Pauline Hanson, a fish shop owner from Ipswich in Queensland feels she has her finger on the pulse of the local population. Once elected in the formerly safe Labor riding of Oxley, she was determined to make Canberra listen to the kind of things she had been hearing over the counter of her shop for years.(1) In her maiden speech in Parliament on 10 September she called for an end to high levels of immigration, an end to multiculturalism and to programs for aboriginals, and further alleged that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians. Suddenly, a nation found itself confronted with what many would have liked to dismiss as the underbelly of Australia which existed only in the "rancid swamplands of talkback radio."(2) Yet instead of being countered by the stunned and embarrassed silence which follows an unforgivable social faux-pas at a cocktail party, Hanson's remarks triggered one of the most massive efforts of Australian soul-searching in recent memory. Pauline Hanson's views, it turned out, were not as isolated as the country's intellectual elites would have liked them to be. What Western Australian Graeme Campbell and his fall from Labor grace had failed to achieve in 1995, Hanson managed to accomplish in 1996: she had brazenly challenged the alleged consensus on Australian identity at the end of the millennium and had sent the pieces flying in all directions. A "very ugly, resentful and xenophobic cat"(3) had been let out of the bag.
Next to the culling of the koala population on Kangaroo Island, the so-called "racism debate" that was started by Pauline Hanson's speech was the most emotional issue in Australian public discourse in the closing months of 1996. Every prominent Australian at home and abroad seems to have chimed in at one point or another. If a rookie politician without discernible power base is given so much attention in the national media and by the nation's intelligentsia, one can only surmise that she has touched a raw nerve and has sherman-tanked Australia into airing an issue that was beginning to pong in the nation's closets. Indeed, it has been suggested more than once that Pauline Hanson is the voice of "mainstream" Australia, the symbol of revenge against the censorship of political correctness embodied by former Prime Minister Paul Keating. This, at least, was suggested by John Howard when he had to defend his less than whole-hearted repudiation of Hanson's views.(4)
The partisan colouring of the debate has blurred some of its national contours, and it is only when one disentangles the short-hand symbolism of many of the statements and allegations that the essential issues that are at stake emerge. While few Australians agree with the totality of Hanson's views and even fewer support the extremism of groups like the League of Rights that are trying to capitalize on the airing of racist ideas,(5) the soul-searching has revealed a very basic sense of uneasiness. As this paper will argue, critical voices condemning immigration and multiculturalism policies, and even lapses into the old racism of White Australia, cannot simply be explained as functions of economically uncertain times that demand scapegoats and justify retrenchment. Rather, they reveal a fin-de-si�cle mood that attempts to come to grips with the all-too rapid transformation of Australia's social and cultural identity. The intensity of the debate suggests that neither the policy of multiculturalism as defined and developed over the past twenty-five years nor Paul Keating's economically and geographically determined vision of Australia as an Asian nation have managed to fill the cultural void left by the irreversible demise of an Australian identity based on British ethnicity.(6)
That there was political capital to be made out of the groundswell of support for the tenor of Hanson's speech was clear very early on. A newspoll published in The Australian on 4 October 1996 indicated that 71% of the respondents found immigration levels too high (easily interpretable as at least in part an anti-Asian verdict), the opinion being strongest among older people, low income people and Coalition supporters.(7) John Howard promptly refused to respond to Hanson with more than a general reaffirmation of a non-discriminatory immigration policy and a stinging attack on the former Labor government. His tactics paid off. As Opposition Leader Kim Beazley had to acknowledge a month later, Labor's traditional working class base responded to the race debate by swinging its support even further to the Liberal Party and the Coalition Government.(8)
