ABSTRACT
As is her way, the One Nation Party senator Pauline Hanson outraged sections of the Australian public with comments about children with disabilities and autism in her explanatory remarks for siding with the conservative Liberal government’s education funding reform bill during its reading in the Senate chamber. For the international reader, Pauline Hanson is the leader of the One Nation Party. 3 The One Nation Party contested the last federal election on a platform of restricting immigration, halting the building of new mosques across Australia and commissioning “an enquiry into Islam”. The last plank in this platform of division is curious and potentially confusing. It must not be interpreted as an invitation to build greater understanding of Islam and its many followers in our community. It was an incendiary proposal designed to sweep up the disenchanted, marginalised and growing numbers of economically redundant white people who would readily target immigrants as the cause of their economic and social vulnerabilities. The senator even excited outrage from her most conservative colleagues in the Senate when she wore a burqa in the Senate chamber to incite hostility towards the Muslim community. Hanson and her One Nation Party are of course not the only ones to resort to immigration and Australian identity politics to bolster electoral favour. Most parties in Australian politics have drawn from this well, and no doubt they will continue to do so.
