(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
On Saturday 13 June, one quarter of the voters of Queensland voted for a fledgeling political party: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. In the talley room organisers of the entrenched major parties, watching their traditional voters defecting to One Nation in droves, complained that it had been ‘impossible to get media coverage in the leadup to the election because of an obsession with One Nation’. The implication was that if only they’d had more media coverage, what was happening wouldn’t be happening. What they didn’t say was that the media ‘obsession’ with One Nation had been a shift into overdrive of an ongoing campaign to discredit Mrs. Hanson and her Party. That her party could pull 25% of the vote under those circumstances should have alerted the entrenched political parties that some kind of revolution was taking place out in the electorate.
For more than a year, Mrs. Hanson had been the subject of the most disgraceful display of media bias, hysteria, spite, and outright dishonesty in history. Routinely dubbing her ‘the fish and chip lady from Ipswich’, they misrepresented what she said in parliament to make her out to be a ‘racist’, made fun of her limited education and personal mannerisms, accused her of being a bad mother, attempted repeatedly to ambush and humiliate her on national television, ignored her altogether in the hope she might disappear, and ultimately lied outright about connections between her party and foreign ‘right wing extremists’. The ‘gay mardi gras’ and left-leaning programmes like ‘Fast Forward’ lampooned her, busloads of paid riff-raff were hired to abuse, spit on, and throw urine-filled condoms at people going to her meetings. She received death threats and required bodyguards. In the final weeks before the election Prime Minister Howard called her ‘deranged’.
What the Australian people had been witnessing with increasing disbelief were the squallings of this country’s entrenched ruling elites in a combined and frantic effort to protect their position of privilege and power against a challenge from the ‘mass’, the non-elite voters, led by Mrs. Hanson. So confident had those elites become of their monopoly of power and policy, that they believed they had what they accused Menzies-style conservatives of believing they had after 23 years in office: a god-given right to rule. Enter One Nation.
Judging by their assessments of the so-called ‘Hanson phenomenon’, the elites still have no real understanding of what’s going on. So isolated have they become from reality and the ‘mass’ that they still believe this phenomenon is the result of ‘people out there hurting’ (the so-called ‘hip pocket nerve’, the only thing the masses are supposed to ‘react to’), and that the situation can be rectified by having politicians from the major parties ‘go out and listen to the people’. If they do they might be in for quite a shock.
What the entrenched political elite appear never to have contemplated, operating as it has done behind a screen of media censorship and obfuscation, is that the electorate might realise that Australia’s ‘leaders’ have, under the rubric of ‘globalisation’, adopted policies which transfer ownership and control of Australia to internationalist bodies. What was even less within their contemplation, was the possibility that the people might act on their own initiative and try to do something about it. To understand how such a gulf could arise between Australia’s ‘leaders’ and the people, one has to understand the ideology of elitism.
Elitist ideology (the phony theory justifying rule of the ‘mass’ by elites) has been around for ages, at least since Plato’s ‘Republic’ (c. 400 BC). The modern version arose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely through the work of two Italians, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), and it parallelled the rise of the huge modern bureaucracies (3). According to the ideology it is ‘inevitable’ that elites must rule because they’re smarter, particularly about things like politics, government and economics, and in ‘a complex modern pluralistic society’ (their phraseology) such sophistication gives them the right to rule the ‘mass’. This they can do by stealth, subterfuge or any other means, ‘whatever it takes’ to quote ex-Senator Graham Richardson. They, and only they, know what’s good for the ‘mass’.
The ‘mass’, on the other hand, is supposed to need and want to be led by the elite. It looks to the elite for all its ideas, and believes every word the elite says. Elitist strategy is to give the ‘mass’ things to play with, like ‘democracy’ or sporting contests, which keep them occupied (having elections, cheering on sporting ‘heroes’) while the elites wield the real power and enjoy the perks and prestige that go with it. The democratic process is there for show, not to actually transfer power, other than from the Coalition Party elite (‘tweedle-dum) to the Labor Party elite (‘tweedle-dee’) on the mutual understanding that ‘it’s your turn now for a while’. But under no circumstances must the ‘mass’ to be allowed to exercise real power or challenge the position of the elite.
That Australia is ruled by elites is beyond question. In 1979 a study was done [see “Elites in Australia” by Higley, Deacon and Smart (1979)] which confirmed that power in this country is shared between elites in government, bureaucracies, big business, unions, academia, the media, the judiciary, arts, churches, ethnic lobbies and so on. Obviously, only those in government enjoy legitimacy flowing from the ballot box, but elites regard any power as legitimate, even if it flows from control of the means of production (business), of education, or of entry into a profession. Might (power) is right, according to elitist ideology, and anybody who has power has the right to use it, and a ticket of entry into the coalition of ruling elites. Elites regard all power centres now as ‘institutions of governance’, and all have legitimacy whether they are based on an electoral mandate or not.
Higley et.al. found that the continued possession of power is more important to the elites than social principle. Accordingly, they don’t care whether the system is capitalist, socialist, or a mixture of both, or even nationalist or globalist so long as they retain the power. This explains why elites which previously believed in welfare socialism promptly discarded that and embraced laissez-faire capitalism when the Hawke government implemented ‘economic rationalism’. It explains also why the elites readily abandoned their fellow countrymen and transferred their allegiance to ‘institutions of global governance’ when it looked like they were to be the next fountainheads of power.
