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Far-Right Political Parties in Australia: Disorganisation and Electoral Failure (Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy) 1st Edition Mcswiney
Political Incivility in the Parliamentary Electoral and Media Arena Crossing Boundaries Routledge Studies on Political Parties and Party Systems 1st Edition
This book examines how Australian far-right parties organise and operate to better understand their limited electoral success.
Australian far-right parties have yet to see results comparable to far-right parties in other contexts. Unlike many of their European counterparts that have made significant electoral gains up to and including participation in national governments, the Australian farright parties of the ‘fourth wave’ have experienced relatively poor electoral results. But this does not necessarily mean that Australia is uniquely hostile to far-right politics. Focusing particularly on the 2019 Australian federal election, this book takes an organisational approach to better understand why Australian far-right parties struggle electorally. Through the novel lens of disorganised parties, the author argues that the failure to develop a functioning party organisation has resulted in Australian far-right parties being unable to effectively navigate their political environment. By focusing on disorganisation, this book provides a new perspective for understanding the limited electoral impact of the far right in Australia today, despite favourable conditions like normalised Islamophobia and growing dissatisfaction with mainstream parties. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of party politics, the far right, populism, and Australian politics.
Jordan McSwiney is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His research focuses on the far right, with an interest in their ideology, organising practices, and use of the internet. His work has been published in journals such as the Australian Journal of Political Science, Information, Communication, & Society, and New Media &Society.
Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy
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This series covers academic studies within the broad fields of ‘extremism’ and ‘democracy’, with volumes focusing on adjacent concepts such as populism, radicalism, and ideological/religious fundamentalism. These topics have been considered largely in isolation by scholars interested in the study of political parties, elections, social movements, activism, and radicalisation in democratic settings. A key focus of the series, therefore, is the (inter-)relation between extremism, radicalism, populism, fundamentalism, and democracy. Since its establishment in 1999, the series has encompassed both influential contributions to the discipline and informative accounts for public debate. Works will seek to problematise the role of extremism, broadly defined, within an ever-globalising world, and/or the way social and political actors can respond to these challenges without undermining democratic credentials.
The books encompass two strands:
Routledge Studies in Extremism andDemocracy includes books with an introductory and broad focus which are aimed at students and teachers. These books will be available in hardback and paperback.
Pathways to Violence Against Migrants
Space, Time and Far Right Violence in Sweden 2012–2017
Måns Lundstedt
Out of Hiding
Extremist White Supremacy and How It Can Be Stopped
Kathleen M.Blee, Robert FutrellandPete Simi
Civil Democracy Protection
Success Conditions of Non-Governmental Organisations in Comparison
Editedby Uwe Backes andThomas Lindenberger
Far-Right Political Parties in Australia
Disorganisation and Electoral Failure
Jordan McSwiney
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Extremism-and-Democracy/bookseries/ED
Far-Right Political Parties in Australia
Disorganisation and Electoral Failure
Jordan McSwiney
First published 2024 by Routledge
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BritishLibrary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-53650-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-53715-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-41327-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003413271
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Listoffigures
Listoftables
Listofabbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 The electoral failure of far-right parties in Australia
2 From organisation to disorganisation: A framework for analysis
3 The party on paper: The official story of party governance
4 The party online: How far-right parties organise and mobilise on social media
5 The party in practice: Organisation and campaigns in action
6
Australian far-right parties as disorganised parties
7 Disorganised parties and the future of the Australian far right
Appendix: Digital data and methods
Index
4.1 Australian far-right network, Facebook, 2019
4.2 Australian far-right network, Twitter, 2019
Tables
4.1 Australian far-right Facebook and Twitter handles used for social network analysis
4.2 Qualitative content analysis sample, with the number of posts on Facebook and Twitter by party
Abbreviations
ACP Australian Citizens Party
AEC Australian Electoral Commission
AfD Alternative für Deutschland(Alternative for Germany)
AFP Australia First Party
ALA Australian Liberty Alliance
ALP Australian Labor Party
AO Australia One
CEC Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
FACNP Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party
FN Front National(National Front, France)
FNb Front National(National Front, Belgium)
GAP Great Australian Party
GD ChrysíAvgí(Golden Dawn)
KAP Katter’s Australian Party
LAoL Love Australia or Leave
NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany)
NSN National Socialist Network
NSW New South Wales
PHON Pauline Hanson’s One Nation
RDA Reignite Democracy Australia
RUAP Rise Up Australia Party
SA South Australia
SD Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats)
UKIP United Kingdom Independence Party
VB Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest)
WA Western Australia
YVA Yellow Vest Australia
Acknowledgements
This book developed out of my PhD research, which I undertook at the University of Sydney. I am enormously grateful to my friend, mentor, and PhD supervisor Anika Gauja. I can’t imagine having finished my thesis, let alone turning the project into a book, without Anika’s encouragement, support, and insight throughout. I would like to express my gratitude for the support of my friends and PhD peers Harry, Stu, Eda, and Madison. I also want to thank my PhD examiners, Sarah de Lange and David Art, for their kind and constructive feedback, which was vital to revising and expanding this work.
