The Christchurch terrorist carnage serves as a stark reminder that Australia is not only the home of funny beer commercials ("Fosters is Australian for beer") and strange ways to play football, it is also home to an increasingly aggressive nativist movement, in and outside the political arena. In the days after the Christchurch terrorist act, one of its most outspoken representatives, the independent senator Fraser Anning, made international headlines after releasing a number of incendiary statements in the wake of the massacre, blaming New Zealand's immigration policy for the carnage.
One might dismiss Anning as one of those people who just don't get it and never learn were it not for the fact that he is hardly an isolated case. Ironically enough, the reason Anning sits in the Australian senate is not because he won his constituency, but because the person who had won it was declared ineligible to fill the seat because of his dual citizenship. Anning had run on the One Nation ticket for Queensland, but entered the senate as an independent.
Pauline Hanson
One Nation is the political vehicle for Pauline Hanson, arguably Australia's most colorful and brazen politician on the far right. Pauline Hanson won election to the Australian Senate in the July 2016 federal election, almost exactly twenty years after first bursting onto the national political scene as one of the most controversial politicians in the country’s history. Newly elected to the House of Representatives, Hanson quickly established herself as a quintessential populist cum nativist, lashing out against the political establishment, multiculturalism, Aborigines, and (Asian) migrants.
