FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| VIEWPOINT Pauline Hanson has the Australian political establishment by its balls. Short, permed and angry, she is kicking in Australia's myth of magnanimous multiculturalism in her crusade against the "Aboriginal industry and those who help peddle their lies." Of course, her list of enemies doesn't end there. Addressing the Australian Parliament in early June on the subject of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, Hanson uncorked a prime vintage of racially tinged nationalism. "Both of these treaties," she told a head-shaking Parliament, "will take power and choice from the majority of our own people and place that power and freedom of choice firmly in the hands of foreigners and self-seeking minorities." It's fittingly millennial that the leader of the first mainstream fascist party to make a major electoral breakthrough in a white liberal democracy since the Second World War is a petite single woman from the Southern Hemisphere. Warmly described by one of her Internet detractors as "an ex-nobody," Hanson morphed from backyard embarrassment to international media personality when her ominously named One Nation party captured 23-per-cent support and the balance of power in Queensland's recent parliamentary elections. The fun has just begun. Canadians should have more than a passing interest in these dire developments Down Under. Of course, we make all sorts of excuses and accommodations for Australia to justify why this could happen there, but not here, in the self-styled cradle of modern tolerance. "That's just how Australians are." "It's the heat and the dust and the ignorance." "They're just a sad and abandoned race of rural settlers struggling futilely against the forces of urban globalization." But that's all nonsense. The only difference between Canada and One Nation is money. Our affluence has thus far insulated us from the sinister forces of fascism. Cash keeps down the fascists like a hard rain keeps down the flies. But there's no guarantee it will last. If the Asian flu currently ravaging the wealth of the Pacific ever infects Canada, and the threat to British Columbia's territorial integrity and economic prosperity implicit in the Supreme Court's recent Delgamuukw decision on Aboriginal land claims comes to fruition, the mood may change - and none for the better. Hanson's maiden speech even contained a sample of the rhetoric we might be destined for, as she warned that, "The Canadian Parliament has just agreed to divide up their country and create a new indigenous state called Nunavut - this race-based state will be funded by the Canadian taxpayer for the next 20 years." Notwithstanding the loud and sour protestations of the loony left's earthly remains, the current incarnation of the Reform Party is nothing more than an off-shoot of the Republican Party, which managed to cross-pollinate itself into the Canadian political landscape. Bible-thumping free-marketeers are not fascists. Dangerous maybe, fascist no. But that doesn't mean we are immune from the siren song of people like Pauline. Australia may be 10,000 miles away, but a few more points on the unemployment charts and a few more long, hot summers like that during Oka may be all that separates us politically. |