I am extremely thankful for the love and support of my many friends who encouraged me throughout the PhD and the writing of this book. A special thanks to Eugene, Tom, Kane, Paria, Harry, Horatia, Yvette, Charlie, Minta, Wade, Ben, and Joey. My sincerest gratitude also to the many colleagues who have encouraged me along the way, in particular, Greta Jasser, Kurt Sengul, Kaz Ross, Michael Vaughan, and Rob Manwaring.
I owe a great debt to the hard work of antifascists researchers, particularly Andy Fleming and the White Rose Society. Their tireless work monitoring and exposing Australia’s far right is a constant source of inspiration, and I hope that my research will be of some use to their own.
I want to thank the staff at Routledge and particularly the editors of the Extremism and Democracy series, Caterina Froio, Andrea Pirro, and Stijn van Kessel for their support, and the anonymous
reviewers for their generous and thoughtful engagement with an earlier version of the manuscript.
Much of the writing of this book was completed at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, at the University of Canberra. I am very grateful to have been given the time to work on this book as part of an Australian Research Council supported postdoctoral fellowship as part of the Democratic Resilience: The Public Sphere and Extremist Attacks project (GA138559). I want to express my sincerest thanks to everyone at the Centre for their encouragement and support, especially Wendy, Adele, Lucas, and Maddie for their feedback on the concluding chapter. I would like to give special thanks to Nicole Curato and Selen Ercan. Nicole, thank you for always checking in to see how the work is going, for encouraging me to stick with it, and for helping me keep the project in perspective. Selen, thank you for your encouragement and feedback, from proposal to finished manuscript. Your generosity in reading my work and helping me to refine my ideas has been invaluable. Without your support, I could never have written this book.
Lastly, I want to thank my family. My parents, Lisa and Ross, my brother Zac, and my parents-in-law, Adi and Robert, have been a great source of moral support and encouragement. I can’t imagine having done this without them behind me. Most importantly, thank you to my wife Francesca. For your patience, proofreading, and unwavering support, I am eternally grateful.
1 The electoral failure of farright parties in Australia
DOI: 10.4324/9781003413271-1
In 2016, Australia’s most prominent far-right politician Pauline Hanson, leader of the eponymous Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON) party, was popping champagne outside the Australian parliament, celebrating her own recent election and the imminent confirmation that Donald Trump had been elected President of the United States. According to Hanson, the election of Trump, as well as the successful referendum to leave the European Union in the United Kingdom (UK), had demonstrated that ‘[people] around the world are saying, “we’ve had enough of the establishment”’ (in Le Messurier, 2016).
In the years that followed, several new far-right parties emerged, including the Fraser Anning Conservative National Party (FACNP), Great Australian Party (GAP), and Love Australia or Leave (LAoL). Others, like the Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), Citizens Electoral Council of Australia (CEC), and Rise Up Australia Party (RUAP) were likewise newly confident following PHON’s 2016 election breakthrough which demonstrated that the far right was again electorally viable at the federal level. However, any plans to emulate PHON’s initial success have been repeatedly dashed, first at the 2019 federal election, and again in 2022. Indeed, by the 2020s, several Australian far-right parties had dissolved, while PHON, though retaining a foothold in the Senate and some state parliaments, has persistently underperformed, unable to claw back losses since 2016. This book is an attempt to explain some of these developments, by looking at the role party organisation has played in the electoral failure of the Australian far right.
