Page 138 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

RACIAL/SPATIAL ANXIETY

especially when they are ‘Asian’. What is important in this latter case is not so much
that Hanson is anti-Asian per se, but the fact that she feels entitled in wanting
to keep Asians out, especially if they ‘do not assimilate’, that is, if they do not
behave according to the rules and habits of the house, to ‘the Australian way of life’
that Hanson herself claims to represent. Hanson, in other words, has appropriated
‘the native’s point of view’. The true natives of Australia, for Hanson, are not the
Aboriginal people, but people like herself, ordinary, white Australians. Implicit in
the ideology of Hansonism is a suppression of the history of colonization which
was foundational to modern Australia, the indigenization of the white presence in
this land, and the postulation of its demographic and cultural dominance as natural
– and therefore, naturally legitimate.
The emergence of Pauline Hanson on the political stage has been an uncom-
fortable reminder of a shameful aspect of the nation’s political and cultural past,
a past many Australians would rather forget about. But it should have become clear
from the previous two chapters that Pauline Hanson is not a ‘phenomenon’ that
can be conveniently relegated to the distant Other realm of Australia’s past. On the
contrary, she is very much a symptom of a problematic aspect of the national present
– one that is not simply going to go away. As Ann Curthoys and Carol Johnson
have rightly remarked,
Hansonite politics, in one form or another, whether or not it revolves
around Pauline Hanson herself, or around One Nation specifically, is a
form of politics of the future not the past. . . . It is a politics that is here
to stay at least as a significant minority factor in Australian political life.
(1998: 97)
It is therefore important to understand the more long-term and enduring
underpinnings of the views and sentiments expressed by Hanson and her followers.
The recent surge of Hansonism in Australia represented a disturbing but
undeniable return of the repressed. What were repressed are deep-seated and deeply
ingrained anxieties – often articulated as racial anxieties – which have underlain the
peculiar structure of feeling of ‘white Australia’. Obviously, as so clearly articulated
by Hanson herself, these anxieties have far from vanished, despite the official ending
of the White Australia policy in the early 1970s. What is the nature of these
anxieties? I want to suggest that simple accusations of lingering ‘racism’ do not
suffice here. Hanson’s hostility against Aborigines and Asians is not merely and
simply a matter of racial hatred. As her statements quoted above clearly indicate,
the anxieties she has given expression to do not merely and simply revolve around
‘race’, but also, significantly, have to do with land, with territory or more precisely,
with claims on land and territory. In other words, what is at stake here is a prob-
lematic articulation of race and space. The recognition of Native Title after the
Mabo and Wik decisions, which has given such a jolt to the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander land rights movement, makes this glaringly clear. Perhaps less evident
is the fact that anti-Asian sentiment in Australia also has a spatial, as well as a racial,
dimension. This is what I would like to illuminate in this chapter.

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