by Laurie Kavanagh
Courier Mail 30th May 1998
Only arrant fools will dismiss the part Pauline Hanson’s followers will play in the looming state and federal elections.
And you would hope the rest can work out just how a working class woman from Ipswich can rise from obscurity to such national power so fast.
Her major appeal is a fearless ability to articulate in basic English the private thoughts of many Australians regarding some important issues, all of which are not as cockeyed and crackpot as some would like to think.
Because of that guts and outspokenness she has won a great following among the silent majority. For here, to them at least, is someone injecting bits and pieces of common sense into a national picture that for too long has been clothed in that trendy hairshirt of the meddlesome upper-strata minority, political correctness.
That minority obviously does not realise it but their precious PC has become a despised and restrictive one-way street to public debate that was destined to provoke a radical reaction. It has.
Pauline Hanson!
So it shouldn’t surprise those not swept up in the bleeding-heart industry that this past week of whitefellas weeping and wailing in retrospect has done the Hanson cause no harm. For while most Australians feel genuine regret for the mistakes of our ancestors, what’s done is done.
There is a general feeling that those church leaders, politicians and academics attempting to manipulate national emotions today are exactly the same type of meddlesome do-gooders who have caused all the past problems with their father-knows-best attitude towards lesser mortals. Well may they say they’re sorry today.
The same bleeding hearts warn of the dire consequences for our multicultural image in South-East Asia should the Hanson mob poll well.
The rest of us can smile at that after seeing the wanton damage done to the Chinese and their businesses during the Indonesian crisis. Political correctness deems that out of bounds, apparently.
Political correctness comes in many forms but there was a fine example on ABC-TV recently concerning the survival of the dugong in the far north. I also occasionally get complaints about the treatment of the dugong, and turtles, being hunted traditionally in Queensland waters.
It doesn’t happen often but young dugongs sometimes are speared as living decoys to attract their mothers, said to be the best eating. Traditional hunting for turtles often involves cutting eggs and flesh from the upturned reptile. Sometimes only eggs are taken and the turtle left to die. Surprisingly animal liberationists appear to have missed these happenings.
In recent years traditional hunting has accounted for up to 1500 dugong and 10,000 greenback turtles annually in Torres Strait. No estimates have been made of those killed outside our territorial waters along the Papua New Guinea coast.
Further down the east coast of Queensland, dugong and turtle populations are not so numerous and, beside traditional hunting, are being destroyed by boat strike, death in gill nets and coastal development.
Because of the urban coastal spread the dugong picture along the Queensland coast is far from healthy. But even in the undeveloped Torres Strait concern is so great Islander leaders are trying to develop a self-governing strategy that will assure future generations of something to hunt.
Dugong have been part of islander culture for as long as there has been a culture. A boy enters manhood when he kills his first dugong. So concerned about the future of the dugongs are Torres Strait elders that they have organised a meeting in Thursday Island next month to plan sensible limits to traditional hunting, which has not always been so traditional since the advent of whitefella firearms, sophisticated nets, outboard motors and spotlights.
Already some mainland Aboriginal communities practice self-control and have restricted hunting to what they believe will be a sustainable level.
No doubt Torres Strait elders will consider similar restrictions at their TI meeting, because under the present unlimited policy scientists are not sure how long the creatures can survive.
And so, back to the prime time ABC-TV documentary on the dugong’s fight for survival in far north Queensland. It highlighted the death and destruction caused to the mammal and its seagrass beds by those rotten white developers, the mainly white fishermen whose gill nets accidentally kill the mammal and the mainly white boaties whose vessels accidentally collide with them.
Not one mention was made of how traditional hunting by Aborigines and Islanders is posing a threat to the dugong, the green turtle for that matter. Traditional killing of dugong simply did not exist. Or was a half-hour documentary too short to show the whole sorry picture?
And some people wonder about the rise and rise of an Ipswich fish and chip lady who keeps rasping on about making this just the one nation again? They must live in ivory towers, those who wonder about Pauline Hanson.