Far-right parties are among the most researched in political science, with more written on the far right than on all other party families combined (Mudde, 2013, 2016). However, research on farright parties – and the far right more broadly – remains largely Eurocentric (Castelli Gattinara, 2020). The emphasis on the European cases is a product of their electoral gains over the last 20–30 years, with the participation of far-right parties in governments and governing coalitions across Europe (Akkerman et al., 2016; Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2015; Mudde, 2019). By comparison, the electoral performance of Australian far-right parties has been negligible. No Australian far-right party has ever entered government, whether in its own right or as part of a coalition at the national or state and territory level. Nevertheless, the persistence and normalisation of far-right politics and parties despite the limited electoral impact makes Australia a useful case for exploring the relationship between party organisation, persistence, and electoral competitiveness.
Taking up this theme, this book examines the organisation of eight Australian far-right parties that contested the 2019 federal election. This election marks the highpoint of far-right electoral competition and party activity in Australia, as one of three federal elections (2016, 2019, 2022) contested by the far right since it remerged as a meaningful electoral force. Matters of party organisation – the way that these parties cope with problems of collective choice, internal governance, and mobilisation – are key to understanding their viability, not just electorally, but as organisations. More broadly, looking at party organisation, we can better understand the goals, collective behaviour, and modes of participation that sustain or hinder the development of the far right today (Pirro & Castelli Gattinara, 2018).
When I began researching for this book in 2018, the Australian far right was confident in their electoral potential based on several favourable developments. The heady days of the Reclaim Australia protests 1 – the most significant mobilisations of the Australian far right since the late 1990s (Fleming & Mondon, 2018) – had passed.
Australia’s most significant far-right party PHON enjoyed substantial bargaining power on the federal Senate crossbench. Despite poorer than expected results, PHON candidates had also been elected to the Queensland and Western Australian (WA) state parliaments in 2017, and the party was in the process of registering a branch in the state of Victoria. In the years since Reclaim, several other far-right parties had entered the scene. Among them, the ALA, the party wing of the self-described ‘Islam-critical’ Q Society of Australia, was preparing to contest its first election in the state of Victoria in 2018. The Australia First Party (AFP) and LAoL had recently (re)registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). The former PHON Senator Rod Culleton, who split from the party after he was deemed ineligible to stand by the electoral commission, was preparing to launch his new GAP. Another former-PHON Senator, the nowindependent Fraser Anning, had formed an informal voting bloc with the former Liberal Party Senator Cory Bernardi and the rightlibertarian Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm in the hopes of exerting greater rightward pressure on the government. In parallel to these developments, the Australian far right had also began to gain momentum on social media and cultivated enormous audiences in particular on Facebook, with Pauline Hanson’s social media dwarfing her ‘mainstream’ competitors in audience size and interaction. 2 By the time of the 2019 election, Hanson and Anning –who by then had launched the eponymous FACNP – were declared the social media ‘winners’ of federal politics in an investigative report on social media use by Australian politicians (Workman & Trigger, 2019).
However, the overall results of the 2019 federal election for the far right were muted. Taking place on Saturday, May 18, all 151 seats in the House of Representatives were contested, along with 40 of the 76 Senate seats. Eight far-right parties – the Australia First Party, Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party, Great Australian Party, Love Australia or Leave, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Rise Up Australia, and Yellow Vest Australia (formerly the Australian Liberty Alliance) – contested
the election. Between them, they stood a collective 208 candidates, 76 for the Senate and 133 for the House of Representatives (AEC, 2019d). This is the most significant electoral engagement by the far right at any Australian election since federation in 1901.
Expectedly, PHON performed the best of the eight parties. It achieved a little over 1 percent growth in its overall national firstpreference votes in both houses of the Australian parliament, to about 3 percent in the House of Representatives and nearly 5.5 percent in the Senate. Though the party achieved shock results in lower house electorates like Hunter in NSW, where it polled more than 20 percent (AEC, 2019a), the party did not win any lower house seats. After the final count of preferences, a second PHON Senator for Queensland, Malcolm Roberts, was elected. Roberts had previously been elected on the PHON ticket at the 2016 federal election, but he lost his seat during the 2017–2018 parliamentary eligibility crisis. 3 However, PHON Senator for WA, Peter Georgiou, was not re-elected, and so the party’s parliamentary representation remained at two senators at the commencement of the 46th parliament in 2019, down from four at the start of the 45th parliament (2016–2019). While the party boasted of its increased primary vote, much of this can be accounted for by the increase in candidates stood, from 31 in 2016 to 71 in 2019. In fact, the party performed worse in 9 of the 13 lower house seats it contested at both elections (AEC, 2016, 2019b).
Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party recorded the secondbest result of the Australian far right, with just over half a percent of the national first-preference votes across both houses from 70 candidates. Party founder and leader Fraser Anning lost his Senate seat, and with it, the primary source of resources for the party. No other Australian far-right party achieved even half a percent of the first-preference votes (AEC, 2019b, 2019c). Yellow Vest Australia (YVA) stood four Senate candidates (two in both WA and Queensland) and received only 0.02 percent of the first-preference votes. The Rise Up Australia Party (RUAP) faired similarly. It stood 23 candidates (14 in the House, 9 in the Senate) and received 0.1
percent of the national first-preference votes for the House and 0.4 percent for the Senate. The AFP, CEC, GAP, and LAoL each stood between 5 and 16 candidates across the country. None received more than 0.2 percent of the first-preference votes.
Within 18 months, FACNP, RUAP, and YVA had ceased to exist. Claiming that with the re-election of the conservative LiberalNational Coalition Government the RUAP’s job was done, the party dissolved shortly after the election, though intending to persist as an advocacy group. Yellow Vest Australia voluntarily deregistered with the AEC in September 2020 after the party’s parent organisation, the Q Society of Australia, was dissolved due to a lack of funding and fears that changes to religious discrimination laws could open them to ‘hostile litigation’ (Maley, 2020). Despite Fraser Anning’s pledge to ‘continue to fight’ (senatorfraseranning, 2019), FACNP was also deregistered in September 2020 after Anning relocated to the United States. The assent of the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Party Registration Integrity) Bill (2021), which increased the minimum membership requirements for non-parliamentary parties from 500 to 1,500 members resulted in the AFP and LAoL being removed from the register of political parties in early 2021. Their removal means that they can no longer contest elections, making them political parties in name only.
For those that remained – PHON, GAP, and the CEC (now the Australian Citizens Party [ACP]) – the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to revitalise their flagging organisations. Large protests against government responses to the outbreak, namely vaccine mandates and lockdowns, were organised in several cities around Australia. The most significant of these, the ‘Convoy to Canberra’ (31 January–13 February 2022), inspired by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests, drew tens-of-thousands of protesters to the Australian capital, culminating in a massive rally outside of Parliament House on February 12. Australian far-right parties courted this budding self-described ‘freedom’ movement. For example, PHON and GAP began to emphasise vaccine scepticism and the rejection of health measures like mask-wearing and lockdowns, while embracing Trump-esque ‘China virus’ rhetoric and the Wuhan
lab leak theory. Great Australian Party founder Rod Culleton spoke at the main rally on February 12, which was attended by PHON Senator Pauline Hanson, who encouraged her social media followers to support the protest (Cosenza & Raphael, 2022). Also in attendance were MPs from the governing Liberal-National Coalition Gerrard Rennick and George Christensen, 4 and former Liberal Party MP Craig Kelly, who had defected to the United Australia Party in 2021. However, the protests of the freedom movement did not translate into a meaningful boost in the far right’s electoral position. The 2022 federal election was overall another failure for the far right. Neither the ACP nor GAP attracted even 1 percent of the national firstpreference votes either the Senate or the House of Representatives. New far-right parties that had emerged out of the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine mandate movement like Australia One (OA) and Reignite Democracy Australia (RDA) failed to register in time for the election and so were unable to stand candidates. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation stood more candidates than ever before, with 149 candidates covering almost every electorate. It achieved a small overall growth in its lower house result, up 1.89 percent to 4.96 percent of the national first-preference votes, though much of this is attributable to the increase in candidates. One Nation’s result in the Senate, however, declined by 1.11 percent to 4.29 percent. Early indications suggested Hanson would even lose her spot in the Senate. Though she narrowly held on, the poor result produced a flurry of media commentary claiming that the ‘writing was on the wall’ (Wilson, 2022) and that the result marked the ‘beginning of the end’ of PHON (Atfield, 2022).
