CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Laboratory Politics: Monoculture Down Under

Photograph Source: Dietmar Rabich – CC BY-SA 4.0

Words can function as prisons and windows.  They can cage meaning and suffocate understanding.  They can also reveal concepts which breathtaking clarity.  “Monoculture”, a recent word running through the podcast-press corps stable down under, is very much of the prison variety, one planted by that most mini-syllabic of politicians, Pauline Hanson.  Unlike her conservative opponents in the Liberal and National parties (her One Nation Party proudly proclaims to be more right wing), she continues to show why she is not on the endangered species list.

In her June speech before journalism’s version of a monoculture, Australia’s National Press Club, that forum of stultified air and safe practice, Hanson put her case for a party she has, with tyrannical enthusiasm, made her own. Much of the address seemed generated by ChatGPT or some Large Learning Model.  Her use of various terms (“transgender insurgency” was a joy of aggrieved exaggeration) proved extraordinary and misplaced.  But it was her reference to monoculturalism that caught the attention of those present.  “We cannot be a multicultural society.  We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural.  Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

To demonstrate the extent of her confusion, Hanson, in subsequent remarks, pointed to that least monocultural of entities, the Australian football team, as Case Exhibit One.  The Socceroos, she insisted, were a model of monoculturalism in........

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