Dreadful as it was, the event gave many in the media cause to consider how they had covered these often frightening anti-racism demonstrations. How did our unquestioning coverage of exhortations to kill Pauline Hanson sit with the fact that this was meant to be the voice of anti-racist tolerance?
PAUL SHEEHAN, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: Last
year we saw a frontal assault on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech
in Australia. A lot of people were going to One Nation out of curiosity.
They’d heard about it in the media and they were curious and what a
fearful experience that turned out to be and how did the news media treat
this? They treated it with kid gloves. It came and went. They weren’t
particularly fussed because it was only One Nation that was being physically
assaulted and intimidated. That was a disgrace.REPORTER: As confronting as the admission may be, it is undeniable that many in the mainstream media have unashamedly set out to damage Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party because of its implicitly racist and divisive agenda. But, in seeking to expose what many suspect is the dark side of Hansonism have we crossed an ethical line? I our zeal to do the hatchet job, have we subverted the last few remaining threads of credibility we have with much of the Australian public. And worst of all we are in part responsible for the rise and rise of Pauline Hanson’s?
DAVID BARNETT, AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW: The media has created Pauline Hanson. Pauline Hanson can’t possibly complain about media, about her coverage in the media. It’s been relentlessly hostile. She’s never been given a fair go.
MARGO KINGSTON, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: She gets a huge cheer when she says the media is very trying. She gets lots of questions from the floor about why does the media hate you? Why are they against you? Now that'’ very cleaver politics of her because when the media attacks her or questions her then the popularity rises.
GRAEME CAMPBELL, AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY INDEPENDENT FOR KALGOORLIE: When Pauline Hanson came to this Parliament, there was a concerted effort by the media, the political parties, the churches, pressure to destroy her. All they did was generate public sympathy for Pauline.
REPORTER: A year on from last year’s violence, if anything, the media pack’s hostility to Pauline Hanson and what it believes she represents has hardened. So much so, that at this press conference to launch her immigration policy earlier last week, the hatred in the room borne towards the Independent member for Oxley from many here was palpable.
Hanson had to expect she’d be asked some tough questions about her confronting policies – not least because her new Immigration spokeswoman is Robin Spencer, brought in from the cold extremes of the Australians Against Further Immigration group.
{FILE TAPE ROBIN SPENCER AT PRESS CONF.}: “Excuse me, the ethnic group leaders are one of the problems of this country”. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: Media frustrations boiled over when, time and time again, both women asserted that the official immigration figures were a giant Government lie – designed to keep the ‘truth’ about real immigration levels from the public.
{FILE TAPE ROBIN SPENCER AT PC}: “The current Government doesn’t include many people that come into Australia to settle here permanent, legally or illegally in their figures.” {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: Equally frustrating was One Nation’s assertion that the Immigration policy would be non-discriminatory. For Spencer particularly made no secret of her desire to protect against what she sees as an undesirable level of ethnic Asian migration.
{FILE TAPE – SPENCER AT PC}: “Now when Dr Charles Price from here in Canberra did his study he showed that Australia really would be 27 per cent Asians in 23 years. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: The demographer quoted, a Dr Price, later said One Nation had distorted and misrepresented his research. But the image going out that night to the national audience was that of Pauline Hanson being yelled at yet again by a baying media pack.
DAVID OLDFIELD, ADVISOR ONE NATION:
The whole thing was attack, attack, attack. There was nothing genuine about
it. It was a whole bunch of people with an agenda. Not a group of professional
journalists asking questions.REPORTER: When you were standing to one side looking on you almost had a smile on your face was the thought going through your mind that all this is doing is playing to Pauline Hanson’s natural constituency?
OLDFIELD: Oh to a degree. But mostly what I was thinking was that I thought the public would enjoy seeing journalists the way they think journalists are. And journalists were not letting the public down.
REPORTER: Later that evening One Nation was allowed to win yet another propaganda coup when Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock backed down on an earlier promise to debate Hanson’s immigration policy on A Current Affair, objecting to Spencer’s presence.
{FILE TAPE RAY MARTIN, ACA}: “Seems a strange decision considering John Howard’s recent statement that One Nation’s policies should be subjected to close scrutiny and challenge.” {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: Once again the distorted references to Charles Price were employed.
{FILE TAPE SPENCER EX ACA}: “Charles Price, a respected demographer said…{END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: And appeals to official fact, this time from two immigration experts were swept away by the frustrating One Nation semantic blend of conspiracies, emotion and selective statistics. The more the experts looked smug in the knowledge that they were right, the more David Oldfield looking on knew his leader had won the point.