Research puzzle
The 2019 Australian federal election was the high-water mark for far-right electoral competition in Australia. Despite an unprecedented showing, the result for the far right was minimal, with only PHON achieving above 1 percent of the national first-preference votes across both houses of parliament (AEC, 2019b, 2019c). In this respect, the 2019 federal election is the point that the widely
remarked ‘rise’ of the far right in Australia collapsed, at least electorally. But how did Australia get here? Unlike many of their European counterparts that have made significant electoral gains up to and including participation in national governments, contemporary Australian far-right parties have experienced relatively poor electoral results and have generally failed to build sustainable party organisations. More to the point, if most countries are said to have a ‘fertile breeding ground’ for the far right (Mudde, 2019, p. 174), why have Australian far-right parties performed so poorly compared to some of their European cousins?
This book is an attempt to answer these questions from the perspective of party organisation. Although we know a good deal about the Australian far right’s discourse (e.g. Miller, 2017; Mondon, 2013; Sengul, 2020) and who votes for far right and why (e.g. Gibson et al., 2002; Goot & Watson, 2001; Kefford & Ratcliff, 2021; Markus, 2019), the organisation of far-right parties is comparatively understudied in Australia. Analysing how far-right parties organise can help to understand the motivations and modes of participation sustaining far-right activity. By approaching far-right party organising in a holistic way and treating social media as an important part of their overall activity, this book also explores the role of the internet in shaping the everyday life of party organisations. As well as furthering our understanding of far-right party organising in its own right, this book sheds light on their limited electoral competitiveness and party sustainability, and what this means for the far right today. In doing so, my aim is not only to critically analyse the future electoral potential of far-right parties but also the wider developments in far right organising in Australia.
In what follows, I set the scene for far-right electoral competition in Australia through an engagement with existing approaches to understanding variation in far-right party success and failure. These approaches are generally organised around the factors associated with demand and supply, with the demand-side emphasising factors that may generate support for far-right parties, and supply-side explanations highlighting the mechanisms that allow far-right parties to harness this demand. While demand and supply factors are not so
neatly disentangled in practice, they provide a useful means for structuring our thinking about what matters in determining not only far-right electoral performance, but why particular modes of far-right activism or discourses prevail where others remain marginal. In doing so, I show that the Australian far right operates under conditions generally favourable to far-right electoral performance, including growing voter dissatisfaction with ‘mainstream’ parties, a largely cooperative commercial media environment, and the normalisation of Islamophobia in everyday life. As such, I argue that we also need to look inside the parties at their organisation to fully understand why they fail to make electoral gains in Australia.
Demand-side approaches to far-rightparty success
Demand-side approaches are concerned with the changing needs and values (demands) of the electorate in contemporary democracies. These approaches are generally rooted in some version of modernisation theory, suggesting that broad structural developments and social change have created new demands along socio-economic or sociocultural cleavages. That is, some portion of the population feel ‘left behind’ by economic recession, increased immigration, globalisation, and neoliberal reforms. These changes fuel discontent with the political consensus, creating demand for farright party alternatives (Betz, 1994; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2007). Along with structural economic changes, cultural transformation and value change have been seen as increasing demand for the far right. The classic ‘silent counter revolution’ thesis advanced by Ignazi (1992) suggests that the (re)emergence of the far right in contemporary societies is a reaction to new values system and the prominence of post-material issues such as identity and the environment (see also: Minkenberg, 2000). The traditional cleavages that had ‘frozen’ party systems were becoming become unstuck, and with them, new axes of party competition were opening up (Mair,
1997). The demand for political alternatives opened new niches for far-right parties to attempt to fill (Betz, 1994).
As a settler colonial society, the Australian nation state was built on the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. From its inception in 1901, the Australian state has had a racist definition of belonging. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not counted towards Australia’s population until 1967, and it was not until 1984 that they gained full equality with other Australian electors (though optional electoral enrolment for federal elections had been introduced for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 1962). Immigration was likewise explicitly racialised, with the immigration of those deemed not white severely curtailed under the White Australia Policy 5 until its repeal in 1973 (Jupp, 2007). The exclusionary nature of Australian belonging did not end with the repeal of the White Australia Policy or the extension of personhood and the voting franchise to Indigenous people. Rather, this legacy continues to inform debates around Australian identity today in ways that are amenable to the far right’s exclusionary agenda.
