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Pauline Hanson’s podcast with Tommy Robinson was dispiriting in unexpected ways. Racism was a given: more deflating was the recognition of its entertainment value. Enough attention has been directed towards Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He is a thug, a fraudster, a bully and a bigot.
Despite, or because of this, there are those who rush to swing hands with him.
Like Senator Hanson, he has a gift for embodying and amplifying grievance. He is a good podcaster; with Hanson, he listened. He directed the conversation in intriguing ways; his interruptions accelerated rather than halted the flow. His empathy when Hanson described being rocked, devastated, on the day she was sentenced to jail, when she saw her then 19-year-old daughter being interviewed on television, looked convincing enough.
At one point, Hanson and Robinson simply stared at each other, laughing. For six whole seconds. It was open-throated delight. Two people intoxicated by their moment.
Moments pass, of course. Barely days ago, Karl Stefanovic was telling Robinson “I love you”. With Hanson in the chair, Robinson struggled to remember him.
“I just sat down with a gentleman last week – what was his name?” A momentary pause. “Karl! He lost his job by the time he walked out the door!” More laughter.
Robinson wanted to know how Australia “ended up with Pakistanis, Somalis, all of these African problems with violent Africans?”
“It started in 1973 with Gough Whitlam,” she responded. “They opened up and got rid of the White Australia policy.”
Hanson stressed postwar “Italians, Germans, Polish and these people” were fine because they “integrated into the system”. But they weren’t … well, you know …
From there, Hanson was soon trafficking the claim that Muslims come to Australia “purely for the welfare system or to get on the NDIS”.
“It’s baseless,” said the NDIS minister, Mark Butler, when asked to respond. There is no evidence available that suggests disproportionate enrolment in the NDIS based on race or religion.
A senior immigration source pointed out that immigrants are subject to strict health checks: any disability requiring NDIS support would be a disqualifying factor except in rare cases of individual ministerial waiver. That applies also to dependent children under the “one out, all out” rule.
Never mind: Senator Hanson offered proof – of a Hansonian kind. “It is quite known,” she told a nodding Robinson, “that in the Muslim streets you’ve got quite a lot of that street who are on the NDIS scheme. So we know that it’s actually happening.”
Tommy Robinson assured Hanson that people were “waking up” – Covid vaccinations and “mass migration” were the vectors. “There’s a cultural revolution brewing in Great Britain,” he said, citing the “revival happening in Christianity”.
A Christian revival apparently immune to the gospels. But we live in an age of upside down words.
Hanson’s longest-serving Senate colleague – and until Barnaby Joyce came along, her closest elected partner – Malcolm Roberts has been venturing deeply into upside down world. In a display of lunacy so delicious it deserves a good red to pair it with, Roberts has been giving oxygen to the great chemtrails conspiracy.
That’s the one where condensation trails left behind by warm aircraft engines supposedly contain chemicals, seeded by governments, to harm the citizenry.
In a YouTube chat last year unearthed by The Australian, Roberts complained that “people ridicule the notion of chemtrails in Australia. I don’t ridicule the idea. I’m open to there being chemtrails in Australia.”
The man Senator Roberts has declared a “beacon of hope” – the bankrupt and disgraced US conspiracy barker Alex Jones of InfoWars infamy – reckons the US government is using chemicals to make people gay.
“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation,” Jones blustered in 2010. “They said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.”
These are our times, folks. A variety of polls indicate One Nation would be the first choice of roughly a quarter of the population right now.
But they’re entertaining.
As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan observe in “Regime Change”, their new book on Trump’s second presidency, for Trump “governing was, above all, a spectacle”.
We live in an age of spectacle. It surpasses substance. It vaults reason. No outrage goes unapplauded. No bigotry goes unblessed.
Are we not entertained?
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Hugh Riminton is national affairs editor at Channel 10
