Australia’s parliament is a curious place when it comes to its dress code. Suits without ties: frowned upon. Dresses made from the national flag: absolutely not allowed. Keffiyehs in solidarity with the Palestinian cause: most definitely permitted.
On Monday, another piece of clothing caused an uproar in Australia’s Senate, so much so that it had to be suspended for 90 minutes.
The leader of the populist One Nation party, 71-year-old Pauline Hanson, grabbed global headlines by striding on the floor of the Senate wearing, a skirt, heels – and a full-length burka, covering her face but flapping loosely like Robert Donat’s tattered academic gown in Goodbye Mr Chips. Hanson was protesting the Senate’s decision to prevent her from introducing a bill to outlaw burkas and full-face coverings in public places.
Her stunt provoked roars of outrage from other senators, including two Muslims, and the presiding officer directed her to remove the offending garment. When Hanson refused, the Senate was suspended, but not before she was accused by other senators of being ‘un-Australian’, disrespectful, and being ‘a racist senator, displaying blatant racism’.
The latter slur was hurled by Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, who earlier this year won a court action against Hanson (which she is appealing). Hanson angrily tweeted that Faruqi should ‘piss off’ to her native Pakistan when Faruqi viciously insulted the late Queen Elizabeth on her death three years ago.
Another Muslim senator, Fatima Payman, lashed out at Hanson for disrespecting her faith, and Labor’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, told Hanson she had insulted Muslim Australians and especially Muslim women.
If Hanson wanted to attract global attention to her burka bill, she certainly succeeded. She had sought to introduce the bill formally, but it was blocked by a Senate vote from being tabled. She then briefly disappeared and returned, wearing her burka. Cue outrage.
Hanson has prior burka form. In 2017, the then newly-elected senator entered the chamber, unrecognisable and fully clad head to toe in a burka, which she then peeled off piece by piece in a bizarre burlesque performance. Then as now, Hanson was making the same point.
She tweeted on Tuesday: ‘Today I wore a burka into the Senate after One Nation’s bill to ban the burka and face coverings in public was blocked from even being introduced. The usual hypocrites had an absolute freak out. The fact is more than 20 countries around the world have banned the burka because they recognise it as a tool that oppresses women, poses a national security risk, encourages radical Islam and threatens social cohesion.’
Hanson has been around for a long time and knows how to grab a headline. She has been a controversial figure since she was first elected as an MP in 1996 and in her maiden speech declared ‘Australia is being swamped by Asians’. A few years later, she was imprisoned briefly on electoral fraud charges overturned on appeal. She is the mistress of the attention-arresting stunt: she knows how to generate outrage, and outrage she most certainly got.
But Hanson also managed to send a message directly to the 15 per cent of voters opinion polls show support her Reform-like One Nation party, more than double the vote share it achieved in Australia’s general election last May. The centre-right Liberal and National coalition parties are in electoral freefall, not least because they are seen as weak and divided on mass immigration, and multiculturalism versus assimilation. Hanson sees the burka ban as an opportunity to appeal to these disenchanted supporters.
What Hanson didn’t get was a fair hearing as an elected senator which, like it or not, she is. She has a right to propose legislation and to seek its parliamentary debate. Hanson was denied the chance to speak by the president of the Senate, shouted down by other senators, and generally ridiculed by the Australian media. If she wanted to tell her supporters, and those flirting with her party, that the Australian political class despises them and all they believe in, she certainly achieved it.
Whether it’s the right way to go about it is another thing altogether. By resorting to such tawdry stunts, Hanson belittles her own cause. She would have done better to stand on her dignity and call for burka bans to be openly and civilly debated. That, however, is not the Hanson style.
One Nation is a party of grievance, not a party of government. Unlike Reform, it has no prospect of breaking through the entrenched two-party system in Australia. But for the political class to emulate Hillary Clinton and her ‘basket of deplorables’ attitude to Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters will do nothing to slow the increasing polarisation of Australian society. Labelling Hanson and her supporters as racists and extremists will only backfire.
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