Pretty much everyone of a certain age remembers this line in Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech: “I’m afraid we’re in danger of being swamped by Asians.”

It wasn’t the first racist comment she’d made in public and it certainly wasn’t the last.

She was identifying her “enemy”: the group she blamed for the woes she’d been hearing about across the counter of her fish and chip shop in regional Queensland.

In Episode 2 of our new series The Making of One Nation^[1], political scientist Ben Moffitt says it’s an intentional populist strategy, used to draw a clear line between “us” and “them.”

I don’t think we’d have One Nation, or Pauline Hanson today without that speech and that line specifically. It set the scene from the get go.

It’s presenting a boogieman, someone to blame for these wider crises.

Over the years, she’s changed the enemy she targets from immigrants to native title, Islam to the Voice to Parliament, elites to Indigenous Australians, but the tactic remains the same.

Ben Moffitt says that positioning has infiltrated Australian politics.

Former Prime Minister John Howard saw the threat coming from One Nation and took and mainstreamed a lot of the policies that Hanson had put up or at least the topics that she was putting up.

Political scientists talk about issue ownership, which party owns a particular issue. I think Howard read the tea leaves and went to own those issues around immigration and national identity, with the Pacific Solution, with offshore processing.

I think it’s fair to say that John Howard is the one responsible for mainstreaming Pauline Hanson’s positions in Australian politics.

Listen to the interview with Ben Moffitt at The Making of One Nation podcast, available at Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode was written by Ashlynne McGhee and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.

References

1. ^{^} The Making of One Nation (podcasts.apple.com)