Since power is crucial for their status, the elites resist any change which might threaten existing power structures. Thus they talk vigorously about ‘the need for reform’ when it involves a GST, which taxes the ‘mass’ while leaving elite power intact, but they refuse even to consider reform of an education system which fails to teach 30% of children how to read or write, let alone think for themselves. Fear of losing power causes elitists to hate democracy and Constitutions (unless they write them) which limit government power and purport to give the ‘mass’ a say in their own government. Instead the elites favour strong centralist, totalitarian regimes which concentrate power in the hands of ruling elites. This explains the subversion of the Australian Constitution by people in high places, the relentless efforts to concentrate power in Canberra at the expense of the states, the willingness to hand over Australian sovereignty to foreign institutions of governance which are non-accountable to the Australian people, and the penchant for creating more and more elitist-controlled committees and tribunals which supervise every minute detail of the life of the ‘mass’.
Whilst the elites might be highly distrustful of each other, all factions will unite to protect the elite class as a whole if its monopoly on power is challenged, particularly by a non-elitist force like One Nation. This is why Australians have witnessed a united effort by politicans, academics, big business, bureaucrats, the media and the churches to ‘fight Hansonism’. In their frenzy to protect their own power, some of the utterances of the elitists have defied gravity, let alone logic: statements like ‘none of this would have happened if Howard had moved earlier to silence her’, or ‘this stops at the border, Queenslanders have always been rednecks’, to ‘Hansonism is bad for exports and economic growth’, or ‘Hansonism is damaging tourism’, or ‘we’ll be the laughing stock of the international community’, whoever they are. Then there was Paul Lynham’s statement that ‘we can’t avoid the future’ even if it is the sort of future nobody would care to live in, and Maxine McKew’s statement that it’s ‘good for Australia’ to sell a viable public enterprise (Telstra) to clean up a bit of pollution. These statements confirm not only that the elites are out of touch with the ‘mass’, but with reality as well.
One of the reasons for the rise of One Nation was the informal power-and-policy sharing arrangement between the two major political parties under the banner of ‘bi-partisanship ’, effectively eliminating any policy choices the ‘mass’ might have had. With characteristic contempt the media tried to sell this as ‘political maturity’. What is amazing is the apparent belief by the elite that the ‘mass’ somehow wouldn’t notice, or would accept it without attempting to do something about it. What was not supposed to happen, according to elitist ideology, was for the masses to exercise ingenuity, to source information from the Internet, to use small-circulation privately-produced newspapers and newsletters to spread the word, to educate themselves in political and economic affairs, and to establish an organisation capable of challenging the entrenched elite position. That sort of grass-roots action is what the elites now call ‘terrorism’. On election night One Nation’s obvious discipline and organisation were dismissed by one elitist as the work of ‘defectors from the Nationals’: leaked elitist secrets, in other words. Such statements are still made without apparently realising they now insult at least a quarter of the voters.
Since ‘political instability’ threatens entrenched elite power it is an almost pathological worry. Accordingly elitists constantly preach the virtues of ‘stability’. Not surprisingly then, Peter Beattie was heard to say with enhanced sincerity that all he wanted was to see ‘stability for Queensland’. Secretly he might have been wishing for an instant replay in which One Nation voters withdrew their votes and things could return to predictable normality, the nice boring ‘stability’ of alternating tweedle-dum/tweedle-dee politics. The ‘mass’, on the other hand, saw an elitist on the scent of power, and within a seat or two of the prestige job.
The elitist road to ‘stability’ consists of suppressing, distorting and otherwise manipulating issues which, if expressed, might lead to conflict: ‘divisiveness’ as they call it (4). One technique has been to suppress dissent by blocking all channels through which non-elite viewpoints might be expressed, through control of the media including the letters pages. Thousands of letter-writers can testify as to the hopelessness of trying to get dissenting letters printed in the major newspapers. Others have contented themselves with writing to regional publications like the Toowoomba Chronicle. Others started their own web pages. Others just fumed, waiting for an opportunity to vote One Nation.
Another technique was to quash any attempt to discuss topics deemed ‘off limits’. Attempts to discuss Aboriginal affairs were smeared as ‘racism’, the questioning of immigration policy as ‘xenophobia’, and the challenging of globalisation as ‘globaphobia’. Another method has been to confine discussion on contentious issues strictly to the recycling of ‘politically correct’ viewpoints, and discouraging others with the ultimate threat of summons before the elitist Inquisition: the tribunals of the thought police. Even this was tried on Mrs. Hanson. Ultimately complete censorship, the ‘media blackout’ is resorted to. Through this method an entire political party, Australia First, along with its founder, Graeme Campbell, were given the ‘silent treatment’ for a whole year, with the result that most of the Queensland electorate was completely unaware of their existence, while others were left wondering what had happened to them.
Because it systematically suppresses divergent views on important issues, rule by elites is incompatible with true democracy. There are still elections, but the people are voting on issues which have been either distorted, suppressed, or misrepresented. Not only that, but many issues like economic policy, immigration policy, firearms policy, and globalisation are simply withdrawn from the public arena altogether. As an editorial in The Australian newspaper once described it, they are ‘given’, whichever party is in power. In that case, as Noam Chomsky says, ‘democracy is at best a very thin reed’. There is ‘democracy’ but nothing important for the ‘mass’ to vote on. Australia’s power elites seem unable to grasp the fact that the ‘mass’ has woken up to this and is taking action.
According to Higley et.al., the only limit to what the elites can do is what the public will tolerate, and it is apparent now that a sizeable chunk of the Australian public has simply had enough. Australia’s elites are faced with an unprecedented non-elite force: the One Nation Party, a party of ordinary people with a rapidly developing political consciousness, increasingly angry at the sellout of their heritage....the nation’s economic assets, and political, legal, economic and cultural sovereignty....by the elites. They evidently have had a gutful of arrogance, patronising statements, dishonesty, treachery and elitism and, what’s more, they now have ‘the will to power’. On the other hand Australia’s power elites, despite their futuristic rhetoric, are plainly living in the past and unable to come to grips with the present. They may already be obs-elites.