Media Tarts

by Julia Baird

  In the mid to late 1990s, Hanson’s fame sprang from xenophobic ideas about immigration, race, welfare and globalisation that male politicians like Graeme Campbell had been hawking for years.3 She was noticed because she was a woman, because she was so utterly unlike anyone else in federal politics. Her timing was right, and her gender was right. She was thought to be honest at a time when a growing acreage of the community distrusted and disliked politicians, believing them to be dishonest and corrupt.

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  By the 2000s, more column inches had probably been devoted to Pauline Hanson than to any other Australian female politician. She claims her major battle had been against the elite in the media who recoiled at her policies, and that this defined her identity. Her hostility today is palpable. She refused to talk to me for this book, and her best friend told me that after she left jail she decided she was tired of the media and would refuse any of their requests. She had always been naive when it came to the press, inexperienced and uncomfortable under scrutiny. Margo Kingston, who followed her on the campaign trail for the 1998 election, wrote a book about her experiences, which is a superb study of the heat, chaos and confusion that marked the campaign — as well as the complex interplay of personalities, conflicting emotions and the personal involvement of some journalists, particularly Kingston.4 She revealed that many journalists and media outlets made political decisions about the coverage of Hanson. They did not want to help make her more popular because many were alarmed by her views, but they were fascinated by the spectacle of an untutored political novice making policy on the run.5

  The role the press played in the spread and conflagration of ‘Hansonism’ was endlessly debated as commentators watched the flames in the late 1990s. Some incorrectly claimed her success was simply due to the media, and that she did not represent a ‘spontaneous grassroots movement’. As academics Iva Deutchman and Anne Ellison have noted, women MPs often win the attention of the press if they contradict female stereotypes.6 Some journalists have also blamed the media for elevating her far more than was commensurate with her ability or political influence, and others have wrestled with their own culpability.7

  During the 1998 election campaign Hanson once held an off-the-record meeting with journalists (to tick them off about their reporting), where she declared defiantly: ‘If I lose my seat, it will be on the basis that people don’t want my policies, that they don’t want me or what I stand for. But there’s no way in the bloody wide world that I am going to allow the media to make me lose it.’8 Her political biography suggested that a lack of clear policy and structural cohesion in the party, and the distribution of preferences, probably had more to do with her demise than the prolonged, intense scrutiny by the press. She was disendorsed by the Liberal Party for the seat of Oxley in 1995 following some inflammatory comments she made about support for Indigenous people. She stood as an independent in 1996 and won the seat with a swing of more than 23 per cent. The next year she formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and in 1998 the party won 11 seats in the Queensland election. She quickly became a celebrity and the most famous Australian woman in the world. But in October that year, after a series of preference deals that worked against her, she failed to win a seat in parliament. The party won only three seats in the 2001 Queensland election, and Hanson quit as president in 2002. In 2003 she failed in her attempt to get elected to the NSW upper house, and several months later was sent to jail for fraudulently registering One Nation in Queensland.

  The truth is, the significance of the election of the woman from Ipswich initially eluded most commentators. Her experience was similar to that of other women who found that their popularity in the polls or the grassroots of their parties cattle-prodded the media into recognition of their influence. Coming at the end of the progressive Keating era, Hanson articulated the whispered, muttered resentments of a part of the Australian community who had felt sidelined and silenced for years, unsettled by the impact of globalisation on their livelihoods and uneasy with the values of ‘new class elites’.9 The response to her on talkback radio and television fuelled some of the attention, but it was only once her party demonstrated serious electoral pulling power that the press was transfixed, and serious. According to Kingston it was not until Hanson’s party won 11 seats at the Queensland election in 1998 that the Herald stopped seeing Hansonism as a ‘sick joke’ and ‘waiting for the laughter to die down’.10 Hanson defies the experience of many ‘media tarts’. She was a subject of fascination, but was not pursued by the press because they liked her but, for many, because they despised her. There was not a point at which they turned on her, or brutalised her. There was rather a point at which they softened, and took her more seriously than they had initially. Hanson drove political reporting widdershins, making a mockery of conventional journalistic propriety or caution, as well as objectivity. Two things journalists frequently fretted over were their role in her rise and whether they had the power to subvert her success.

