Australia’s far-right burqa stunt shows shock-jock politics is on the rise

It takes a certain sort of person to be a populist politician. Shamelessness helps. But indignation is the key. This should come easily, or for the fakers, at least be expressed with real conviction.

Pauline Hanson, leader of Australia’s One Nation Party, has her schtick down to a T. And it’s not pretty: demonise a group of people, make a scene, bask in the publicity.

Yesterday, she entered the Australian Senate chamber wearing a burqa. This, she said, was a protest against the rejection of her bill designed to ban full face coverings in public spaces.

Penny Wong, leader of the governing party in the chamber, joined with Muslim senators in condemning the stunt, which she said was “not worthy of a member of the Australian Senate”. Of course it wasn’t worthy.

Today’s burgeoning class of shock-jock politicos, egged on by their namesakes on TV and radio talk shows, ignore decorum, established rules, and even the law, to appeal to people’s baser instincts.

Hanson has played the race card for decades now. She began in public life by sharing her thoughts on Australia’s aborigine population before developing her current fixation on brown-skinned immigrants.

But while she has had an undoubted effect on Australian culture and politics, that influence is noticeable, however, for how small it has been compared to demagogues in other rich democracies.

Nearly a third (31.5 per cent) of Australia’s population was born abroad. But the populist movement down-under is nothing compared to the rise of Reform UK here, the MAGA movement in the US, or any number of far-right surges on the continent.

Some Australian pundits suggest their nation’s obligatory and “preferential” voting system helps keep political extremes at bay.

But Australia’s greater prosperity is probably just as important. Societies under economic strain seek scapegoats. The swelling ranks of the poor and disadvantaged in the UK and US are receptive to the messages of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

Why else would Trump have claimed that illegals were eating Americans’ pet cats and dogs in that election debate.

And once populists get away with it, they’ll do it again, no matter how mendacious or nasty their antics are.

Brazil’s thuggish former president Jair Bolsonaro was not only allowed to continue as a member of Congress but went on to become president despite telling a female Member of Congress he wouldn’t bother raping her because she was too ugly.

Bolsonaro was dubbed the “Latin American Trump”, sought re-election in 2022 with preposterous campaign antics – including a video falsely claiming that his left-wing opposition was handing out feeding bottles with penis-shaped nipples at daycare centres to please the LGBT lobby.

And like his pal Trump, Bolsonaro promoted mad conspiracies about voting fraud in the run up to an election that he went on to lose.

Populists know that if you repeat lies loud enough and for long enough, the message will stick with some voters.

Social media has made things so much worse. Twitter/X, run like a personal fiefdom by one of far-right populism’s noisiest exponents, Elon Musk, has provided campaigners and politicians an unedited voice to exploit their shock tactics.

The unelected tech-oligarch is using his power transnationally, as he did in the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson in September. Musk can spout his conspiratorial effluent on race and gender directly to his 200+ million followers on X around the globe.

The depressing reality is that far-right populism and the phenomena of white nationalism, and techno-kleptocracy are on the rise, and the shock tactics of its proponents are here to stay.

This makes it all the more important that mainstream politicians on the left and right put party politics aside and call it out.

The signs in the UK are not promising. When a senior Conservative Party figure like Robert Jenrick, courts publicity by making videos shaming fare dodgers, in which he manages to get in a dig against “weird Turkish barber shops”, the message doesn’t appear terribly different from Reform UK’s references to migrant “invasions” and groups “not sharing British values”.

In Trump’s America, the Republican Party has abandoned its principles, and allowed crooks and kleptocrats to cash in on white, working class grievance, to the benefit ultimately of no-one but themselves.

We might tell ourselves that raids by masked immigration agents and drone attacks on smugglers boats couldn’t happen here. But 10 years ago, most Americans would have said the same.