Robin Spencer clearly upset, but Pauline Hanson knew her message had hit the mark with her A Current Affair audience.
John Pasquarelli was Pauline Hanson’s advisor until a falling out last year. He accuses the media of trying to destroy Hanson not just because of what she says but because we and the political establishment are elitist snobs who hate the sort of person that she is.
JOHN PASQUARELLI, FORMER ADVISOR PAULINE HANSON: I think a lot of these people just are up themselves. A lot of them are, I think they’re snobs in a lot of ways. They think they’re intellectual snobs. They’re elite. And how dare a person like Pauline Hanson come along who drops the odd ‘R’, and god help us work in a fish and chip shop. I mean the greatest example of new age snobbery was that exhibited by Janet Holmes A ’Court when she made a sneering reference to that fish and chip shop woman from Queensland. I mean that again just sent Hanson’s appeal up again.
REPORTER: Of course, it’s precisely
Pauline Hanson’s common touch that helped her win 11 seats in last
month’s Qld State Election. Who could imagine Bronwyn Bishop, Cheryl
Kernot or Carmen Lawrence agreeing to do this?Do you think that it’s a class thing with Pauline Hanson?
OLDFIELD: I believe that it is. Yes. I think that the media definitely see themselves as elitist. They definitely see themselves as some sort of social conscience that must make sure that the Australian people see it the way the media see it.
REPORTER: Margo Kingston is one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior political reporters. She admits that initially she and many of her colleagues made a mistake by deliberately not reporting on Hanson in the hope Hanson and her supporters would go away.
KINGSTON: When the news poll hit two weeks into the Qld election we knew we had to work out what was going on here, that we’d made a mistake. And I think the mistake we made, certainly the mistake I made is I think we all believed Australia had settled a few things about our identity, about our tolerance and about our place in Asia and in the World. And personally I just got the shock of my life and went out to Qld to follow her around and realised you try and have a conversation with the country person about race and there is simply not the language to communicate. Is so different, it is just down the line.
REPORTER: In the weeks prior to the Qld poll it was soon clear that Hanson was not a flash in the pan but looking at a major victory for One Nation. But when Kingston started writing about just what an effective politician Hanson was, many of her colleagues accused her of going soft on the One Nation leader.
KINGSTON: What I was actually doing, shock horror, was observational reportage. That’s all.
REPORTER: As distinct from?
KINGSTON: As distinct from finding the chink and making that the story. For example the Courier Mail followed her once in the last week of the campaign. They tried to ignore her. They followed her up to North Qld where every single small town came out to meet her. It was mob scenes. It was interesting. Weird, mind blowing phenomenon. The Courier Mail ran four paras about how she nearly got killed on the road when a driver tried to overtake her that was it.
REPORTER: One obvious example of the media’s calculated bias against Hanson was the photos of her used during the campaign.
KINGSTON: If you look at all the mainstream media’s pictures of Pauline Hanson before the Qld election and they’re all thin lips, sour glowering. Every single one of them. After the Election, all of a sudden, the smiles the attractive face of Pauline Hanson. Now it’s easiest to find it in the image but in the stories of course it’s happening as well.
REPORTER: So why were the media elite doing that. Why do we do that?
KINGSTON: Well I think it’s because there’s a social which is evil, destructive and ultimately dangerous for our economy as well. The race stuff is intolerable. Now what the mainstream media wanted, I think what all the mainstream Australia wanted was for the race stuff to be knocked off early. It wasn’t John Howard refused to do it. In fact he opened the door to it. He said he understood. Now in may view and I think the view many people – I don’t know, I don’t think I am elite! – many people who think about Australia for a living: race is not something that you allow to flower.
REPORTER: When John Howard raised his own concerns about the rate of Asian immigration in 1988, many in the media shouted him down as a ‘racist’. Noted Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey also copped the same epithet for his views. Whether the media’s efforts to knock that race debate on the head was right or wrong, there are those who argue its suppression spawned the seeds of Hansonism a decade on.
PASQUARELLI: Pauline Hanson I think thinks that she is the message but she’s only just another messenger. There’s a lot of people that have gone before her: John Stone, Blainey, Ruxton, Peter Walsh and of course Graeme Campbell and Pauline never created this response to her. It has been there all the time. I say it’s been there festering away since Whitlam and it’s been bubbling and seething away right up until her maiden speech. And then it all started coming out. Now that’s the response. She let the genie out of the bottle.
REPORTER: As you’ll see in Part Two of our story, there’s good reason to suspect that the media’s efforts to stifle the flames of racism has unwittingly boosted the Hanson bandwagon’s ascent to Canberra.