  Was Hanson framed by the press? None of the traditional sexist categories applied to her, few of the clichéd slurs stuck, but the sexism was obvious and her critics were unabashed in their attacks — it was open slather on her appearance, sexuality, dress, voice and working-class background. The usual restraint was abandoned for the ‘Oxleymoron’, the ‘Evita of Ipswich’. It is an interesting exercise, placing Hanson within the stereotypes, or frames, that have historically applied to political women in Australia, and seeing how they fit.

  1. The steel sheila

  Hanson’s ambition was not questioned, although the apparent contradiction of her power and her appearance was constantly mulled over. The long-running jibes that female politicians were really men in drag, hiding male genitals under their skirts, were taken one step further in Hanson’s case, when satirist Simon Hunt created the drag character Pauline Pantsdown, parodying her views and juxtaposing recordings of her voice in songs like ‘I’m a Backdoor Man’ to ridicule her. Hanson — or the photographers who shot her — did play with the imagery of the female warrior, or martyr, at times; she was pictured saluting, standing in a tank and wearing a helmet, for example. But she was not the Steel Sheila journalists had been hunting for decades. She came from outside the main political parties, had no chance of leading the country, and her potency as a leader was seen as inexplicable and weird, instead of a logical or hoped-for career progression. She lacked the ‘respectability’ necessary to be seen as a Thatcher clone.

  2. The housewife

  Hanson was a working woman who ran a fish and chip shop in Ipswich, not a demure domestic creature happy to do the housework. At least one photographer tried to get a photo of her pegging out her washing, but she was more likely to draw the tag ‘fishwife superstar’.11 She did not have a romantic view of marriage and told journalists she liked casual sex. She was widely reported to have advised one of her shop employees to use men for their bodies — ‘get what you can out of them, then give them the flick’ and told journalist David Leser that the best moment of her life was getting divorced. When he asked whether this was from her first or second husband, she laughed: ‘That’s two good things.’12

  3. The mother

  While in her personal life she had fractured relations with her sons to whom she did not speak for years at a stretch — Hanson fancied herself as a mother to the nation. In 1998, she declared: ‘I care so passionately about this country, it’s like I’m a mother. Australia is my home and the Australian people are my children.’ This sparked a fascinating debate on maternity and politics. Prime Minister John Howard said he was the ‘servant’ of the nation; Treasurer Peter Costello said, ‘She’s not my mother’; and Labor leader Kim Beazley said his mother’s philosophy was inclusive: ‘The view of Australian mums, as I have found, is that while you love everybody, there’s always the vulnerable in your family that you take care of most. That is motherhood Oz style. It is not motherhood Pauline Hanson style.’ But, musing on the one-time popularity of Bronwyn Bishop, and the
desire of the electorate for a strong female leader, then press gallery president Malcolm Farr summed it up as: ‘We want mummy. And I think Hanson instinctively realised that when she called herself the mother of Australia and wrapped the flag around her. She knows men, and men like being mothered. They like a striking authoritative female figure to do things for them.’13

  4. The feminist

  Hanson claimed to despise feminists, and said she was not one because when she was married she always had a hot dinner on the table for her husband when he got home.14 She lumped feminism in with a host of other social ills, criticising what she saw as ‘a new religion of internationalism, of anti-white racialism, multiculturalism, feminism and Asianisation’. Equally, when sexist comments were made about her dress, body, brain, or right to be in parliament, feminists were quiet, many offended by her racism and her belief that the ‘most downtrodden person in modern Australia’ was the white Anglo-Saxon male. Her former adviser, John Pasquarelli, said: ‘I laugh when I think of those ball-breaking, hairy-legged feminists who find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand they would dearly love to embrace Pauline Hanson the Amazon, who wears a belt strung with dripping male scalps, but they also find themselves totally repulsed by their perception of her policies.’15

