Quarterly Essay 42 Fair Share by Judith Brett

Author:Judith Brett [Brett, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781458798619
Google: dDRPBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2015-01-29T05:08:11+00:00

Taking Stock

In the late 1990s the country started to regain some political space, as an electoral backlash forced rural issues back onto the mainstream agenda. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party was a magnet for rural grievance and destabilised many country electorates. The party was formed in 1997, after Hanson won national notoriety for her outspoken criticism of Aboriginal welfare as an endorsed Liberal during the 1996 election campaign. Then came her electrifying maiden speech, in which she attacked just about every policy assumption of the previous thirteen years of Labor government: multiculturalism, indigenous welfare, economic rationalism. City-based commentators focused on her attitudes to race and saw her as the personification of provincial ignorance and bigotry, but she was also an economic nationalist who believed the government should restore protection for manufacturing and services to the country. She spoke from the nation-building assumptions of a previous era and many country people rallied to her party. Whether they agreed with her policies or not, they were grateful to her for drawing attention back to the country. Said one rural voter, “Pauline Hanson’s One Nation raised the politicians’ awareness of the rural areas. All of a sudden the rest of them are showing more interest than they did before Pauline. So we have a lot to thank her for.”

At the 1998 Queensland state elections One Nation won 22 per cent of the vote and eleven of the eighty-nine seats, and at the federal elections in the same year 9 per cent of the vote. Those who voted for it tended to be poorly educated, blue-collar men over fifty who lived in rural electorates, though like all parties it drew support from other demographics as well. One Nation soon imploded from its political inexperience and the contradictions of its populist promise that its parliamentarians would not be as other politicians, but it did send a wake-up call to Canberra about the deep disaffection in the country, as did the unexpected defeat of Jeff Kennett’s Victorian Liberal government a year later. Kennett lost a swag of regional seats and failed to win a majority, with three rural independents holding the balance of power. In a scenario to be repeated federally in 2010, the independents chose Labor, which promised to restore services to rural Victoria. It helped, too, that the incoming premier, Steve Bracks, was from the regional town of Ballarat, in contrast to Kennett, whose enthusiasm for city-based major events had made him seem more like the premier for Melbourne than for Victoria.

In 1998, after considerable pressure from the National Party and the surge of rural voters to One Nation, the government agreed to an inquiry into the impact of the National Competition Policy reforms on the country. The resulting report shows the administrators of the neoliberal state arguing with a confused and very angry rural Australia, which still believes that the state can and should protect its prosperity and way of life. Over and over the report stresses the government’s limited capacity to solve

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