One Nation Train. “Make Australia Great Again”, US-Australian Relations The pondscum hate her she must be honest

The global populist fever is catching. Put the nation first before all else, patria before sense. Make America Great Again. One Nation before any other. Australia has been a fairly non-responsive patient to that effect, keeping its symptoms to the rural fringes of the country, or the more bitter blue-collar edges disgruntled by immigrants. While essentially conservative and reactionary, the Australian skill over the years has been to temper revolt with urbanism, mortgages and status anxiety.

But the emergence in recent months of the Trump presidency has stirred a virus of sorts, moving through the political body at some speed. Homes are becoming unfordable. Australia’s banks, a long protected profit-making racket, continue charging monstrous fees for using the money of citizens. (Their wealth is your benefit.) Industries are closing or, in the weight loss metaphor, down-sizing. Governments and the main opposition party are getting edgy.

Much of this has been fanned by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, an entity conservatives were so keen on destroying during the 1990s they established a special fund to do so, run by the deposed former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott. He was to have the monopoly on reactionary politics.

A campaign of such fanatical fury ensued against Hanson, one with shades of hollow martyrdom, genuine persecution, and political vengeance. It came from political and cultural circles, from faux Australian elitism and snobbery, and those fearing she was having a bite of their electoral cake. Tribal mania kicked in, and she had to be destroyed. Convict culture, rather than being egalitarian, hoards, protects, preserves. Hanson, it was suggested, was out to get more than her fair share.

She was attacked for her fish and chip shop ignorance; mocked for her excruciating whine that tears strips in the air; teased brutally for her ill-considered remarks that showed reading even less advanced than a Rupert Murdoch tabloid. (“Go back to Islam!”)

For a time, she even became the subject of cruel, albeit apt satire for a drag queen by the name of Pauline Pantsdown, nabbing her statement “I don’t like it” and immortalising it, if only across a narrow spectrum.[1] Australia, having never had clear cut, totalitarian types who scream eloquently and supply erudite arguments for ostracising or killing races, could only point at Hanson. She was comedy, she was easy, and she had red hair. No poorer example was possible.

After her parliamentary loss and subsequent brief imprisonment for corruption, Hanson was confined to the reality television circuit, a shadow of Trump cast, doing the rounds as a minor celebrity on trash celluloid. Even there, there was some sympathy. The goblin of populism lay, gazing and stirring. She was bound to ride again.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/one-nation-train-make-australia-great-again-us-australian-relations/5577440