The level playing field: Hansonism, globalisation, racism

Race and Class

Volumn 40, Issue 2-3, 1998, Pages 206-208

  Perera, Suvendrini ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 33750812022     PISSN: 03063968     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Quoted in Benedict Anderson, 'Murder and progress in modern Siam', A'eii' Left Review (Ho. 181,1990), pp. 34-5.
2. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, (Spinifex, 1993), p. 12.
3. An example is the document on 'Productive diversity' produced by the Office of Multicultural Affairs under the previous Keating Labor government: 'In a world where every competitive advantage must be fully exploited, productive diversity utilizing Australia's linguistic and cultural diversity to economic benefit - offers a practical resource which no organization...can afford to ignore...in order to... increase access to export markets, develop domestic niche markets, improve productivity'. (Office of Multicultural Affairs, 'What is productive diversity?', April 1995). Here multiculturalism is shown to be thoroughly structured by the contradictions generated by the idealised and coercively assimilative demands of a homogeneous nation state ('Australia') and the law of the market, in which 'diversity' is scripted as a commodified resource which will offer the nation the commercial edge.
4. Ecofeminism, op. cit., p. 9.
5. In Australia, multiculturalism refers specifically to a cluster of government policies introduced by Labor and Liberal governments in the 1970s, and represented as opposing the previous policy of assimilating racial and ethnic minorities. Hanson's objections to 'multiculturalism' focus on its most innocuous manifestations - for example the appearance of shop and street signs in languages other than English. Presenting a rather alarming glimpse of her cognitive capabilities, Hanson has said that without signs in English she didn't know whether she was 'walking into a butcher or a hairdresser'.
6. Noel Pearson, Chair of the Cape York Land Council and member of the Indigenous Working Group on Native Title, commenting on the Liberal/National Party's campaign in the 1996 General Election. For a discussion of the 1996 campaign and its aftermath, see Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, '"Racial suicide": the relicensing of racism in Australia', Race & Class (Vol. 39, no. 2,1997), pp. 1 -20.
7. Although, as Bernard Semmel has demonstrated, 'the essentially mercantilist assumptions and objectives embodied in..."classic"...imperialism were far from absent in the thinking [that] erected the system of free trade in the last half of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries', historically free trade has also encompassed both anti-imperialist and anti-racist positions. In the nineteenth century its supporters distinguished the pacifist, reformist ends of free trade, often identified with abolitionist and philanthropic interests, from the overtly expansionist aims of empire, in turn identified with the evils of monopoly capitalism. See Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: classical political economy, the empire of free trade, ami imperialism, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970), p 5.
8. Toni Morrison, 'Home', in Wahneema Lubiano ed. The House that Race Built (Pantheon, 1997), p. 10.
9. See discussion in '"Racial suicide"', op. cit., p. 10.
10. For example, members of the party are not allowed to make contact with other members and access to the membership list is tightly controlled. Rather like the shareholders in multinational corporations, members of One Nation ltd. are not allowed to attend party meetings without giving seven days written notice.
11. Quoted in James Norman, 'One Nation's race for policies' The Big Issue (No 50,1998), p. 6.
12. Stuart Hall, 'Subjects in history: making diasporic identities' in Lubiano, op. cit., p. 297.
13. See, for example Andrew Stevenson, 'Pauline Hanson: sex symbol', The Daily Telegraph (20 June 1998), pp. 26-7.
14. See Graham Little's review of Two Nations, 'She's not there', Age (29 August 1988).
15. John, Gabriel, Whitewash: racialized politics and the media (London, Routledge, 1998), p. 183.
16. For example, the brief adoption by Hanson of attacks on single mothers receiving welfare benefits. In the US context, from where it was obviously lifted wholesale, this is inescapably a raced issue; in Australia, however, it is understood to relate more to ordinary (i.e., Anglo) 'battlers'. When One Nation realised the negative impact this particular form of scapegoating was having among its target constituency, the denunciations of single mothers ceased abruptly.