When xenophobia has a face

1996: my year of awakening

Yesterday I heard that Pauline Hanson had made the news with a controversial rant about the public housing residents at the centre of a COVID 19 lockdown. I won’t dignify her statement by repeating the original comments as, after two and a half decades of her public presence, I can predict exactly what she would say. Her polemic is straightforward xenophobic racism, espousing the usual “us versus them” discourse, fear and demonisation of the other. This is not a new state of affairs for Hanson, and unfortunately, it is not new at all for Australian politics.

To be a person who is other than white in Australia means navigating a history of whiteness and fear of the other. I don’t remember when I learnt about the White Australia policy and the brutal, bloody truths of colonial invasion. Possibly the White Australia policy was covered in high school but as to the other horrors of Australia’s past, those were thoroughly white-washed. Even when I was taught about the institutional discrimination of the past White Australia policy, there was no recognition by my history teacher that this was very recent history. First Nations peoples do not have the luxury of forgetting Australia’s history, which for them is still the present, but it seems that for many Australians there is persistent cultural amnesia when it comes to race.

In 1996, Hanson gave her infamous maiden speech to parliament. She lamented the rise in Asian immigration to Australia, warning about the dangers of being…