Lazarus Rising

by John Howard

  The gun-control drama illustrated both the unpredictability of politics and the reality that public perceptions of a PM are often shaped by how he responds to unexpected crises. The tragedy of Port Arthur could not have been foreseen. I acted swiftly and in a manner which was compassionate to the surviving victims and the loved ones of the 35 who died.

  One of those who I remained in touch with was Walter Mikac, whose wife and two small daughters were murdered by Bryant. His loss was immense, and he established the Alannah and Madeline Foundation in honour of his two little girls. He was a lovely man, and my sympathy for him demonstrated how I felt for this group of Australians who had seen the lives of those they cared for most brutally ended by a random act of violence.

  Not only had I involved myself at an emotional level with the tragedy, but I used the immense authority of my newly won office to achieve a huge shift in the laws relating to guns, and in a direction most Australians supported. Many people saw me in a different light for the first, and for some, the only time. This was something that went to the basic safety of their daily lives. Maybe there is more to this man than just balancing the budget, reducing union power and strengthening our defence forces, some thought. It gave me a social dimension, above party politics, which had never before occurred to some Australians. Within just two months of becoming PM I would forever be identified with driving an effective national response to a terrible tragedy which was now part of our history. I had passed a very important character test.

  23

  PAULINE HANSON

  The Queensland division of the Liberal Party endorsed Pauline Hanson as the Liberal Party candidate for the safe Labor-held seat of Oxley in the 1996 election. It was a Labor Party citadel and certainly not one that we felt we had any prospect of winning. Two weeks out from the election, Hanson was reported in the local Ipswich newspaper as having cast aspersions on Aboriginal people, blaming them for higher-than-average crime levels, and suggesting that they had privileged access to entitlements. These remarks were completely unacceptable, and the Queensland Liberal Party president, Bob Tucker, and state director, Jim Baron, after consultation with our federal director, Andrew Robb, Grahame Morris and me, decided that Hanson should be disendorsed. So close were we to the election that it was too late to choose another candidate or indeed to alter what was already on the ballot paper. Thus Pauline Hanson, although disendorsed as a Liberal, appeared as the Liberal Party candidate for Oxley on election day.

  That would have been the end of the matter, except for the voters of Oxley. As is now part of Australian political legend, Hanson secured, at 19.3 per cent, the biggest anti-Labor swing in the nation, and won Oxley from the Labor Party. It was an amazing result. Although the general outcome in the election suggested that Hanson would have received a very big swing anyway, it is doubtful that she would have won the seat without the additional factor of her disendorsement by the Liberal Party. This, for several reasons, inflated her vote.

  The swing required to wrest Oxley from Labor had been 12.6 per cent. Pauline Hanson’s sacking did attract a sympathy vote. As well, her sacking drew attention to her attack on what she saw as excessive benefits for Aboriginal people. A lot of people in places such as Ipswich agreed with her. As she was no longer an official Liberal, some traditional ALP supporters felt freer to vote for her. Their usual party was on the skids, so why not. The euphoria of our massive general election win swamped a proper examination of the true ingredients of Hanson’s remarkable victory.

  Given the Coalition’s huge majority, Pauline Hanson for several months drew little attention. She greeted me in a friendly enough manner whenever we came across each other in the halls of Parliament House. She did not strike me as a person who was about to have a big impact on Australian politics. This changed quite dramatically on 10 September 1996, when Pauline Hanson delivered her maiden speech.

  The speech was full of economic populism and old-fashioned protectionism. One could disagree with many of the points she made without branding them as in any way extreme or prejudiced. She called for the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). She was ahead of her time on that. Eight years later that became the policy of both the Coalition and the ALP. Back in 1988 the Coalition had opposed the formation of ATSIC.

  There were two claims Hanson made in her maiden speech which attracted all of the attention. She said that a form of reverse racism applied to the application of Indigenous policy. She rejected outright the proposition that Aborigines were the most disadvantaged group in our society. Hanson delivered a broadside against special programs of all kinds for Indigenous Australians, including those flowing from the Mabo case.

  Her most incendiary allegation was, ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.’1 She said that Asian migrants did not assimilate, formed their own ghettos and had their own religion and culture. Hanson also called for the abolition of multiculturalism.

  I found it interesting to read her speech again, 13 years after it had been first delivered. Doing so confirmed in me the belief that my reaction to it, criticised as it was, had been correct. There was little doubt that Hanson echoed community sentiment with her attacks on multiculturalism, ATSIC and separatist policies for black and white Australians, and blanket condemnation of political correctness. Equally, though, her unwillingness to accept that Indigenous Australians were the most disadvantaged group in our midst was as inaccurate then as, sadly, it remains the truth today.

  Her remarks about Asian immigration were irresponsible and inflammatory. Asian immigration had risen, but alarmist and inaccurate talk that Australia was being flooded with Asians risked stoking old-fashioned and unwanted prejudice. The bulk of the evidence from the 13 years which have passed since Hanson’s speech has been that Asians have joined the mainstream of Australian society quite freely.

