'Equality': Hanson's cover for racism
By Peter Boyle
"We must get across the message", said Pauline Hanson at her May 30 meeting in Newcastle, "that to call for all Australians to be treated equally is not racism, to say that to be considered disadvantaged should be based on individual circumstances, not on race or cultural background, is not racism".
But if Hanson is not a racist, then why has former US Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chief David Duke praised her as an "Australian patriot"? Is it some terrible misunderstanding on the part of the KKK, as Pauline Hanson's One Nation party chief David Ettridge would have us believe? Why does "one of the most evil and wicked organisations on Earth" (Ettridge's public description of the KKK) support someone who is only for racial equality?
Hanson's "I am for equality" rhetoric may sucker in a few naive non-racists, but her real message is crystal clear. Other racist campaigners, including the KKK, have also used the same bogus appeal to "equality".
That is why David Duke supports her.
The KKK, claiming to have shed its violent past (it no longer openly advocates the lynching and torture), now campaigns against immigration and affirmative action (preferential measures to address years of oppression) for African-Americans and women.
Duke failed in campaigns for the governorship of California and Louisiana, but his racist anti-immigration and anti-affirmative action program won considerable support from white Americans and has been substantially adopted by Republican California Governor Pete Wilson. It also influenced the Clinton administration's recent attack on welfare.
Duke's indirect success has been attributed to his use of the rhetoric of ending the supposed "privileged treatment" of blacks and women. The big business media and Republican and Democratic politicians seized upon this slogan to justify their neo-liberal program of cutbacks. Ironically, many of the "angry white males" the anti-affirmative action campaign appealed to have suffered as a consequence of these cuts.
The US example is a warning not to dismiss Hanson. Hanson is to Prime Minister John Howard what Duke was to Governor Wilson. Howard cuts funding to Aboriginal education, health and legal services, proclaiming: "I understand the resentment that the rest of Australia feel when social security services are made available to minorities that are not made available to them".
But there is no legitimate basis for such resentment. Aborigines are clearly the least privileged section of the Australian population, suffering:
- <~>an infant mortality rate 2-3 times that of other Australians;
- <~>average life expectancy 18 to 20 years lower;
- <~>an unemployment rate five times higher;
- <~>an imprisonment rate 14 times higher, and 16.5 times greater likelihood of dying in custody.
Aborigines don't get equal treatment in Australia. These oppressive social conditions are a direct result of the dispossession, genocide and racial discrimination against indigenous Australians.
The limited government measures to redress this oppression — the special education programs like Abstudy, the Aboriginal legal, health and housing services funded through ATSIC — were only won through political struggles in the mid-1970s. There is a long way to go before the terrible legacy of oppression is overcome.
To win real racial equality in this country, we need more such special measures to address these real social inequalities. While dishonestly appealing for "equality", Howard and Hanson want to destroy the few small steps towards racial equality. That is why they are racists, doing the dirty ideological work of the real privileged minority in society.