The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.23           June 9, 1997 
 
 
Thousands Protest Fascist In Australia  

BY BOB AIKEN AND DOUG COOPER
SYDNEY, Australia - Increasing polarization around the views of fascist politician Pauline Hanson has spilled into the streets here in recent weeks.

Since her One Nation Party was launched April 11, thousands have joined protests almost everywhere Hanson has spoken, and at initial public organizing meetings convened by her supporters. The party's national launch was in Ipswich, Queensland, the center of Hanson's Oxley electorate in the Brisbane metropolitan area. Hundreds protested noisily outside the meeting.

One Nation has become a pole of attraction for ultrarightist forces across the country. Party organizers claim 9,000 membership applications were requested in the first two weeks.

In one of the largest actions in recent state history, more than 3,000 people protested Hanson's meeting in Hobart, Tasmania, May 9. In Perth, Western Australia, 2,000 picketed her May 3 rally of 1,000 people. Some 500 protested at a breakfast function she addressed the following morning.

Up to 1,000 demonstrated at an initial One Nation public meeting in Geelong, near Melbourne, Victoria, May 4. Many chanting protesters entered the hall, blocking the meeting of 50 from convening after 15 minutes.

About two weeks later, 200 attended a second One Nation meeting there. About 50 people picketed outside while some 700 participated in a rally on the other side of town, called to oppose Hanson.

Some 150 people, most of them Aborigines, attended an April 24 protest rally in Rockhampton, central Queensland, after Hanson was accompanied at a rally in the town a week earlier by a local Aboriginal man.

In Hervey Bay, Queensland, about 200 people protested a One Nation public launch that drew 300, May 8. Aboriginal protester Russell Currie said, "I was barred [from entering] because I was Black." His niece was also barred. Currie said that an elderly white man going into the meeting swore at him, "Get out of my way, coons." Tony Pitt, the secretary of the One Nation branch, is a former leader of the now- defunct ultrarightist Confederate Action Party.

Scapegoating and nationalism
A May 17 statement issued by the Communist League explained, "Hansonism's demagogy is combined with aggressive Australian nationalism. It clearly defines who `Australians' are - and aren't - in its `one nation.' It practices the politics of resentment, scapegoating migrants in general and Asians in particular, Aborigines and others, while demagogically speaking of the need for `all Australians' to be treated `equally.' It aims at convincing people that these scapegoats are the source of the crisis, not the capitalist system."

Hanson comes out of the Liberal Party, the main party of the bosses. She successfully stood as an Independent in the March 1996 federal elections after being disendorsed by the Liberals for racist comments.

In her April 11 speech launching One Nation, Hanson raised the specter of "civil war."

"There are so many people in Australia who do not think of themselves as Australians," she said. "They have simply transplanted the problems of their way of life to our country. Where will they stand in any future crisis, beside us, or behind us, or will they themselves be the crisis?"

The One Nation book Pauline Hanson: The Truth created a national political storm when it was released in mid-April. It includes speeches and statements by Hanson, as well as an anonymous section outlining Hansonism's program. It was briefly available only at One Nation rallies, with a print run of only 1,000, adding to its mystique. The press has reported on the content of the book.

The Communist League statement noted that the book "contains malignant racism: it scaremongers about `whites' being swamped by Asians by 2050 and dehumanizes Aborigines as `cannibals' who allegedly ate their own children and mothers. But it is not simply racist. It includes antigay diatribes, claims to identify with the `battlers' against `new class elites,' characterises all the established political parties as corrupted beyond redemption and attacks key institutions of liberal democratic rule such as the High Court.

"It is a manifesto of an incipient fascist movement, complete with conspiracy theories, pseudoscientific claptrap and mystifications. It is accurate to compare it to [Adolf] Hitler's Mein Kampf."

As well as drawing significant crowds and thousands of membership inquiries, One Nation, according to one opinion poll was drawing 10 percent support, while another reported 25 percent were considering voting for the party.

In Hobart hundreds of protesters assembled May 9 outside the venue where Hanson was to speak. They were joined by more than 3,000 who had gathered at Franklin Square three blocks away for an anti-Hanson rally and march. A couple of hundred protesters surged into the public meeting.

The chanting, jeering, foot-stomping crowd forced organizers to disband it without Hanson appearing. There was no violence, Rodney Croome, a prominent gay rights activist and march spokesperson, told the Militant. The Saturday Mercury reported that 350 people had come to attend the meeting.

Hanson told a news conference the next day, "I will not be stopped" by "200 of society's thugs," and claimed that criticisms of her by Liberal Party prime minister John Howard and leaders of the Labor opposition had "incited" the protesters.

Youth in the lead
Most of the Hobart protesters were "kids wearing orange ribbons and scarves as a symbol of racial harmony," wrote Daily Telegraph reporter John Hamilton, while in the Sydney Morning Herald, David Marr squawked, "It was just a very rowdy demo of the kind we haven't seen since the Vietnam [war] days."

Students from the University of Tasmania played a big part in the rally. On May 10 Hanson was confronted by protests of 800 outside a meeting of 600 in Launceston, and 100 outside a meeting of 300 in Ulverstone.

Just days before Hanson's tour of Tasmania, the state Parliament passed a law decriminalizing homosexuality, after a nine-year struggle for gay rights. The rightist politician was invited to tour by the Concerned Voters Association, whose leader, Chester Somerville, a former state president of the National Party and former leader of the shopkeepers association, was active in opposing the law.

In Perth the protests came in the context of an April 28 trade union rally of 20,000 protesting new draconian antiunion legislation introduced by the Liberal government in Western Australia.

Up to 1,000 attended an annual multicultural and Aboriginal reconciliation festival in the Sydney suburb of Manly May 18. The festival took on an anti-Hanson flavor, with Hanson's recently established national office a block away, as capitalist politicians from the major parties denounced her views.

Hanson is addressing a One Nation meeting at the Civic Theater in Newcastle, May 30, in the wake of BHP's (Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd.) April 29 announcement that after 82 years it will close its steelmaking operations there in the next two years. Some 2,500 jobs will be lost.

One Nation is campaigning to "restore tariff protection, revitalize Australian manufacturing and initiate financial support for small business and the rural sector" as an answer to unemployment.

A picket and a multicultural festival are planned for Newcastle. Hanson is also scheduled to speak in Adelaide June 11.

Bob Aiken is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union in Sydney.  
 
 
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