PART TWO:
{FILE TAPE} HANSON MAIDEN SPEECH: My view on issues is based on commonsense and my experience as a mother of 4 children, as a sole parent and a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: The media should have studied recent history more closely for early on in Hanson’s political career when she rose to make her maiden speech to parliament we also tried to ignore her without success.
{FILE TAPE-MAIDEN SPEECH}: I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the Government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: While her speech received very limited coverage on mainstream radio and the next day’s papers, one grab in particular seized the imagination of thousands of callers to tabloid talkback radio that evening and the next day.
{FILE TAPE SPEECH}: I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. {END FILE TAPE}
PASQUARELLI: The fax machine went burr and just melted down when the Parliamentary switchboard here they were getting back up forces, back up help, to come in when the switchboard here at Parliament House went into melt-down.
REPORTER: Fired by the shockjocks, so began the media transformation of the Qld country girl into a major new political force – Hanson receiving credibility in a growing avalanche of press coverage. While there was no doubting the implicitly racist overtones in her speech, we in the media unwittingly played right into One Nation’s hands by giving her often wildly inaccurate assertions national prominence.
The biggest shock to media and hardened political operators from the major parties was the enthusiasm with which the Midday audience applauded her taboo claims: that aborigines get unfair benefits; her call for the abolition of multiculturalism; and her fears about the level of Asian immigration.
{FILE TAPE HANSON ON MIDDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 1996}: If they leave their country, come out here then they are Australians. Everyone equal, everyone treated the same and no one’s better than anyone else. Audience Applause. {END FILE TAPE}
OLDFIELD: What Pauline has done is broken through that veil of political correctness that has suppressed people. I mean there are millions of decent Australians out there who have not a racist bone in their body but they’re sick to death of being told what they’re allowed to say and what they’re not allowed to say.
REPORTER: Sydney Morning Herald senior journalist Paul Sheehan has written what is this week a number 1 best selling book called ‘Among the Barbarians’, arguing that there are taboo concerns, including those about aborigines and Asian immigration, that we in the media have colluded to suppress.
PAUL SHEEHAN, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: The news media gave her an enormous amount of publicity. They gave her the oxygen and then they sneered and jeered and ridiculed her and ordinary people were saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, she’s raising issues that we would like raised and she’s getting bucketed and they felt that by being bucketed that they themselves were being bucketed by this cappuccino gateau, these little cappuccino quaffing journalists who were sneering at the working class Australians.
REPORTER: Sheehan actually argues the media chose to hear what it wanted to hear in Hanson’s speech because it was convinced she was really a racist.
SHEEHAN: The speech contained the ultimate sound bite, ‘we’re going to be swamped by Asian’s’, but later in the speech she said she described Asian immigrants as hard-working, and that they should be treated like any other Australian. You could argue that her speech was a speech against racial politics. Now this was never reported in the media and I don’t want my remarks to be seen as sympathetic to Pauline Hanson, I’m not. But I am not sympathetic to the way in which the whole issue was distorted. All the comments that she made that would have evened out her remarks have been ignored systematically and cynically.
RICHARD MCGREGOR, THE AUSTRALIAN: One point I agree with Paul Sheehan and other people is that the accusation, the shrill accusation of racist is far too overused and used to intimidate people and that’s quite correct.
REPORTER: Richard McGregor is the Chief Political Reporter for the Australian newspaper. While he agrees that the use of the ‘racist’ pejorative in Australia has often demeaned the real meaning of the word, he echoes the view of most of his press gallery colleagues that Hanson’s speeches are racist and should be treated as such by the media.
MCGREGOR: But if you, say for example, raise the issue of slowing down Asian immigration, what does that mean? Does that mean we then discriminate on the grounds of race and letting people into the country? Do we give points for Hong Kong and more points for Britain and less for Lebanon. I mean, how does it work. How do you do it?
REPORTER: If Hanson’s maiden speech was racist, her appearance on the Midday program a week later with Aboriginal leader Charlie Perkins tellingly revealed most in the audience didn’t care. Hanson was telling them what they’d wanted to hear for years.
{FILE TAPE HANSON ON MIDDAY 16 SEPTEMBER 1996}:
Hanson: I feel that his has been just suppressed for too long in this country. It’s about time we brought it out in the open. It’s like a festering sore. People need to talk about it. APPLAUSE.
Charles Perkins: You’re an ignorant person in terms of race relations in this country. You don’t know what your talking about (noise from audience). Just a minute. The blue rinse set is piping in.
