The politics of abuse

A heckler interrupted a lecture with an attack on the presenter, rather than addressing the content of the lecture. The response from the lecture went something like this:

“Your opinions define you, not me.
They say nothing about me, but speak volumes about you.”

Much the same can be said of all personal attacks, attacks which bully a person for who they are, and who they are is something they cannot change. Who they are is seen as a weakness, but as the quote above indicates, it is more a weakness for the bully, for the person doing the attacking than the person being attacked.

To put this into a political perspective, we have seen One Nation attack on Jacqui Lambie as she struggles with a medical condition, vaginal prolapse, using a cartoon mocking her.

Quoting from an article in The Guardian of 19 October:

“It depicts Lambie, an army veteran, as saying ‘I can’t laugh because of my prolapsed vagina’ before adding a crude sound effect ridiculing the health condition.”

In an earlier cartoon on the party’s ‘Please Explain Channel’, the Liberal Member for Canning, Andrew Hastie, an SAS Captain in a previous life was accused of treason for complying with a subpoena to give evidence in the civil case Roberts-Smith brought for defamation. Hastie was compelled, to attend the court, to present evidence. Failure to do so would have lead to criminal penalties. As Hastie explained to the court:

“I don’t dislike Mr Roberts-Smith at all. I pity Mr Roberts-Smith. I pity this whole process. I don’t want to be here.” (Guardian 11September, 2026)

Andrew Hastie may well be called again, as a witness in the up coming criminal trial of Ben Roberts-Smith. If so, he has a legal obligation to attend, if called to do so, and the evidence he presents has to be ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Failure to do so would be subject to a criminal charge of perjury. If found guilty of such a charge, Mr Hastie would be ineligible to serve as a representative in parliament. He would have a criminal record.

In September this year, Pauline Hanson criticised the Prime Minister’s late mother for having lived in social housing for sixty five years.

Both cartoons and other political commentary say more about One Nation than it does about Jacqui Lambie and Andrew Hastie, and both can respond, but Maryanne Albanese cannot, she died in 2002. The target of that attack was Mr Albanese.

Just scanning through the various topics on the Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain Channel, we can see that not much ordinary, every day people have to contend with is safe.

The latest cartoons, Season 3 titles:

• Distractions
• Chinese Spies
• Diversity, Inclusion, Equity
• Champaign Socialists
• The Albanese Government
• Digital ID
• Carbon Capture
• Net Zero-Bot
• E-Safety Commissioner
• Immigration Junkies
• Bad Budgets and Big Computers
• Political Hit Jobs
• The Polls

That’s just the latest, and going back to the earlier seasons, there is not a lot which is upbuilding, not a lot which offers a positive slant on what a One Nation government would seek to achieve apart from pulling down the edifice we call parliament and the concept of parliamentary democracy, where the challenge for government is to protect the least of its people.

Each episode is highly critical in a cartoonish manner, but essentially denying that either we are facing a global warming crisis, or pillorying people who are charged with doing jobs which are important for the safety and well being of our population, including our children and grand children. Viewing just a few episodes it is distressing to think that people think these things are funny, that putting people down for being who they are, what they believe, more or less the marginalisation of being ‘WOKE”, what ever that means.

Just a brief look at ‘WOKE’, as determined by the stances taken by Pauline Hanson include ‘victim blaming’, that Domestic Violence is a two way street, despite statistics showing that women bear the brunt of men’s violence, that rape is questionable, that women may well be responsible for the sexual assaults they face, (what was she thinking to wear such revealing clothing never the thought that the man involved perhaps has a brain which is controlled by his sex organs rather than the other way around), that Muslims are a danger to our society, that LGBTQIA+ people are not welcome, that immigrants need to be tested for racial purity, that they are pure white perhaps?

Just wait a while and we will see that we are all pilloried by One Nation. Except of course those card carrying members and personal friends and supporters of Pauline and her ‘One Nation’, not to mention the richest who can provide aircraft, offices and other benefits as well as a seemingly bottomless pit of donations.

Exploring what rights, human rights, citizenship rights, freedoms are becomes an interesting exercise when considering the negativity of the politics presented in these cartoons, as well as the public demonstrations Pauline Hanson performs, such as the wearing of a burkha in the Senate, the expressions on Domestic Violence and the ‘get over it’ comments as she brushes aside the freedoms of expression of others, such as First Nations people’s Invasion Day protests, or to Jacqui Lambie’s response to Hanson’s insensitivities.

We have come a long way in the quest for a democratic system which allows all voices to be heard, and early in that quest, the creed established at the time of the American and French revolutions include that:

“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression’. (What Happened to Democracy. Daron Acemoglu 2026, Page 103).

After WWII, where Fascism was defeated but the threat of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe hung over the freedoms of democracy, British economist and former Member of Parliament wrote:

Liberty means more than freedom from arbitrary power of Governments. It means freedom from economic servitude to Want and Squalor and other social evils; it means freedom from arbitrary power in any for. A starving man is not free. (Ibid, Page 69).

Comedic political commentary which essentially criticises and insults using mistruths and misinformation has a debilitating effect. Social discourse degenerates to personal invective, distrust and formenting of hatred against any ‘other’ the current debate focusses on. It has long been a tool in discrimination, whether on religious, racist or ethnic basis. One cannot avoid using the example of Hitler to spell out the dangers, but Hitler was just on of a legion of leaders who used lies, mistruths and misinformation to ‘purify’ the nation, to cleanse the ‘corrupting influence’ of some ‘other’, rallying those in fear of oppression to participate in an act of oppression.

A quote from Hannah Arendt came up on a feed of some kind in my phone which struck a chord:

“This constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that cannot distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.

With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

I have no reference for that quote except that it came on a Threads feed, but fits in perfectly with the many times Arendt writes about political intrigues, such as her commentary on the Dreyfus Affair in France at the turn to the 19th to 20th centuries. Or on her writings on The Totalitarian Movement, which emerged from the democracy of Germany during the 1930’s:

“Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of their utilitarian content, the interests of class or nation. The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he (or she) can never admit an error. … Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations to make their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organisation to bring as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make true their prediction that the German people would be ruined in defeat.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1951, Page 456)

The warning signs are all around us, that we really do need to think through the vacuous nature of the politics of abuse as witnessed in the utterances of One Nation and Pauline Hanson.

We need not look far to see where the lies, the mistruths, the inflammatory putting down of people considered somehow ‘unworthy’, to see that the destruction of the very democracy we have is placed in the balance. We see it in Israel, we see it in the USA. The lessons from history remain unlearned.

And can we not see that the destruction of Israel, The USA, should that occur can be blamed on Netanyahu and Trump should they fall as Germany did on the defeat of the Nazi regime?

It is not Pauline Hanson who is the problem here, it is those who blindly follow the politics of hate and derision, who embrace the mistruths, the blatant lies and misinformation, who see the put downs as a form of humour without thinking through the damage such attitudes can lead to.

Allow me here to express an opinion, and possibly have the same standard imposed on that opinion as the opening quotation. In my humble opinion, One Nation does not really care about anyone but One Nation. The thought of ceding power to them would see the political system collapse, in a sense the Trumpification of our nation, where the wealthy get all, but the ‘leg-up’ of a social agenda for those in need collapsing under the weight of tax cuts for the rich, pandering to the political elites but neglecting the needs of the most vulnerable.