Page 165 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

as the disempowerment of their identities as ‘ordinary Australians’. Hanson’s
popularity has given the lie to the progressive national image preferred by the major
political leaders, the corporate world and the intellectual class. For Hanson,
divorced mother of four, former small businesswoman and anti-establishment
politician, the future can only be secure if a certain, old-fashioned kind of Australian
identity is upheld: notionally white, culturally homogeneous, naturally parochial.
Hanson’s apocalyptic future fear, disguised under a thick dose of bad-tempered
anger and aggression, made her turn against those she believed will rob her from
her country: Aboriginal people and Asians, and their supporters in the intellectual
and political elites. Not surprisingly, critics have routinely accused her of racism
for her attacks on what she ungenerously calls ‘the Aboriginal industry’ and her
infamous statement that Australia is being ‘swamped by Asians’. But the moral(istic)
critique of racism does not take account of the deeper, more pervasive sense of
identity panic that underlies this call for the nation to retreat back into its insulated,
isolated condition as a parochial island-continent, culturally and psychologically
distant from the rest of the world, particularly ‘Asia’, the geographical region the
country reluctantly, but inescapably finds itself in.
As the process of globalization in the past few decades has drawn Australia
irrevocably into the global network, particularly with ‘Asia’ – through trade, travel
and migration – many Australians, especially those who lack the social, cultural and
educational capital to adjust to and survive in this brave new world, find themselves
de-centred, devalued and marginalized from a national culture in which ‘Australian
identity’ can no longer be securely anchored in a safely secluded, British-derived,
white homogeneity but has become thoroughly unsettled and opened up by the
everyday impact of social, cultural and racial heterogeneity, difference, flexibility,
and hybridity. Against this background, Pauline Hanson’s politics is exemplary of
the kind of reactionary identity politics I have outlined above, the tragedy of which
is that it contributes to its own continued self-disempowerment. The identity
asserted here, as Phil Cohen (1999: 22) has remarked about the different but similar
case of the old, white working class in East London, is ‘by and large immobilised
in a culture of nativist complaint’ – the very terms in which they stake their claims
to cultural entitlement and insiderdom, excludes them from the central sites
of contemporary cultural and economic power in the globalized world, where
cosmopolitan sophistication and ease with rapid change and multiple realities are
the preferred, even necessary assets.
While Hanson’s movement represents only a small (but significant) minority
of disaffected Australians, it would be a mistake to underestimate its cultural
significance as symptomatic of a much wider trend, not only in Australia but across
the globe. For peoples who feel hard done by the rapid and unsettling changes
brought about by globalization tend to mobilize essentialized, backward-looking
conceptions of identity in an effort to find a magical solution to life in a world
in which uncertainty is the name of the global game. Indeed, it may not be
exaggerated to say, sociologically speaking, that whenever the discourse of identity
is articulated today, the desire expressed in it has more to do with a nostalgic harking

154