This has predominantly been felt in debates around immigration and asylum and questions about multiculturalism. The mainstreaming of a punitive border regime and anti-immigrant discourses in Australia has provided fertile ground for the far right. This is because, though matching far-right parties in key areas like immigration or multiculturalism may be intended to mitigate their electoral potential, it also increases the salience of these issues and normalises the demands of the far right (Mondon & Winter, 2020). Australia’s major parties – the centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) and centre-right Liberal-National Coalition parties – have come to bipartisan support on asylum seeker policy and immigration policy broadly in line with the demands of Australian far-right parties like PHON (Wager et al., 2022).
Although the introduction of mandatory detention of maritime asylum seeker arrivals predates PHON, Australian governments have taken an increasingly restrictive approach since Hanson’s first
election in 1996. Asylum seeker policy underwent a brief period of liberalism during the late 2000s under the Rudd ALP government. However, this was reverted in favour of more hard-line policy following the election of the Abbott Coalition Government in 2013 and the launch of Operation Sovereign Borders, an Australian Defence Force-led border operation to limit maritime asylum seeker arrivals. The ongoing operation includes the turnback of boats carrying asylum seekers, detention in offshore processing centres, and a limited regional resettlement program, which has served to criminalise seeking asylum in Australia and entrench the politics of race and hegemony of whiteness (Ndhlovu, 2020; van Berlo, 2015). Since PHON’s electoral breakthrough in 2016, asylum seeker policy has increasingly hardened, with reduction to financial support for asylum seekers, and expanded ministerial powers to revoke refugee status and indefinitely detain refugees (Wager et al., 2022).
The hardening of asylum seeker policy has occurred alongside the proliferation of more pronounced anti-immigration discourses in Australia. This has resulted in a restriction of the availability of temporary skilled migration visas to ensure, as Liberal Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull put it, ‘that Australian jobs are filled by Australians’ (2017). Likewise, cuts to the permanent migration intake ceiling have echoed far-right claims about population growth and overcrowding with Scott Morrison, then Minister for Immigration, claiming that ‘Australians in our biggest cities are concerned about population. They are saying: Enough, enough, enough. The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full’ (2018). Though the desire among electors to reduce the level of immigration has fallen off since spiking at the 2019 federal election (Cameron & McAllister, 2022), such claims have not been limited to the right of Australian politics. In an opinion piece published in the newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, ALP Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and opposition spokesperson on immigration Kristina Keneally asked whether ‘we want migrants to return [to Australia] in the same numbers? The answer is no’ (2020). Echoing the rhetoric of Australia’s far right, Keneally argued that the closure of Australia’s borders in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to
‘restart’ Australia’s immigration program to transform it to one that would put ‘Australian workers first’ (2020). Pauline Hanson welcomed the article, claiming that it vindicated her own positions on immigration (Clench, 2020).
This has coincided with renewed criticism of multiculturalism and rising levels of Islamophobia and Sinophobia in Australia. The revival of Australia’s far right through the Reclaim Australia protests was, in large part, catalysed by the rise of Islamic State and the Lindt Café siege in Sydney in December 2014 (Sparrow, 2019). It was not long before Coalition PM Tony Abbott was calling for a ‘revolution within Islam’ and questioning the sincerity of Australia’s Muslim leaders in working to address violent extremism (in Cox, 2015). His government even launched an inquiry into food certification in 2015, partly motivated by suggestions from the likes of Pauline Hanson and National Party whip George Christensen that halal certification was being used to fund terrorism. By the time of Hanson’s First Speech following her election in 2016, polling found that one in two Australians agreed with a ban on Muslim immigration (Essential, 2016). Islamophobia has gone from a ‘fringe element’ to a ‘position of respectability’ in Australia, normalised not only by political and media actors but by academics, teachers, social workers, and law enforcement (Poynting & Briskman, 2018). Even the horrors of the 2019 Christchurch massacre were not enough to temper Islamophobia in Australia, with a significant increase in the number of Islamophobic incidents reported in the aftermath of the attack (Iner, 2022), just two months before the 2019 federal election.
