source : the age
Ever since she made a video in 1997 to be released if she was assassinated, Pauline Hanson has been as much a media outlet as she is a politician.
Her appearance at the National Press Club this week may have had the conventional format of an aspiring leader facing those whose job it is to scrutinise them, but from the outset it also saw conventions broken.
To be fair, the first of these transgressions came not from the senator herself but from GetUp’s banner stunt as she stood to speak. Hanson described it as “disgusting”; a word that might equally be used for her repeated appearances in an Afghan burqa on the floor of federal parliament.
From there on, the One Nation leader played chief disruptor, portraying Australia as a dystopia in the grip of “energy poverty”, social breakdown and financial mismanagement, but also taking time out to attack individual journalists in the room and blacklist those media she regards as irretrievably left wing. She looked forward to closing down SBS and transforming the national broadcaster.
In a recent column for The Age on Hanson’s election prospects, Waleed Aly noted: “The problem for major parties is that whatever they now say, they symbolise [the] system. The benefit for insurgents is that whatever they say, they symbolise upending it.”
For the purposes of this insurgency, legacy media such as this masthead are maligned as part of a system supposedly against One Nation and its supporters. The transparent aim of that portrayal is to put on the defensive those daring to reporting on Hanson’s rise, her supporters and what those supporters hope to receive by backing her.
But it also relies on a wager that people have stopped listening to what news coverage has to say. Or, as Canberra University’s Jordan McSwiney put it, that “the anger is so raw that scandals and stuff-ups don’t matter any more”.
In all of this, The Age’s role does not change. It is not our job to amplify anger but to examine it. We identify questionable and corrupt behaviour by politicians regardless of where they sit on the ideological spectrum, and we demand accountability at every level of government and from all leaders, as our interrogation of Premier Jacinta Allan’s conduct regarding Victoria’s Big Build demonstrates.
It is in this light that we pay close attention to Hanson’s associations, her conduct and her claims.
When she tells a national audience that “under this government, interest rates are heading towards 10 per cent”, it is our responsibility to provide reliable statistics. When the fact 23 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home is used to suggest that they can’t speak English and that our social cohesion is at risk as a result, we must point out the distortion involved.
When the senator takes a leaf from US President Donald Trump’s playbook and refers to “the hoax of global warming – which is now climate change”, it is our job to report the science and to remind our readers that the change in language Hanson identifies was promoted by spin doctors trying to downplay the issue rather than experts studying it.
And where she seems to simply pluck numbers out of thin air – such as her claim that there are “18,000 people on ASIO watch lists at the moment” – we will demand a source and, if that is not supplied, call it out for the scaremongering that it is.
Hanson’s decision to front the Press Club was about displaying antagonism – but it also signalled a desire to be taken seriously as a political contender. With that come the same expectations of honesty and reasoned argument The Age applies to all leaders.
As Aly points out, Hanson’s rise is part of a global phenomenon to which political and social establishments have struggled to respond. “Why should we assume … there’s some uniquely Australian rabbit to be pulled out of some hat?” he asks.
But perhaps it isn’t a question of magic tricks. Perhaps it comes down to changing how governments communicate with their citizens over the growing list of economic and geopolitical worries that beset them. Perhaps it is a matter of seeing those who don’t speak English at home as they really are, and not as some paranoid caricature would paint them.
Perhaps it is as simple as admitting that our leaders – and our institutions, including the media – can and do get things wrong, without always attributing that to conspiracy or malevolence.
In the weeks and months to come, The Age will be asking further questions about One Nation’s leader, her supporters and her party colleagues. Since they seek to govern, it is important to identify their policies and put their statements to the test.
It’s our wager that you still care to be informed of what we find out.
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The Age’s View – Since The Age was first published in 1854, the editorial team has believed it important to express a considered view on the issues of the day for readers, always putting the public interest first.
