Michael Duffy, The Courier Mail October 19th 1998
As One Nation recedes in the rear-view mirror of Australian politics it is disturbing to look back at the extraordinary over-reaction to Pauline Hanson by many important and intelligent people.
At times it was as if they were seized by a sort of mass hysteria. Why did they lose touch with reality where Hanson was concerned and what does this tell us about our country?
The first instinct of many of our leaders and thinkers was to compare Australia to Nazi Germany. As the stolen generation report showed, this is a particular enthusiasm of theirs.
When the book Pauline Hanson, The Truth dared to point out (correctly) that some Aborigines in the past indulged in cannibalism, Brisbane Jewish community leader Lawrence Rosenblum told a crowd, "Hitler sought to dehumanise and vilify his victims in preparation for the popular acceptance of their ultimate destruction. His propaganda factories alleged Jewish people mixed the blood of murdered Christians with their Passover bread. Does this sound familiar?"
Not really. But Charles Perkins, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were among the many who also drew comparisons with Nazi Germany. Family Court chief justice Alistair Nicholson said he was speaking against Hanson because German judges did not oppose Adolf Hitler. Author Tom Keneally announced on British radio that Hanson had put Australia on the train to Auschwitz.
It is perfectly understandable if people want to oppose Hanson and the deplorable increase in racist taunting that seems to have occurred since she rose to prominence. But there's an enormous gulf between claiming that and Australia is following in the steps of Nazi Germany.
The Australian filmmaker George Miller (Mad Max and Babe) said last year, "The sense that I am getting, and it is mainly from Los Angeles, is that we are almost in danger of becoming the new South Africa."
Los Angeles is where they have real race riots. The great nation of which it is part is one where good old boys kill crippled Negroes by dragging them behind their vehicles and tie gay students to fences and beat them to death. Yet Miller thinks we should be worried about Hollywood's criticism of our intolerance!
Many people also claimed that Asians would avoid Australia because we are now seen as racist. That is strange. Which Asian nation exactly was going to cast the first stone at Australia for racial intolerance?
Not China - only 30 years ago, the ethnically dominant group there imposed starvation on other groups, who ate their own children to survive. Not Japan, one of the most racist countries on earth. Malaysia? No, when the Malaysian government is not beating up its deputy prime minister in a police cell it is busy passing laws discriminating against its large Chinese population.
Indonesia? Whenever there's political trouble in our northern neighbour they rape and kill the Chinese and burn and loot Chinese shops. This is the behaviour of which our Ethnic Affairs Commission would not approve.
The point of all this is not to insult Americans or Asians, or to suggest that Australia is pure, but to indicate how absurd it is for all these people to pretend to be worried about what foreigners thought of Hanson.
The other thing worth remembering is that all the predictions of big losses in trade, tourism and foreign students - just as the predictions that racial violence in Australia would increase also were wrong. These things simply did not happen.
So why did so many of our best and brightest make wild claims about Hanson? The fundamental reason, I believe, is that many well-educated people have a deep contempt for their fellow Australians.
The author Robert Hughes, for instance, opined that "Racism is deeply embedded in our culture and can rise like a phoenix - or rather, a vulture - with the slightest stimulus... (with the election of John Howard in 1996) we have returned to tub-thumping, boong bashing populism".
Hughes and some others who hold equally extreme views about Australia (such as filmmaker Miller and author John Pilger) have lived in other countries for many years. It's as if their view of this place is set in the past and they are reluctant to update it.
And yet there were many residents who also pushed the line that Australians in general are evil people who need to be kept under control by Labor governments.
This was the angle used to attack Howard for his treatment of Hanson in The Australian, sociologist and commentator Hugh Mackay said Hanson had released "deep and primitive urges" in Australia. In The Sydney Morning Herald, columnist Adele Horin wrote that "Pauline Hanson forced us to recognise the currents of racism that run deep in suburban and rural Australia".
But do they really? Howard always said that if more people ignored Hanson she'd go away. It looks as if Howard was right and his critics were wrong.
Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson called Howard and his ministers "racist scum" and Hanson "a disastrous monster" but the disaster had not occurred. Australia, perhaps to the disappointment of many intellectuals, remains a fairly quiet place, free of gas chambers and racial murders.
What we do have, is a group of leading Australians who, thanks to Hanson, have demonstrated that they regard the rest of us with contempt and fear. It is disturbing to realise that this is the same group that will be making much of the running on the republic during the next 12 months.