  Pauline Hanson would have struck a chord with most Australians by saying that we should all be one society, with disadvantage within that society being addressed effectively. She quoted some views of Sir Paul Hasluck from 1955 in support of her claims. Hanson then made the truly extraordinary assertion that in 1955 white Australians enjoyed privileges over Aborigines, whereas 41 years later it was the other way around. She based her claims of modern-day black privilege on the existence of special benefits available only for Indigenous Australians. She made no allowance for the fact that these benefits were there precisely because of Indigenous disadvantage and nothing else.

  Hanson’s mistake was to argue that there was no disadvantage rather than to attack the benefits as a way of reducing the disadvantage. She would then have been on much surer ground. Australians then and now all agree that there is profound Aboriginal disadvantage. We disagree on how best it should be tackled.

  The immediate issue posed by Hanson’s speech was not the accuracy of her two provocative comments — they were clearly both wrong for the reasons I have given — but how to respond. My instinct from the beginning was that there should not be an overreaction.

  Pauline Hanson should be corrected, but I felt she should not be made a martyr. The more people attacked her, the more supporters she would attract and the greater would be the publicity given to her views. On A Current Affair on 25 September, I was asked whether I thought that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians, the very words Hanson had used. My reply was, ‘No, I don’t believe that. We have a non-discriminatory immigration policy in this country.’ Twice more during the interview, Ray Martin asked if I thought that there was a problem with the level of Asian immigration. I said there was not.

  Interviewed by Alan Jones on 30 September I said, ‘I don’t agree with [Hanson] when she implied that Aborigines as a group are not disadvantaged; I think they are.’ In that same interview I went on to say, ‘Now, I want justice for the Aboriginal people. I did not oppose the Mabo decision, I thought it was, in itself, a very justifiable decision but I think the way the Keating Government did it, the way Robert Tickner
handled the situation, was quite wrong.’ The day before, interviewed again by Ray Martin, largely about Pauline Hanson, I said, ‘We badly treated our Aboriginal people, shamefully treated them, and we must remedy that by helping them now to have a brighter future.’

  These remarks of mine were clearly at odds with what Pauline Hanson had said in her maiden speech. I had stated my position but because I had not launched the all-out verbal assault on Hanson urged on me by the ALP, many journalists and by some Liberals such as Jeff Kennett, it was alleged I had gone ‘soft’ on her and was not showing ‘leadership’. My approach was deliberate. So was that of our opponents, who saw the potential to divide the Coalition side of politics on the issue. That was their objective.

  The truth, and this was something which I felt from the very beginning, was that Pauline Hanson was something of a metaphor for a group of Australians, most of whom did not have a racist bone in their bodies, who believed that in different ways they had been passed over, left out or generally short-changed by the pace and the intensity of economic and social change which Australia had undergone over the previous 10 to 15 years. Although Pauline Hanson’s most controversial remarks were about Asian immigration and Aboriginal welfare, her general pitch, subsequent to her maiden speech, was to identify very strongly with traditional Australian values.

  She literally, as well as figuratively, wrapped herself in the Australian flag. She assumed the demeanour of an Aussie battler. She was a single mother who had run a fish and chip shop in Ipswich. She spoke in a faltering manner on occasions, which only added to her popular appeal; many Australians who had not completed a tertiary education were increasingly suspicious of slick, public relations oratory and wanted to be spoken to directly in a language they felt they could understand. She argued for strong defences, friendship with our traditional allies as well as protection for Australian industry and, amongst other things, attacked the Coalition Government’s gun laws.

  To my mind, the Australian media, with a few notable exceptions such as the Sydney radio talkback host Alan Jones, completely overreacted to Pauline Hanson. Wide sections of the media, particularly Fairfax journalists and the ABC, saw a golden opportunity to attack me for not hitting Hanson hard enough. The huge media coverage of Pauline Hanson within Australia stimulated extensive and often lurid coverage in Asia. It always will. That is why Australian journalists have a responsibility in such matters to contemplate the impact of sensationalism.

  Paul Kelly, editor at large for the Australian, regarded as Australia’s foremost political author, allowed himself to become caught up with the Hanson hysteria. I leave aside what he wrote at the time. Comments in his recent book, The March of Patriots, enable me to make my point. In that book Kelly claimed that the speech I made to the Queensland Liberal Party on 22 September 1996 gave Pauline Hanson momentum. It was an unjustified claim. Kelly said that I had signalled sympathy for Hanson and contempt for her critics. I didn’t even mention Hanson in the speech. What I did point out was that, following our election, some of the political correctness of the Keating era had gone. I had railed against some of the McCarthyist smear tactics of the Keating Government whenever the Liberals disagreed with an Indigenous policy of that administration. It was a highly political speech at a Liberal Party convention, just six months after a huge election win, and in a state where the Coalition had scored its greatest triumph — fancy that!

  The message which the Keating Government’s smear tactics generated was encapsulated in a cartoon which had appeared in the Age at the height of the native-title debate several years before we won office, which depicted Peter Reith and me both on horseback, shooting Aborigines. The caption read, ‘The Second Dispossession’. It was outrageous. Our opposition to the Keating agenda on native title had been enough to bring forth this kind of vitriol. In writing this book I reread my Queensland speech. In it I made direct reference to that Age cartoon immediately after the remarks to which Kelly had referred as giving Hanson momentum. I had the McCarthyist tactics of the Keating Government in mind, not Pauline Hanson, when I said, ‘The pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted.’