It is tempting to advance an economic explanation for this phenomenon. Support for high levels of immigration has traditionally been highest in periods of prosperity. It is in periods of economic expansion, too, that traditional scales of ethnic ranking are eroded, and previously non-preferred groups of migrants become admissible and socially acceptable for pragmatic reasons. This paradigm, explaining the nexus between economic and ethnic factors, can all too easily be applied in the reverse. It has been argued that, as the traditional manufacturing sector is in decline, the recruitment of unskilled labour among recent immigrants is no longer necessary. Regional integration and a loss of economic sovereignty are blamed for causing structural unemployment while deficit spending on social programs taxes the working poor and middle class. In this climate of economic insecurity and rising resentment, many people are no longer convinced that either immigration or multiculturalism programs serve the national, rather than sectional, interest, and previously acceptable groups of immigrants are turned into scapegoats.(9)
In fact, however, if there has been any consensus among the participants in the debate, it has been that anti-Asian remarks, much more than immigration levels, have damaged the national interest. Most of the early debate was devoted almost entirely to its detrimental economic effects in the region. The Australian' s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, estimated that the impact of the Hanson debate in Asia "probably exceeds by many millions of dollars all the international promotional and good-will budgets of all Australian government departments put together."(10) Factions in the tourism industry demanded a $25 mill promotional subsidy from the federal government to make up for an alleged fall-off of business from Asia caused by Hanson's remarks.(11) The Australian Vice Chancellors Committee, nervously eyeing the substantial revenue accruing to universities from its international student population and from exporting educational programs to the region, called upon the Prime Minister to act swiftly and decisively to dispel the impression that there had been a rise in racist views in Australia.(12) Former prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating found themselves in rare agreement that Asian good-will was essential to Australia's economic future(13) while the military reminded Australians that racial taunts could endanger regional military cooperation. Thus, the gist of the debate was that being, or at least appearing to be open to Asia and Asians was essential to Australia's economic well-being.
Bad press in Asia and the skillful use of the situation by some Asian leaders, eventually dislodged the government from its sullen silence. In an attempt "to put the racist genie back in the bottle"(14) John Howard introduced a parliamentary motion reaffirming Australia's commitment to equal rights for all citizens, non-discriminatory immigration policies, aboriginal reconciliation and to a culturally diverse, tolerant and open society. Most of the ensuing parliamentary debate sounded like a discussion of trade policies. Only Graeme Campbell spoke against the motion, and Pauline Hanson chose to stay at home and tend to her fish shop.(15) While most political commentators conceded the sincerity of the statements offered by major government and opposition figures, the Prime Minister's own stance still continued to inspire doubts. Howard is on record for attacking multiculturalism in 1988 and reserving the right of a future Coalition government to restrict Asian immigration to safeguard social cohesion. In light of these statements (which , ironically, cost him the Liberal leadership at the time), the non-discrimination motion seemed little more than a public relations effort and short of real political leadership on the issues.(16)
Why is it that John Howard, reducing multiculturalism to little more than the motherhood principles of tolerance and equal rights to all citizens, continues to enjoy the support not only of conservative Australia but possibly a majority of Australians. A commitment to diversity in today's Australia is about as meaningful as a commitment to snow in Canada. It is the lowest common denominator in a democratic society that is made up of people of various backgrounds and cannot reverse this social reality. However, support for the policy of multiculturalism in its many incarnations, having waxed and waned over the years, seems to have reached a low point.