Kennerley: Excuse me Mr Perkins I wouldn’t like you to insult our audience who have been gracious enough to give you your time this afternoon.
Perkins: You’ve been wonderful to do that.
Kennerley: So if you wouldn’t mind not being rude to our audience…
Perkins: I’m not being rude, don’t be rude to me if you could just let me finish then, I know it’s your program.
Kennerley: do not be rude to our audience.
{END FILE TAPE}
PASQUARELLI: She did him like a dinner. I mean Charles Perkins, the Aboriginal industry should never ever let him be their spokesman.
{FILE TAPE HANSON ON MIDDAY 16 SEPT 1996}: You have the position. You’re on the ATSIC board. Well what have you done for your people. [Audience applause] Where has the money gone? I am concerned about your people and you know what, I want to see what’s happening to the money. Why isn’t it going to where it’s supposed to be going? [Applause] {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: On live national television Hanson clumsily articulated the frustrations of many people – including aborigines - with the wastage and failures in Aboriginal funding. And when she presented Perkins with what she claimed was her report on these problems he angrily threw it back.
{FILE TAPE PERKINS AND HANSON ON MIDDAY}: She’s telling a lot of bullshit. She doesn’t’ know what she’s talking about. She’s using Parliament to slam Asians, Aboriginal people and all good Australians. You’re giving Australians a bad name lady, a bad name. { END FILE TAPE }
PETER BOWERS: I am at once fascinated and absolutely repulsed by this woman.
REPORTER: Peter Bowers is one of Canberra’s most respected and experienced political journalists. He agrees that a mainstream media reluctance to acknowledge the failures and weaknesses in some aboriginal programs has handed Hansonism the most effective form of propaganda:
BOWERS: All the buttons she touches, there are elements of truth there. There are elements of truth in the Question she asked the PM yesterday about aborigines getting loans for one and a half percent. Why can’t you give it to hard pressed country folk for one and a half per cent when I set up a people’s bank I get ridiculed… So there is an element of truth, that’s true.
REPORTER: And is it true that the country feels that that aspect of the debate has been suppressed by people like you and I.
BOWERS: I think unwittingly there’s a lot of us in the media may have been shied off these things because of political correctness but we didn’t want to see if we questioned some programs as to why it is that aboriginal health is such an appalling disgraceful national scandal despite a great deal of public money that’s been thrown at the problem.
REPORTER: Have we done a disservice by not reporting the corruption. We’ve all seen it?
KINGSTON: I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. The apex of this movement in the early 90s was Robert Tickner, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister, walking into a room saying I have just done a report on the $250m aboriginal health strategy, we can’t find out where the money’s gone, it’s made no difference. And someone, I think it was me, said ‘Excuse me this isn’t good enough’ and I got accused of ‘I know you’re not a racist Margo but some people would think you were.’ There is no doubt that at that stage the issues were so sensitive that we went too far one way.
REPORTER: We suppressed that debate?
KINGSTON: It was suppressed.
REPORTER: The real danger posed in the rise in Pauline Hanson and her One Nation supporters is that the more the media and our politicians attempt to suppress the grievances of her audience - however ignorant and racist they are - the more ready that audience will to wear the racist tag.
PASQUARELLI: As soon as you ever try to have a debate, you’re called a racist. Seriously, you are called a racist. Read through the articles written in the Age or the Fairfax press. Your called a racist or a bigot. Thank God those words have been so misused by your mates in the media. They’ve lost their currency. Just like homosexuals stole gay. Now we’re going to see principle and morality. The way these politicians are flogging those words another couple of years they’ll have no currency either.
REPORTER: There’s another word that people now associate with Pauline Hanson and it’s spawned the phrase that has become her rallying cry.
{FILE TAPE EX: 60 MINUTES 13 OCTOBER 1996}: Tracey Curro: Are you Xenophobic?
Hanson: Please explain? {END FILE TAPE}
PASQUARELLI: Immediately she said it I prayed. The first time in my life I’ve prayed I think. Ad I said please don’t let them edit that out, and they didn’t.
REPORTER: But they presumably…..
PASQUARELLI: But they thought it was going to do Pauline a lot of damage I think. And it backfired.
REPORTER: It’s a measure of just how much of a gulf there is between the sneering media and it’s understanding of Hanson’s appeal that what we all thought was an embarrassing blunder became Pauline Hanson’s credo cur.
Another confronting thing for all of us in the media is that a lot of support for Hanson’s implicitly racist calls to reduce Asian immigration and abolish multiculturalism actually comes from ethnic Australia.
