FROM THE ARCHIVE: Pauline and the Magic Pudding
Australia's in strife, the word has passed around: the magic in the pudding's been whisked away. Why, who's responsible, and what we have to do to get it back, is not something about which we can agree as Australians.
The phenomenal electoral success of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in the Queensland election would seem to indicate that around a quarter of that State's electorate has been prepared to identify itself with a populist, protectionist, racialised view of the world.
The media's response to the election has provided both a confirmation of Hanson's achievement and a publicity platform upon which her party can now build. Her success has meant her critics have been obliged to show her a degree of begrudging respect that it has hitherto been all too easy to deny her. Similarly her support base: it's been shown to be rather more "mainstream" than most commentators hoped it might be or made it out to be.
The difficulties now confronting the Coalition Government have been stressed – among these: the threat to the National Party, the status of John Howard's political judgement, the question marks over his leadership, the deal with Senator Harradine to eliminate a race-based Double Dissolution election.
But have those who have rushed to judgement finally got it right? Could it be that much to do with the movement, its leadership and its impact is still being misconstrued? If so, who will be the beneficiary, Hanson and One Nation or those who have stood against her?
One Nation’s unprecedented debut as a parliamentary party has at last demonstrated just how fallacious its portrayal as basically a rural phenomenon has been. In the last half century, universal reliance on motorised transport and electricity, the expansion and diversification of options that come with the telephone, radio and television, film and video, mobile phones, satellite dishes, personal computers and internet access, has profoundly altered people's imaginative horizons and daily desires.
One Nation’s unprecedented debut as a parliamentary party has at last demonstrated just how fallacious its portrayal as basically a rural phenomenon has been.
Because of the domestic (as well as the workplace) availability of ever more remarkable technological
