If there is one thing that unites left-wingers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, it is surely their abiding and oftentimes openly baffled frustration at the enduring popularity of the British monarchy. To left-wing eyes, the crown is both an anachronism, signaling that the societies over which it reigns remain rooted in the past, and a living monument to imperialism, white supremacy and various other words sure to set progressive teeth on edge.
And so it came to pass that when Elizabeth II took her final breath in 2022, one Australian senator simply could not contain her rage.
Mehreen Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens, took to social media. “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized people”, she declared. The response was as measured and moderate as any regular user of social media will have come to expect.
Among the respondents to Faruqi – who is a naturalized migrant born in Pakistan – was Pauline Hanson, the leader of the One Nation party. Hanson’s response was succinct: “Pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”, she wrote, igniting a predictable hailstorm of likes and retweets.
This week, four years later, both women were in court for a final resolution of the matter, after the Australian authorities, for some unknown reason, got involved.
The Ruling
Ms Justice Melissa Perry this week upheld a lower court ruling that Hanson, in responding to Faruqi by telling her to go home to Pakistan, had breached Australia’s hate-speech laws and engaged in anti-Muslim rhetoric. Hanson is now appealing the matter further.
In any case, regardless of who eventually wins in court, both women involved in the matter are winning politically. This is the kind of ridiculous row that is manna from heaven to any politician with an extremely online, radicalized base.
Hanson’s Rise
For Hanson, the years since 2022 have been extraordinarily profitable. For years, she was considered something of a joke in Australian politics and derided as an unfashionable, backward backwoodswoman with a habit of putting her foot in her mouth and saying racially and culturally insensitive things. The kind of woman whose lack of sophistication becomes a running joke between the great and the good over canapés at the Opera.
They are, as Nigel Farage once said, not laughing any more.
One Nation, which advocates the usual Western-populist right mélange of immigration skepticism, tough-on-crime policies and anti-woke revolutionary ideas, baked in a nice crust of anti-establishment aesthetics, is now polling ahead of Australia’s two old parties. Much like Reform in the UK, it is now positioned to emerge as clearly the largest party after the next Australian election. This prospect is absolutely terrifying the great and the good in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.
The Left’s Desire to Fight
Confronted with something so discombobulating as the prospect of Pauline Hanson as prime minister of Australia, the Australian left has been sent reeling.
As in most Western nations, it is divided between roughly two camps: on one side, supporters of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese think that the left can prevail by doubling down on nice-guy technocratic politics, in which politicians like Macron, Merz and Albanese blend kissing babies and attempting to appear trendy on social media with a policy of handing the governance of the state over to the expert class in the universities and the professions, in the firm belief that bringing inflation down by a point or two will resolve their difficulties.
On the other side of the left are the woke revolutionaries, who believe that the popularity of the likes of Hanson, Farage, Trump and Le Pen is simply down to the fact that nobody has yet properly taken them on. This is the world in which Faruqi lives: the pugnacious, pugilistic and preening left that believes that calling Hanson a racist to her face is the thing that will finally snap the voters out of their hypnosis.
For this strand of the Australian left, having a court officially declare Hanson in breach of racial speech laws is the equivalent of definitively proving relativity.
Two Winners
In this sense, the latest row is perfect for both women. For Hanson, it is evidence of a rigged Australian justice system which punishes ordinary Australians for standing up in plain language for what is right.
For Faruqi, it is final and definitive proof, to be shoved in the face of One Nation voters, that their beloved Mrs Hanson is a dreadful racist.
No minds will be changed on either side, but supporters on all sides have reason to become more entrenched.
What polls make clear, however, is that Hanson is winning and that Australians – known the world over for their “fair dinkum” culture – are increasingly siding with her plain-talking, politically incorrect style over what they perceive to be the stultifying conformity of woke Australia.
As so often, the real loser in this kind of row is neither Hanson nor Faruqi, both of whom can use the fight to prove themselves political street brawlers their base can trust. Instead, their fight is an example of how Western politics increasingly displays all of its energy around the fringes, with dueling bases of supporters ever more fired up for both women.
All the while, the technocratic Labor government continues to lumber on, bolstered by the approval of Australia's great and good, but without ever really being loved or hated by anybody. In the contest between the technocrats and the passionate outsiders, it is the latter who are definitively winning. And not only in Australia.