Everywhere she goes, Hanson’s audience responds sympathetically to her claims that she is not getting a fair go from the media.
OLDFIELD: People hate, absolutely hate the media with a vengeance.
REPORTER: Pauline Hanson’s advisor David Oldfield admits One Nation has no difficulties in convincing the public that media coverage of the Party and its leader has been hysterically biased.
Why he says is the media so eager to dig up sexual dirt on him and Hanson and not to raise the stories we all know about other politicians?
OLDFIELD: There are no taboos. Anything can be asked, any line can be crossed, as soon as it's Pauline Hanson the media think they've got a free kick to hurt, to impale, to attack, to murder to do anything they like. Any scurrilous allegation regardless of how lacking in substance, regardless of how lacking in credibility the person who might be making it may be, gets a run. If your willing to put up your hand and say I’ve got something really nasty to say about Pauline Hanson you'll find yourself on national television.
{FILE TAPE: SUNDAY 13 JUNE 1998}:"BRIAN ANNEAR WALKER”
Ransley: Do you know how many school teachers there are?
Walker: No I'll be honest about that.
Ransley: What about the annual budget of the Queensland education department.? Walker: No I don't know. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: Prior to the June 13th Queensland state elections with polls showing One Nation almost certain to hold the balance of power. Sunday's Paul Ransley quizzed some of the parties candidates about the portfolios they would be expected to oversee.
{FILE TAPE ROSITTA PETCH HEALTH SPOKESWOMAN}:
Ransley: Do you know what the Queensland share of the Medicare agreement is.?
Petch: No I'm not going to start quoting numbers because I could quote the wrong number.
Ransley: Do you know how many Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders make up the prison population in Queensland?
no.
Petch: I should know these things but I'm just telling you I’m not going to quote numbers. I may quote the wrong number and that will leave me with egg on my face and I don't intend to do that. {END FILE TAPE}
OLDFIELD: There's no doubt they were caught out and they looked very silly. And in fact I use the tape from your show now to train other people as to how not to get themselves caught. But I mean what you get of course is, your people would have known these people were very inexperienced, you can lead them up the garden path. I mean the bottom line is, and I think the public are aware of this, an experienced journalist can get a person to say things that they just don't mean.
REPORTER: This week Pauline Hanson ejected the Queensland Times newspaper from her electorate office. Claiming it was biased. The offending story run about a One Nation candidate prior to the qld poll seemed reasonable enough. But it was a perfect opportunity for Hanson to give the media a serve. As hard as it may be for us in the media to admit it Pauline Hanson does have a point. Like the way the press covered allegations by liberal MP Tony Abbot a week ago.
{FILE TAPE ABBOTT IN PARLIAMENT}: So One Nation has registered in Queensland it doesn’t have 500 members, it is not a validly registered political party and it cannot receive any public funding. {END FILE TAPE}
REPORTER: Neither Tony Abbot nor most of the national media that carried his allegations last weekend bothered to check them first with the qld electoral commission. Readers of this Sun Herald headline could be forgiven for thinking that Hanson would pocket half a million dollars in funding for her own personal use. (HEADLINE: HANSON POCKETS $500,000). Yet this week a frustrated Queensland electoral commissioner Mr Des O’Shea told Sunday that Tony Abbots' allegations about the parties registration were completely baseless. Also this week the Australia Israel review magazine allowed one nation to once again take the moral high ground by publishing the names of 2000 party members and donors from a leaked confidential list.
OLDFILED: Considering the history of the Jewish people for one of their magazines to open to persecution 1000 or so of our members by printing their names I think is just the peak of hypocrisy. I mean they are Nazi style tactics to be quite frank.
REPORTER: Indeed other Jewish groups and civil liberty organisations backed away from the ill conceived attack. Horrified at the breach of privacy of people who after all were merely exercising their right to belong to a political party. While the publishers tried to defend their actions they had in fact unwittingly delivered one nation another propaganda victory. In the wake of One Nation’s Queensland victory, the media and the mainstream parties have often sought to either ignore, ridicule or sully Pauline Hanson. An unconvinced constituency has pushed her support even higher in the polls.
PASQUARRELLI: She and the media know are locked together. You know it's locked in an embrassive you know, both parties don't want to be in but they're there.
REPORTER: The frustrating dilemma for the media is how to analyse the policies of a party that when it's confronted with an objective truth claims its all part of a big Government lie. Perhaps we should be looking at why so many people want to believe that. To borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche "the more the media tries to destroy Pauline Hanson the more it will make her strong”.
ENDS.