  In my Queensland speech I entered an important caveat. I said, ‘That freedom of speech carries with it a responsibility on all those who exercise that freedom to do so in a moderate and tolerant fashion and not to convert the new-found freedom, if I may put it that way, into a vehicle for using needlessly insensitive and intolerant language.’

  Hanson appealed very strongly to many traditional National Party supporters. Thus she became an electoral gift to the Labor Party. Shrewd heads in the Labor Party knew that most of her support would be from amongst those who had voted for the Coalition at the 1996 election. There may have been a few Hanson supporters in places such as the Hunter Valley of New South Wales — and indeed in her home patch of Ipswich — of a normally Labor hue, but by and large she attracted the support of people who had voted for the Coalition in droves just six months earlier.

  As a consequence, Labor could attack Hanson with impunity, build the issue as much as possible and call on me and other members of the Liberal Party to denounce her and, in time of course, to place her behind Labor on our how-to-vote recommendations. Unfortunately this tactic from Labor was mimicked by some in the Liberal Party. Jeff Kennett saw himself as the great Liberal friend of multiculturalism, and therefore as a natural-born opponent of Pauline Hanson. Never reluctant to jump in and say things which he thought I should be saying, he ran the Hanson issue as hard as he could.

  Peter Costello and, to some degree, Alexander Downer and even Tim Fischer went harder than I did in denouncing Hanson. I had wanted a final decision on Liberal Party preferences to be put off until closer to the election. Peter Costello announced in an interview on the Sunday program on 10 May 1998 that Hanson would be placed last on the ballot paper in his electorate of Higgins.

  Newspapers in Asian countries ran prominent stories about Pauline Hanson. Our critics in Australia knew this and it provided added incentive for the anti-Hanson crusade to be kept at fever pitch. Pauline Hanson had no policy substance. She championed ludicrous propositions such as a flat-rate spending tax. I knew that as time passed she would be forced to declare her policies and that this would ultimately erode the support which she had gathered in the community. I also knew that many of the people who were endeared to her would deeply resent being labelled racist. It was a situation where people had only wanted to listen to certain things which she had said, but ignore the rest.

  For the Prime Minister, and a Liberal one at that, to launch a full-frontal assault on Pauline Hanson with the sort of language some of my critics were demanding would have been quite counterproductive. It would have given her even greater status. Amongst other considerations, I wanted to retain the support of those former Coalition voters who were supportive of some of the things being said by Pauline Hanson.

  It is hard to know what impact the guns issue had on boosting Hanson’s support. Pauline Hanson would have made her controversial speech and gathered a lot of the support which she did irrespective of the national gun-control laws. However, many traditional National Party supporters had been unsettled by the laws; some of them felt betrayed by our actions. Others, having waited many years for a Coalition Government and finding that their economic conditions had not improved overnight, sought what appeared, on the surface, to be a more radical alternative in Hanson.

  Even though the adverse press Australia was receiving in Asian countries was as much the result of the political campaign against Hanson in Australia as the remarks she herself had originally made, it was nonetheless damaging to our interests in those countries. For that reason I decided to deal in a more formal set-piece way with the Hanson issue, through an address to the Australia–Asia Society in Sydney on 8 May 1997.

  In that speech I said, ‘She is wrong when she suggests that Aborigines are not disadvantaged. She is wrong when she says that Australia is in danger of being swamped with Asians. She
is wrong to seek scapegoats for society’s problems. She is wrong when she denigrates foreign investment, because its withdrawal would cost Australian jobs. She is wrong when she claims that Australia is headed for civil war.’ I said that her political campaign had been based on fear and instability, and did not offer positive solutions.

  Many of those who had previously attacked me praised this speech, although declaring that it should have been delivered six months earlier. In fact the substance of my denunciation of her policies in the speech had all been contained in comments I had made months earlier, both in the press and in parliament.

  The remarkable feature of that speech was that I had not broken any new ground with its contents, yet it received wide praise from erstwhile critics. Perhaps the crucial difference had been the symbolism of giving the speech to a group committed to strong Asia–Australia ties. In my May 1997 speech I warned against labelling people who were taken with Pauline Hanson as bigoted, narrow-minded and racist. I said that a few no doubt were; most, however, were not. Nor did I retreat from what I had said at the Queensland Liberal Convention in September 1996 about the repudiation of political correctness, represented by the Coalition’s 1996 win.

  Going to the nub of her broad appeal, which was not racist, I said, ‘Rather, she echoes concerns about the pace of change and the pressures that parts of our community are under. These concerns, as distinct from her responses, deserve the most sensitive understanding, and the Government is committed to giving them a serious and effective response. She also echoes long-smouldering resentments about attitudes which have been imposed upon the majority of the Australian community without that majority feeling it has even had an opportunity of debating those issues.’