An Analysis Of Pauline Hanson's Political Strategy

Lately,populism has been sweeping around the world and its influence in politics is exemplified by Trump's election victory in America.Five Star Movement Party's election in Italy and other populist movements.Australia is apparently no exception.In Australia,it is certainly true that major parties(Labor Party and the Coalition with Liberal as the core)are forming the government.However.populist parties and MPs are exerting their increasingly strong balancing powers in parliaments in the latest two decades.Among them,Pauline Hanson's One Nation(PHON)has the best election performance(particularly in the 2016 general election winning 4 seats in the Senate),and wields the balance of power in the Australian political arena.And her tremendous appeal to voters has become something that forces the major parties to have to take it into consideration during their own election campaigns and even parliamentary decisions.In 1998,Pauline Hanson debuted in Australian political arena and made her maiden speech targeting mainly against Indigenous people and Asians.For now,the leader of PHON still advocates her conservative and alt-right political appeals but turns against Muslim.She called for the ban of burka and stop of Muslim immigration out of national security concern.Also,she advocates white supremacy in her senate proposals,in which she argued that it is the Australian white people rather than minority groups are the disadvantaged.With the anti-Muslim rhetoric as well as white supremacy sensation,Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party have been inviting numerous commentaries,reviews,polling and reports.Focusing on her recent political performance from 2016 to 2018,this thesis takes Hanson's anti-Muslim and white supremacy propositions as two representative cases so as to find out how Pauline Hanson implements her political strategy within framework of Benjamin Moffitt's Populism's Crisis Model.The analysis on those two representative cases finds that Pauline Hanson's political appeal is mostly political stunt,namely,protest only for the sake of opposing mainstream parties,instead of providing workable political solutions out of long-term concerns.Whether Pauline Hanson is aware of it or not,her proposals aim at resonating and provoking voters'discontent towards current situation,which often stands in the way to find effective approaches to solve problems,and to make it worse,intensifying social tensions.