  There was a substantial gender gap in the support for Hanson: in the late 1990s, 60 per cent of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party’s support was from men and 40 per cent from women. The gap existed in every age group.16 Historian Marilyn Lake’s theory was that disaffected rural white men were looking to Hanson to ‘restore their stolen masculinity’. According to Pasquarelli, her ‘sex appeal became very evident in the weeks after her maiden speech. Those men seeking dates with Pauline sent her gifts of chocolate and flowers, together with letters couched in polite but amorous language . . . A few dispensed with the preliminaries altogether and made proposals of marriage! These Sir Galahads saw Pauline as a classical damsel in distress — feisty and tough, yet vulnerable and almost girlish as she stood alone against her assorted foes.’17 Lake argues her sex appeal was crucial: unlike other female MPs, who tried to downplay their sexuality,

  Hanson flaunts her sexual difference and in the process of fashioning her as a celebrity, journalists have come to the party, their gaze gravitating to the signs of sex on her body: the red hair, the green eyes, the painted mouth, her sexual persona signified by her class, as well as her gender.18

  One female media commentator told me she thought Hanson was portrayed as the ‘town bike’, with the connotation not just of sexiness but sexual availability and accessibility, a woman who enjoyed sleeping with men. Another female journalist wrote that Hanson had a certain sexual confidence: ‘Thirty years ago, she’d be the girl who laughed with the blokes, unafraid of the rough joke, unafraid of being called ‘common’.19 The interest in the sex appeal of Hanson quickly translated into speculation about her sex life, particularly a rumoured affair with the Machivellian David Oldfield, and his influence over her.20

  5. The cover girl

  This was the stereotype Hanson exploited relentlessly. At first the media wrote disbelievingly about her sex appeal, then, as she morphed into a model, they played up to it, splashing her on front pages in her halter dress, bright yellow jackets, and knee-length skirts. At the same time, mostly female commentators mocked her leopard-print cowl necks, Hawaiian-style muumuus, and love of loud colours. Much of this coverage was overtly snobbish. Then, of course, there was the extraordinary front-page headline ‘Forget policy — I’ve got great legs’. According to Kingston, Hanson was surprised by the media interest in this black ‘regulation height’ skirt. She describes a scene where journalists were relaxing in a bar with One Nation members and police, and a News Limited journalist was receiving phone calls from Daily Telegraph editors asking for more miniskirt quotes: ‘Oldfield suggested Hanson say she had better legs than Beazley or Howard. She didn’t want to say anything, but when pressed hard came up with the line that if she had good legs at 44 then that was good going.’ That was the last time she wore a short skirt during the campaign.21

  Hanson was voted one of Australia’s sexiest women in an FHM poll in 1998 — scraping in at 100. She ‘polled particularly well’, wrote the editors, on which basis, they mocked, they suspected ‘many FHM readers to be of dubious mental health, or at least decidedly bent sexually’. The attraction was undeniable, but it was considered perverse. Bob Ellis described her on the Queensland election night standing ‘in a pale gold spotlight with a jostling swarm of paparazzi, like Kim Novak at a Hollywood premiere, to gloat and preen and prattle and raise her strange yellow devil-cat eyes while everyone looked at her with a kind of erotic, stirred revulsion: how could this dread improbability be happening?’22 Hanson was often caricatured as grotesque, monstrous and inhuman.

