Bulletin from Abroad
The Trump ascension sounds a warning of growing support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
Bernard Lagan in Sydney
Lenoir is a hardscrabble, sullen town in the forested hill country of North Carolina’s far west, hugging Appalachia, that folkloric, dank wellspring of America’s white poor. The 1000km, 11-hour road journey south from New York traverses the two Americas: the Blue lakes of energised metropolises, largely commanded by Democrats, and the often-lagging Red rest now owned by Republicans.
It crosses between worlds – from the tree-lined avenues of upper Manhattan’s strivers into a land of shuttered mills, crumbling factories and Walmart stores whose towns had main streets nuked, leaving miserable jobs for stackers and chicken gutters. And good people who silently seethed.
The highway passes through the small Virginian city of Winchester – a base for the Confederate army during the Civil War – that more recently gained infamy through the books of Joe Bageant. The Winchester native rose to a stellar writing career and 30 years later returned to chronicle the blighted lives of poor whites, sapped by mass job destruction.
Bageant’s filmic descriptions of these wastelands included a 2007 prophecy: “Here in my hometown, it is impossible to avoid the America that carried George W Bush to victory in 2004 and would again elect someone just as unsavoury even if they turn on Bush like feral dogs in these last days of his attempted imperial reign, even if he is hauled out of the Oval Office in custody.”
That someone came in the form of Donald Trump. Bageant, who died in 2011, would have been among the least surprised by Trump’s ascension, for he understood the dispossession of the white underclass. I felt it in Lenoir in its brooding valleys, among the cast-offs who lived in trailer parks far out of town, in the sullen faces of idle men in bars where rage ripples.
Australia has its Lenoirs and Winchesters; not as large or as impoverished, but as alienated from mainstream parties and eager to embrace outliers who claim to be maverick saviours. We saw it in the sudden rise of the large, loud Queensland mining and tourist-park magnate Clive Palmer, who was propelled into the Australian Parliament in 2013; zeppelin-like, he deflated and foundered and is now out of Parliament, strenuously resisting court questioning over his soured business dealings.
His supporters turned to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which stormed this year’s election, taking four Queensland Senate seats.
For now, the towns and hinterland southwest of Brisbane and north around Bundaberg – a landscape supporting sugar-cane farmers and small croppers and businesses – are Australia’s Appalachia. A large proportion of voters – about 20% – supported Hanson in the general election.
A new barometer in the form of the Queensland state election – likely to be held next year – will be a fresh indicator of One Nation’s growing support. Up to 13 seats are expected to fall to Hanson’s party – probably delivering her supporters the balance of power in Queensland’s Parliament.
Malcolm Turnbull’s Government and the Labor Party are rattled, not only by Trump’s historic victory, but also by the evidence that the uprising against globalisation, job casualisation and cold corporate power is upon Australia.
Labor leader Bill Shorten is eager to burnish his protectionist colours, saying he would lead a government that would “buy Australian, build Australian, make Australian”. Turnbull, instead, urges better explanations of globalisation and the need to cut taxes for big business.
Plenty of what Trump says might be dismissed as ill-informed, ill-judged, heat-of-the-campaign mouthings. What can’t be dismissed are the forces long welling in places such as Lenoir – and now in Queensland’s hinterland and on Brisbane’s struggling fringes.