By Allen Myers
"DISGRACEFUL" shrieked the one-word headline, 4½ centimetres high, on the front of the July 8 Melbourne Herald Sun. Three days later, the Australian was still featuring the bashing of Keith Warburton, with photographs, on its front page. For the commercial media, the incident outside a One Nation meeting in Dandenong on July 7 was a godsend. It has provided a golden opportunity to step up a campaign against the anti-Hanson protests.
The Australian's journalists didn't waste much time getting to their main point: "Mr Warburton's assault has heightened concern about the often violent confrontations between Ms Hanson's supporters and her opponents".
Contrary to what was suggested, the Australian had not conducted a poll following the assault and found that "concern" about violent confrontations had increased. What the sentence really indicated was that the Australian's editors had decided to do their best to "heighten concern".
Nor did the Murdoch journalists offer any evidence for the assertion that "violent confrontations" occur "often" at protests against Hanson, for the simple reason that violence has been rare. Where it has occurred, it has generally been caused by Hanson supporters — as in Adelaide, where National Action thugs attacked anti-Hanson protesters.
God of the Telegraph
Another Murdoch employee, Miranda Devine, in a Sydney Daily Telegraph piece on the same day, may have set a new record for exaggeration. In a column on the editorial page, Devine announced that God ("providence") had intervened to warn that anti-Hanson protests are really part of a wider conspiracy.
"It's no mistake", Devine wrote, "that a copy of The Socialist Worker newspaper lay next to the unconscious body of a 59-year-old man ...
"Providence placed it there for all the world to see that the violent anarchy engulfing anti-Hanson rallies is not a spontaneous expression of anger from a disillusioned citizenry but a deliberate and well-organised campaign by people whose ultimate goal is to smash the capitalist system."
(God apparently spoke to Devine on a bad line, with the result that her column gave Keith Warburton's first name as "Kevin".)
Wherever you look in the media, the theme is the same: anti-Hanson protests are "violent". Thus the Canberra Times on July 9 described the street outside the National Press Club, where a One Nation meeting was taking place, as "a battle zone" and the anti-Hanson protesters as an "army". But the only incident of real violence mentioned in the article was "one man ... pinned to the ground by several police".
It seems that no whiff of "violence" is too absurd to be treated seriously. On July 16, the Channel Ten "news" even featured a beat-up from Hanson's office which claimed that anti-racist demonstrators in Brisbane were planning a physical assault on her.
Free speech
Usually accompanying the "violence" charges is the claim that the protests are manipulated — for ulterior purposes — by one or more of the socialist groups among the participants.
Thus the Melbourne Sunday Age — apparently not as favoured by divine (or Devine) revelation as the Telegraph — claimed on July 13 its own "investigation" as justification for the scurrilous headline: "Shadowy revolutionaries behind the Hanson violence".
In the small print, however, it emerged that the "investigation" had discovered only that socialists were "not condemning physical intimidation of One Nation supporters" to the satisfaction of the Sunday Age. With the same logic, one might declare "Sunday Age behind Hanson's politics" because the paper has not condemned her racist positions.
Both themes — "violence" and "manipulation" — are designed to mesh with the claim, which the commercial media have been pushing since the first big anti-Hanson protests, that the demonstrations interfere with "free speech", or are intended to do so. This is untrue.
(A small minority in the anti-racism committees in a few cities — desiring to be revolutionaries and having read in the commercial media that "revolutionaries" are "against free speech" — have fallen into the trap of advocating "No platform for Hanson". But this position has not been supported by a majority in any of the anti-Hanson demonstrations.)
It would not be possible for the anti-racist movement to silence Hanson even if that were the aim. Hanson has not only free speech, but also what might better be described as a free megaphone: every time she says something, no matter how stupid, it's splashed all over the commercial newspapers, TV screens and radio. For example, when Hanson went to Adelaide for a One Nation meeting, the Advertiser (the city's only daily) the next day printed most of her speech — treatment which that newspaper normally reserves for the queen.
Only one meeting of One Nation has not gone ahead. Its Hobart meeting was abandoned by the organisers, not because of violence, but because a big majority of those who showed up for the public meeting were exercising their right of free speech by loudly condemning racism.
Protest and democratic rights
The media campaign has a clear aim. It is not really to protect Hanson, although that is a by-product. It is to stop people from protesting in the streets.
The wealthy people who rule this country — and major media proprietors are included in that group — normally don't want any mass politics in the streets. Because they are a very small minority, with interests quite different from the majority of us, they don't like anything that might actively involve large numbers.
They want politics to be confined to parliamentary politics, because that is the kind of "democratic" politics which can easily be controlled by a small minority. Those of us who don't have the financial means to be influential with parliamentarians are supposed to confine our political activity to voting every three or four years.
But parliament is not a venue for defeating racism. It is what has given Hanson national influence. And parliamentary politics, if not countered by politics outside parliament, will allow Howard to get away with his own racist agenda.
The right to participate in politics in the streets, through mass rallies and demonstrations, is an important democratic right which is widely valued in Australia. It is seen, correctly, as part of the right to free speech for all of us who aren't members of parliament.
The powers that be are, wisely, reluctant to attack this right directly. But they try to restrict and undermine it. The big media therefore do their best to ignore demonstrations — and when they can't ignore them, they try to tell us that demonstrating is ineffective or counterproductive ("Protests fuel the Hanson bandwagon": heading on a column by Terry Sweetman, Brisbane Courier-Mail, July 17).
Or they engage in the kind of violence-baiting we are seeing in the current media campaign. And when someone in a protest lets fly with an egg or a fist, it just makes their job easier.
Bad history from the Herald
An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald on July 9 contrasted the "violent", "hostile to ... free speech" demonstrations against Hanson "with the great moratorium demonstrations ... that turned Australians against the war in Vietnam. Those demonstrations were essentially peaceful ..."
The demonstrations against the Vietnam War were largely peaceful, as the anti-Hanson demonstrations have been. But you wouldn't have known it then if you had relied on the commercial media for your information.
Some of the big early demonstrations against the war occurred in October 1966, when US President Lyndon Johnson visited Australia. Some headlines from those demonstrations:
"Sydney goes wild. Teenagers halt President's car" (Adelaide News).
"Wild brawls in LBJ welcome. Ugly scenes in city" (Sydney Daily Mirror).
"Sydney accused. 'Worst abuse of President's career'" (Daily Mirror).
"Near riot: 20 held at reception" (Adelaide News).
"U.S. fears for President's safety" (Sydney Sun, the Herald's stable mate at the time).
That kind of media attack on extra-parliamentary politics was typical throughout the period of the antiwar movement. A classic is the Sydney Sunday Telegraph of November 3, 1968, which described a Resistance weekend educational camp under the headline "Sydney children at guerilla classes"!
Perhaps this means that today's anti-Hanson demonstrators can look forward to being praised by the Sydney Morning Herald — 30 years from now, when the paper's owners are worried by street demonstrations on some other issue.
But if we want to succeed now, we'll have to follow the example of the 1960s antiwar movement, not the advice of the Herald.
Instead of demonstrating, the July 9 editorial continued, those against Hanson should have done like Dr Jim Cairns, "a leader of the Vietnam moratorium marches, [who] attended the [Dandenong] rally and handed out anti-racism pamphlets. This was an appropriate response ... Only reasoned debate and information, including by pamphlets, will defeat the obnoxious propaganda spouted by Ms Hanson."
The Herald's editors omitted to mention that Dr Cairns tried to hand out his pamphlets inside the One Nation meeting and was promptly ejected by three bouncers. Isn't it strange that that produced no indignation in all the media defenders of free speech?