  At the same time, Hanson was portrayed as a woman who was both a political fool and a canny flirt who knowingly manipulated men to get votes. Mike Seccombe wrote: ‘Pauline Hanson might not know what xenophobia means, or who the police commissioner is, but she sure knows the political value of a revealing dress . . .’23

  Sonja Koremans wrote in the Courier-Mail in 2001:

  Who on earth was Pauline Hanson trying to be yesterday? Was it one of Charlie’s Angels or Princess Diana? Sharon Stone perhaps? It’s anyone’s guess, but one thing seems certain, she was more intent on flaunting flesh than projecting political acumen. Dressed in an ode-to-the-’80s halter-neck dress — canary yellow and worn with that signature scarlet lippie — Hanson projected an image of a woman more intent on taking a romp in the top paddock than dealing with deregulation of the dairy industry. But, with 60 per cent of One Nation’s support coming from men, why wouldn’t Hanson want to egg on her biggest fans with sexy frou frou frocks?24

  There was no shame. It should be noted that while Hanson might have liked dressing up, she said she refused to pose in overtly sexual, or artificial, ways. In 2001, when she was polling highly in another FHM poll, the then editor, John Bastick, said he wanted her to pose for the magazine — doubtless in typically revealing outfits. She told a journalist, ‘No thanks. But if a woman who has had four kids can be asked to do something like that, it’s a great compliment. I’ll leave it at that and just stick to politics.’25 She indicated to News Limited journalist Emma Kate Symons that she had limits, and there was ‘no way in the world’ she would pose with a feather boa like Kernot: ‘I am not a fashion model and I am in politics.’26

  ‘Forget policy, I’ve got great legs’. Headline in the Daily Telegraph’s election coverage, September 1998. Michael Klein/Newspix

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  Less than three weeks after she was released from prison, Pauline Hanson appeared in the Australian Women’s Weekly in a series of photographs: in an aqua blue cardigan, a black strapless cocktail dress with a beaded choker, a sparkly black shirt and pants, and chic white shirt and black skirt ensemble. The words — billed as her secret prison diaries — contrasted sharply with the glamour shots, as she detailed strip searches and the indignities of prison life. It had been an alarming place for her to find herself, and the stories that emerged about senior Liberal minister Tony Abbott and his establishment of a trust fund called ‘Australians for Honest Politics’ to help fund court cases against Hanson doubtless confirmed her suspicions that ‘the system’ was out to get her. As she told the reporter who wrote up her ‘diaries’: ‘I remember Dad telling me not to go into politics because it was a dirty game. I didn’t know what he meant then. Now I was experiencing it first hand.’ The article ended with the declaration that if she were to stand for parliament it would not be as a member of the party she founded, One Nation, but as an independent: ‘I have been through the court system, the litigation, the party politics, the infighting and that took me away from what I set out to do in the first place — to give people a voice.’27

  Hanson both defied and embodied the bias against women in politics. She made her maiden speech exactly 20 years after Margar
et Thatcher packed her bags for her visit to Australia in 1976, and the two women differed sharply: the cool, articulate, brilliant, blonde British woman and the inarticulate, unpolished, angry, redheaded Australian. Thatcher was the über-politician who was feared by her colleagues, and Hanson the anti-politician who was loathed by hers. Thatcher eventually became Britannia, while Hanson draped herself in the flag and declared she was the mother of all Australians. Thatcher controlled the media, cynically manipulating stereotypes when she was establishing a profile as leader of the Tories, then ignoring them as she cultivated the steely persona instead. Hanson defied the media, and subverted the conventions by playing to them. This may have been because her supporters were immune to attacks on her in the press — which they took as further evidence that she was fighting the elites.

  Just as Natasha Stott Despoja was jeered at for wearing an evening dress, and Cheryl Kernot for a red feather boa, Hanson sashayed into polling booths and election parties in flesh-flashing numbers, delighting admirers with sundresses, high heels, and a collection of fetching frocks. When she did what other women were not supposed to do, it often worked in her favour. Hanson was then, perhaps, our first post-modern media tart who unwittingly and clumsily played the media at their own game and, briefly but spectacularly, won.