In 1973 Immigration Minister Al Grassby had created with the image of the "family of the nation" the romantic illusion that individual pride in ethnic origins and a common commitment to Australia's future was all that was needed to create a new national identity.(17) The Whitlam and Fraser governments tried to define multicultural policies in terms of first-generation migrant services;(18) whatever "cultural" component was left in these policies was restricted, according to Laksiri Jayasuriya, to "expressive and symbolic needs of the culturally different"(19) but did not propose to bridge either the legitimacy gap or the power differential between so-called "mainstream" and so-called "ethnic" culture. The subsequent attempt of the Hawke government to "mainstream" multiculturalism by making it a policy for all Australians met with puzzlement and resentment. Critics were not ready to concede that ethnic culture could be raised above the level of a consumable commodity or that, all Australians being ethnic Australians, there would not be a hierarchy of cultures.(20)
In the end, multiculturalism policies have not satisfied anybody. The 1988 FitzGerald Report indicated that many Australians did not understand multiculturalism and worried that it would lead to the division of the nation into separatist cultural minorities.(21) Even multiculturalism's former advocates have turned against its present manifestation. Laborite Barry Cohen, who is on record for a moving description of the personal hurt inflicted by bigoted ignorance, recently condemned the ethnic lobby for demanding that immigrants "should remain exactly as they were when they arrived and the government should fund them to do so."(22) Jerzy Zubrzycki, whom many consider the architect of Australian multiculturalism, called it "a good idea that has gone wrong" because it had been used by politicians and self-serving ethnic leaders to entrench minorities.(23) Academics and experts alike call for a radical overhauling of an "outdated multiculturalism," the initiation of a "post-multiculturalism phase."(24)
The consensus among these critics is that culture is to be expressed individually by equal citizens rather than in groups, and that cultural expression has to be subordinated to the commitment to the nation. What then is this nation? What is the nature of Australia's imagined community? This question, which goes to the heart of modern Australian identity, has remained unanswered in the 'race debate." At best we can see negative definitions. The debate has revealed the ambiguity with which Australia's Right is approaching American influences: Much of the criticism leveled against the political correctness "McCarthyism" of Paul Keating (and its implied criticism of the American intellectual climate) coexists with a tacit endorsement of the style and tactics of right-wing American populism. The other camp, centred around former prime minister Keating has been quick to identify Australia's monarchists as the root of the problem. In a speech at the University of New South Wales, Keating offered an elegant deconstruction of the myth of the old, culturally homogeneous Australia, "a past that never was." Ironically and probably very consciously he did so on Remembrance Day, with the result that the next day's front pages juxtaposed his condemnation of the "lie and fantasy" of monoculture with World War I pictures of lighthorsemen and bronzed Anzac soldiers, with John Howard in the middle.(25)
The republican camp has seen in the race debate an opportunity to depict its opponents as a group of dislocated, confused individuals that reach for nostalgia to recreate old certainties. In the best tradition of old Australia, so Keating, they are taking a "national smoko." Their fear of sudden cultural discontinuity, according to New York-based art critic Robert Hughes, "is merely a cistern into which the monarchists can pour their inarticulate bad dreams about multiculturalism."(26) The answer, so Hughes is not a return to a monoculture whose sole source is Great Britain, but a common commitment to political institutions that should reflect Australianness. A republican head of state may well be such an institution, but the republican model of citizenship is also well known for its assimilationist overtones.
Keating and Hughes have undoubtedly identified the malaise that has beset the nation. Rapid social and cultural changes have left many Australians confused and defensive. Articles about the embattled middle class abound and in mid-October, the Australian Magazine published a feature on "The Decade of the Century", the 1940s - - by Geoffrey Blainey (the historian well known for starting the Great Immigration debate of the 1980s with his book "All for Australia" in which he warned against the asianization of Australia). The prevailing instinct seems to be to retreat into a cocoon. Australians may poke fun at the old imagery -- Pauline Hanson striding into the Parliament House lunch bar, past the quiche and salad in search of a stubby of VB to go with her pie, chips and gravy -- but it is hard to ignore the embarrassed recognition greating American Samuel Huntington's suggestion that Australia has failed to make a successful transformation from one civilisation to another. Australians today find security and safety neither in the vision of an Asian nation, which time and again bases itself on the arguments of economic rationalism only, nor the various concepts of multiculturalism. The witty allusion to the current Jane Austen revival craze in the title of an article on Hanson: "Pie and Prejudice" sounds more nostalgic than may have been intended.
Pauline Hanson may well represent the old program of the Deep North (or as Robert Hughes calls it, the "burps and farts from the deep gut of Australian racism") and in her return to the rhetoric of White Australia she is not representative of a majority of Australians. The debate she has generated proves the widespread disenchantment with 25 years of multiculturalism policies. It is easy to overlook that these policies have indeed produced a more tolerant society, and one that is trying to find its identity in a shared future rather that a common past. Pauline Hanson, however, managed to speak to those like herself who have a chip on their shoulder: Australians who feel disenfranchised both in the search for a future vision and in the re-interpretation of Australia's past by so-called "black armband" versions of history. The "race debate" was not a reaction to economic uncertainty but another chapter in a 30-year old debate about reconceptualizing Australian identity.
Footnotes and references withheld from this electronic version. Contact the author for further information.