at being demographically overwhelmed by a rising Aboriginal population: ‘The Aboriginal population increased 33% from 1991-1996 while the rest of the population of Australia increased by only around 6%’, she warned a crowd gathered at Longreach, Queensland in September 1998. At the same meeting she raised fears that Aboriginal corporations could potentially buy up pastoral properties in Queensland, engaging in a kind of economic takeover of the land and pastoral industry in that state: ‘Most Australians are not aware the Indigenous Land Corporation will have the financial ability to transfer the ownership of Australia’s pastoral leases to Aborigines … by 2004 the Indigenous Land Fund will have received over $1.2 Billion in taxpayers’ funds … Given the chance the Corporation could buy all the pastoral properties in Cape York in just one year. This taxpayer created fund could take only about thirty years or so to buy all the Pastoral Leases in Queensland’.^[57] Significantly, Hanson envisions Aboriginal-run pastoral stations not as contributing in significant and important ways to the economy of the country, but somehow as threats to the nation’s integrity. Along similar lines, Hanson claims that Queensland Labor and Coalition parties are in a conspiracy to create a separate, sovereign Aboriginal state. As evidence of an international conspiracy to this effect, she points her finger at the Canadian government and the new territory of Nunavut, which she incorrectly portrays as a separate, independent, ‘race-based’ state separate from Canada.^[58] And she blames ‘new class elites’ for ‘surrendering’ Australia to indigenous Australians.^[59]

While this kind of paranoid, militaristic rhetoric is also found in the extreme right-wing populist movements in North America, in Australia this rhetoric has a particular salience when placed alongside established foundational histories and images of nationhood. The success of One Nation during the mid- to late 1990s, in part, must be associated with its ability to appeal to these sentimental symbols of Australian identity and history and to tap into lingering fears about the tenuousness of the nation’s security.

Anti-native title arguments in Canada show some significant differences. As in Australia, indigenous people in Canada are often constructed as undeserving of ‘special rights’: they ‘sponge’ off government, they don’t use the land they have, they are incapable of self-management – these are the common stereotypes. There are concerns that the settlement of Aboriginal land claims and the implementation of forms of Aboriginal self-government will result in ‘race-based’ territories with governments operating outside the context of the Canadian federation. Opposition to indigenous land claims is justified in terms of a defense of the principle Canadian values of equality, democracy, and individual rights. But while similar to the anti-native title arguments in Australia, Canadian opposition to indigenous claims is couched in particular images of Canadian national identity and history that convey an unshakeable conviction of the imagined Canadian traditions of benevolence and generosity.

Popular histories in Canada, both at the national and local level, construct the frontier expansion as a series of benevolent extensions of Euro-Canadian colonial authority. This is quite unlike either American frontier narratives, where conquest is portrayed as a result of violence, or Australian versions, where – when settlement has been successful – indigenous peoples are either completely erased from the landscape or, as in the case of the Kalkadoon of north-western Queensland, have died a heroic, Anzac-like death in the face of Australian colonial expansion.^[60] In Canadian popular narratives, when settlers are not portrayed in a kind of passive, frozen state surrounded by a hostile wilderness (as Atwood describes), the successful colonisation of the frontier is imagined as being achieved through a process of ‘conquest through benevolence’: through Aboriginal peoples’ willing subordination and ‘loyalty’ to the paternalistic care of government agents, missionaries and settlers.^[61] Canadian frontier heroes are not usually the Indian fighters of American versions; in fact, popular historians often deny the occurrence of overt Aboriginal resistance. Instead, the frontier heroes are the Mounties, the enforcers of law and order. Pierre Berton, Canada’s foremost popular historian, has described the North West Mounted Police as ‘civil servants and social workers’ whose paternalistic qualities were appreciated by the Indians, who called the Mountie ‘father’.^[62] This narrative of ‘conquest through benevolence’ has permeated Canadian stories of national identity and history for over a century. It has translated into a heavily paternalistic Indian Affairs policy of coercive power masked as benevolent guidance, and a set of paternalistic attitudes among non-Aboriginal Canadians in which racism is masked in a language of benevolence and good will.^[63] This narrative of benevolence is echoed in the widespread belief, often heard, that in Canada ‘we have treated our Aboriginal people well’.

This narrative of Canadian benevolence and generosity frames much of the anti-native title discourse today. For example, in contrast to Australian discourse, in which governments are accused of being traitorous and surrendering the country to Aborigines, in Canada governments are accused of being overly generous to Aboriginal people. Land claims are constructed as yet another massive government ‘giveaway’ to Aboriginal people – an excessive benevolence.

These themes of Canadian benevolence and government over-generosity infuse the anti land-claims rhetoric of the Reform Party (now known as the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance), the conservative populist party that could be described as the Canadian version of Australia’s One Nation. Like One Nation, the Reform Party is opposed to the recognition of special Aboriginal rights, arguing that ‘all Canadians are equal’, and that treaties would perpetuate ‘racial’ divisions among Canadians. The Reform Party opposes land claims settlements in the Western Arctic and Yukon because ‘the generosity of the land claim agreements was excessive’.^[64] The Reform Party’s Aboriginal Affairs critic, Mike Scott, evoking a self-image of a benevolent parent to Canada’s indigenous people, has stated that land claims settlements are not in the best interests of Aboriginal people. British Columbia’s resource economy would be destroyed by land claims settlements, he argues. ‘As the least well off British Columbians, Indians more than anyone will be harmed if the government makes deals that help destroy the economy’.^[65] Another Reform party member has stated: ‘The real villians [sic] [in the land claims movement] are the federal and provincial governments and their bureaucrats. Since 1982, these culprits have been leading the native people to expect that their wish lists would be fulfilled, that indeed Canada’s native people have a right to expect preferential treatment.’^[66] Thus, the land claims movement is a result of naïve Aboriginal ‘children’ being misled by overly generous, paternalistic governments.

This image of excessive government paternalism is even more explicit in the arguments of Mel Smith, a key Reform party supporter and recent author of a book on the land claims issue in British Columbia.^[67] Smith argues that the British Columbia government has addressed the native title question by establishing Indian reserves. ‘70% of the reserves in Canada are in British Columbia! It is a myth to say the government has not met its obligations to the Indians!’^[68] Of course, colonial officials did not establish reserves to address Aboriginal title, but to protect settlers from growing threats of violence from indigenous peoples whose lands they were taking. Further, many of the reserves in British Columbia, in contrast with the large prairie treaty lands, are only a few acres in size – the number of reserves does not equate with the size of reserves. These facts, however, are obscured in Smith’s rhetoric of generosity. The concept of Aboriginal self-government, now recognised and supported by the federal government, ‘causes all sorts of problems, because it raises expectations, it causes the Native people, the leadership, to feel that they have their own rights’, Smith suggests.^[69]

These images of Canadian national identity and benevolence are also encountered in rural debates. For example, one writer to a rural B.C. community paper stated: ‘Everyone agrees that land claims should be settled, but how? How many years have we been pouring funds into this abyss [reserve communities]? It apparently has done the natives on the reserves no good at all ... Where has this money gone? The native people of Canada should be the best dressed, the best housed, the best educated people in the world!’^[70] Another writer similarly drew on the images of Canadian benevolence and Aboriginal ingratitude:

The images of history, of identity and of the nature of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations contained within such anti-land claims rhetoric all resonate with dominant assumptions of Canadian identity and national history. The Canadian self-image of benevolent paternalism is juxtaposed to the image of a now-excessive government generosity and the passive, childlike Indian who is being misled into false expectations of their Aboriginal rights by sympathetic governments.