‘The red-haired lady’ will make us as popular as Americans overseas

On a slow train between Shanghai and Hong Kong 25 years ago, I sit at a dining-car table with Laurence, an English-speaking fellow of Chinese heritage.

Complete strangers on a train before this journey, we’ve gradually become friendly over several dishes of an appetising mobile Shanghainese banquet.

Laurence, a Hong Kong pharmacist, leans across the lunch table, gently rocking with the motion of the train, and remarks: “You’re different to most Australians. You seem to like foreigners. You seem quite happy to be around them.”

Surprised, I explain that most Australians are tolerant and that many are well-travelled and have a love of China, and for that matter, the rest of Asia.

“But what about the red-haired lady?” he asks. Pauline Hanson’s notorious 1996 “swamped by Asians” parliamentary maiden speech is still ringing in many an Asian ear.

At that time, China’s economy was transforming. Its charming but sluggish inter-city express trains were starting to be replaced by the largest bullet-train network on the planet.

All these years later, I have a question: Pauline, please explain, what should we say when you inevitably emerge again in conversation in Asia, where I will soon return once more for the Traveller title published by this masthead? I’m guessing your answer would likely be “I don’t care”, or something even more forthright. Let me explain why you – and the rest of us – should care.

In my fairly extensive travel, my experience is that many people, rightly or wrong, begin with interactions with the presumption that many Australians are essentially racist. Hard to hear, it can be even harder to counter.

Image, that fragile commodity, is everything when it comes to travel and tourism, and it’s easily damaged. Look how rapidly Hanson’s presidential hero and role model has tarnished, if not trashed, the image of America and its tourism, particularly in relation to inbound visitors, at a serious cost to the US economy.

Why should it matter? The answer is jobs, stupid. In Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were a total of 736,800 tourism jobs filled by our compatriots as of December. The figure accounts for about one in every 22 (or 4.5 per cent) of all filled jobs, many of which are held by young Australians in the challenged national economy.

That compares with only one in 50 Australians employed in mining – in which Hanson has a wildly generous benefactor – or about 2.1 per cent of the total Australian workforce, which amounts to about 314,500 people.

Certainly, mining greatly underpins our economy, but tourism – badly undervalued by politicians, including successive federal governments – is not only an important earner but a generator of goodwill, a fast-evaporating global commodity.

Overseas visitor numbers to Australia have rebounded since the pandemic, but are still lower than pre-COVID-19 figures. Compared with 2019, the number of trips to Australia by international visitors was down by at least 5 per cent last year, according to Tourism Research Australia, although foreign tourists were spending more.

Overall, inbound tourism is still worth $42.3 billion to the Australian economy, with a forecast $46 billion by 2030 – placing it firmly among our top 10 export earners. Nothing to be sneezed or sneered at.

Each of us setting foot in another country is an ambassador. On my coming trip to Indonesia, it’s going to be even more difficult than 25 years ago to defend Australia and Australians, should the subject of Hanson’s most recent incendiary comments arise.

One thing for certain is that the latest rhetoric from Hanson and One Nation risks Australians becoming about as popular overseas as Americans have become when they travel. Americans regularly report on social media the frosty reception they receive in other countries.

The only contribution I can recall Pauline Hanson making to tourism was in 2019, in a widely criticised report on A Current Affair, broadcast by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

It showed footage of Hanson’s ignominious descent of Uluru on her backside in protest against the then-imminent ban on climbing the rock, proving one of the main reasons for the prohibition: safety concerns. At least 37 people have lost their lives while attempting the climb.

Then there was the fouling of the fragile waterholes at ground level in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park from climbers urinating and defecating at the summit as well as leaving full nappies, the contents of which also found their way into the precious ponds.

Back to the Shanghai train. I never saw Laurence again after we parted at our destination all those years ago, typical of the often-ephemeral nature of friendships formed during travels. I wonder what he thinks of “the red-haired lady” now, with Hanson’s One Nation back in the headlines of Asia’s leading mastheads.

I’m not sure whether I convinced Laurence that most Australians are tolerant of foreigners, including Asian people like him. If I somehow bumped into him again, I reckon I’d have an even greater challenge doing so following Hanson’s record-length National Press Club address.

Anthony Dennis is the editor of Traveller at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.