How we’ve treated Hanson – a 30-year retrospective

The full article is here, but here’s the gist:

“ …here’s my radical plan to confront Hanson. Let’s embrace her right to participate in the political discourse and engage in good faith; don’t ridicule her, don’t sneer at her lack of sophistication, don’t search for the reasons not to take her seriously. Because with these numbers she is deadly serious.

Rather than taking her outrage bait let’s hold her to the same standards as other participants in our representative democracy. Rather than shutting her down, let’s keep asking her politely to please explain.

By engaging Hanson and her supporters we can channel the political momentum building behind her into something more productive: a genuine, good-faith discussion about Australia’s place in an increasingly unstable world.

It’s so much harder to hate on people you have taken the time to listen to, even when you disagree with them vehemently.”

In researching the piece my You Tube feed got colonised by a retro one Nation algorithm which illustrates by point that e have spent the last 30 years ridiculing and infantilising her rather than actually engaging her.

And of course we have been right to call out her overt racism and targeting of minorities, but in doing so I think we have actually let her off the hook but not taking her ideas seriously.

This clip from a 90s comedy show displays how we have sneered at her lack of plish and sophistication.

This long piece on 60 Minutes shows her extended family and its direct link back to the White Australia consensus. But it also shows a journalist fising for the next point of outrage:

This piece with Tom Gleeson doing a segment he called ‘I hate you prove, change my mind’ is actually one of the efforts to actually meet her on common, albeit it confected ground. “What was worse - prison or Dancing with the Stars?” .

As always, the great Andrew Denton in his interview show ‘Enough Rope’ is the most genuine attempt to both understand her and hold her to account for her views.

Finally, Pauline Pantsdown, uses humour to confront her views in a way that seems more absurd than angry.

All of which to say if we are serious about addressing the recent wave of support for Pauline Hanson there is a rich archive of material on what does and doesn’t work – and it seems to me the most effective approaches are one’s that see her humanity, even when she struggles to see it in others.