CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Acting the Goose: Pauline Hanson’s Tour of Blighty

Clown Nation, by Karla Dickens. Photograph Source: Laterthanyouthink – CC BY-SA 4.0

She has been a remarkable survivor in the cutting, remorseless field of politics.  Mocked for her incoherence, her lack of erudition, and dismissed as a garden variety racist, Pauline Hanson of the One Nation Party now boasts a degree of popularity that has eclipsed her opponents.  As with other countries, Australia is seemingly experimenting with the “I-am-fed-up” school of political representation, making any figure supposedly anti-political most attractive.

It is that degree of appeal that risks wearing off.  Hanson, hoping to draw inspiration from foreign sources of resentment (domestic sources are evidently not enough) thought it wise to conduct what she amusingly called a “fact finding” tour of the United Kingdom.  Her aim: to learn from the mistakes arising from immigration, notably of the swarthy sort.

The trip was intended less to take in the sights (no loot inspection of the British Museum) as digest the morsels of bile and suspicion offered by such figures as the convict and race baiting Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson; the grumbling, pampered Holly Valance, formerly of the mercifully terminated Neighbours; and one of Britain’s dimmest and briefest of prime ministers, Liz Truss.

The One Nation senator also made an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a forum for the washed-out right-wing........

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