Media and political complacency is letting Pauline Hanson re-write the rules on accountability
- Written by: Weekend Times
“Disappointing” was the best Guardian Australia could muster when Pauline Hanson’s One Nation banned it from a press conference, this time called to announce the party’s candidates for the forthcoming Victorian state
election.
“Unorthodox” was the reaction of The Age, which was also banned, along with the ABC.
These are the latest in a series of bans imposed by One Nation on media it does not like. The first occurred on the eve of the byelection for the federal seat of Farrer in southern New South Wales on May 9. The ABC was chucked out, and the rest of the media stood by and did nothing.
The second occurred in Perth on June 11 when the ABC was ejected from a Swan chamber of commerce event at which Hanson spoke. Once again the other media acquiesced.
And now, along with The Guardian, The Age has been added to the list of the proscribed in its home state, where an election is to be held in November.
In the face of a clear and present danger to press freedom and Australian democracy, two of the most important newspapers in the country cannot find it in themselves to call One Nation’s behaviour what it is: tyrannical.
In democracies, public figures do not get to pick and choose who covers them and how. This is especially so with politicians at election time.
With polls showing between one in three and one in five voters would vote One Nation, allowing Hanson to get away with granting access only to those who give her favourable coverage makes it even likelier that support for her will grow. It creates a vicious circle.
In a country like Australia which has no constitutional protection for press freedom, this cornerstone of democracy rests on conventions. US President Donald Trump has trashed conventions in his country, and Hanson is following his example by trashing them here.
Yet in the three months since One Nation first committed this assault on our democratic norms, the reaction has been muted. The best the prime minister has been able to do is say that excluding the media is “misguided”.
Not a word from the leader of the opposition, the Australian Press Council or heads of major media organisations. Taking advantage of their complacency, Hanson is re-writing the rules governing political accountability.
In political science there is an arcane phenomenon known as the Overton window, named for Joseph Overton, an American public policy analyst.
His proposition was that there are moments in the field of public policy when the previously unacceptable or unsayable can suddenly be said or done without attracting instant and annihilating condemnation.
The window shifts under a particular set of conditions. First, there are signs suggesting a possible shift in public sentiment or community mores. Second, it takes someone with sufficient political momentum and willpower to say the previously unsayable. Third, it requires other participants in public discourse to take notice and even acquiesce.
This has the effect of normalising it.
Pauline Hanson has shifted the Overton window in Australia by saying, for example, that Australia should be a monoculture. Such a brazenly racist and divisive statement made before her rise in the polls would have been swiftly condemned and may have done her serious political harm. But not in the prevailing political climate.
She is doing it again with press freedom. She says she will decide who comes to her press conferences and the circumstances in which they come, and the media murmur platitudes such as “disappointing” and “unorthodox”.
The window can shift back again when the consequences sink in, but it takes moral strength and determination to make this happen.
The only senior figure in Australian political life to say what needed saying was Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. After the exclusion of Guardian Australia, The Age and the ABC from One Nation’s Victorian press conference, Hanson-Young denounced Pauline Hanson as a political coward running scared of scrutiny.
She was “a politician who thinks that she should have the right to say whatever she wants, but no one else should have the right to ask questions”.
That was a start, but the violation of democratic principle is the central issue.
One media organisation caught squarely in the spotlight in all this is Southern Cross Media. Hanson’s benefactor, Gina Rinehart, is spending upwards of $26 million buying nearly 10% of the company’s shares through an intermediary, Bruce McWilliam.
Southern Cross is one of Australia’s biggest media organisations. It owns the Seven Network, 7news.com.au, the Triple M and Hit radio brands, a raft of regional radio stations, and West Australian Newspapers.
So where does Southern Cross Media in particular stand on One Nation’s attempts to control who reports on the party and how?
The situation has become a dilemma. Hanson and One Nation must be covered in order that the public should know what they stand for, so a media boycott of them is not an option.
Moreover, a boycott would work only if all the main media organisations joined, and the chances of that are nil given News Corporation’s generally supportive coverage of her in its tabloids and on News24 (formerly Sky News) after dark.
The opportunity to make a media boycott effective was lost at Farrer. There, Hanson could be heard telling her officials the ABC should not have been excluded. Now she has seen what she can get away with.
So having sown the wind by their supine response, the media are now reaping the whirlwind, facing the threat that they might be next unless they give Hanson and One Nation the coverage they want.
Yet the media have the remedy in their own hands. They have the power to make Hanson’s tyrannical attitudes and behaviour a central issue, and their failure to use this power has only emboldened her.
It is time to shift the Overton window back, on this issue at least. Language like “disappointing”, “unorthodox” and “misguided” won’t do it.
Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