Anti-Asian sentiment has a long legacy in Australia, not only among the far right (Peucker & Smith, 2019; Smith, 2020) but within the project of Australian nation building more generally, with the restriction of immigration from Asia a key motivation for the White Australia Policy (Jayasuriya et al., 2003; Walker, 1999). There has however been a marked rise in Sinophobia in Australia in recent years, fuelled by China’s economic rise and increased assertiveness in the region (Ang & Colic-Peisker, 2022; Ang & Mansouri, 2023), as well as popular narratives regarding Chinese nationals pricing Australian’s out of the domestic housing market (Rogers et al.,
2017). The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated this, with highly inflammatory interventions from not only the far right but influential sections of Australian media, linking the pandemic to multiculturalism, and the Australian Chinese community in particular (Sengul, 2021b; Sun, 2021). The most explicit came in a series of articles in the Herald Sun, Australia’s most read newspaper, written by one of Australia’s most prominent conservative columnists Andrew Bolt. Bolt claimed that the virus ‘thrives in multiculturalism’ (Bolt, 2020a) and that ‘multiculturalism made [the state of] Victoria vulnerable’ to Covid-19 (2020b). It is worth noting that Bolt has been at the centre of several racism controversies throughout his career, including one sparked by a 2018 article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Australia’s second most read paper, entitled ‘The Foreign Invasion’, which claimed ‘Australia is being swamped by non-Englishspeaking immigrants who refuse to assimilate and accept our values’ (Bolt, 2018a). The article was published alongside his regular column in the HeraldSun, which claimed that ‘there is no “us” anymore, as a tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away what’s left of our national identity’ and lamented rising numbers of Chinese and Muslim migrants in Australia (Bolt, 2018b). While these examples may seem extreme to readers unfamiliar with Australian media, they are unfortunately just the most obvious (and among the most widely read) examples from a media landscape firmly grounded in racism (Elias et al., 2021).
Such policies and developments in public opinion, and the discursive conditions which shape and enact them, are favourable to the far right in that they increase the salience and legitimacy of some of their key demands, such as immigration restrictions (Bale & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2021; Brown et al., 2021). In 2019 the number of Australian electors who believed that immigration had gone ‘too far’ spiked to 45 percent. Although the importance of immigration to vote decision has since declined, in 2019, 44 percent of Australian voters rated it ‘quite important’ and a further 35 percent rated it ‘extremely important’ (Cameron & McAllister, 2022). So, while negative attitudes towards immigrants have steadily declined in Australia, in 2019 36 percent of the electorate still believed
immigrants increased crime, and 31 percent believed that they took jobs away from Australians (Cameron & McAllister, 2022). At the same time, trust in government and satisfaction with democracy has drastically declined in Australia, reaching its lowest levels since the 1970s in 2019 with only 25 percent of electors believing that those in government can be trusted, and 41 percent not satisfied with democracy (Cameron & McAllister, 2022). The decline in trust is largely the result of dissatisfaction with the major parties, the ALP and the Coalition (Cameron, 2020), and so corresponds to increased demands for political alternatives. Unsurprisingly then, political distrust has been a ‘significant determinant’ in electoral support for minor parties, and in particular, Australian far-right parties (Jiang & Ma, 2020). As research has shown, Australian far-right parties are not creating these attitudes so much as aggregating the discontentment already present in Australian society (Kefford & Ratcliff, 2021; see also Markus, 2019). But this potential demand for far-right politics does not automatically translate into its emergence nor success at elections. While the demand-side may explain a potential electorate for the far right, it cannot explain who joins or votes for them, nor cross-national variation in performance (Art, 2011; Carter, 2005; Mudde, 2007).
Supply-side approaches to far-rightparty success
Supply-side approaches focus on the parties and party systems themselves. The role of political–institutional factors, such as party competition and the emergence of electoral niches, issue ownership, and the relative openness or closure of institutional political systems, highlights the external supply-side factors that may allow a far-right party to gain ground. For example, the convergence of traditional parties is said to have opened new political opportunities on both the left and right wings for new political entrepreneurs to exploit (Kitschelt & McGann, 1997). Far-right parties may use this as a means of presenting themselves as legitimate alternatives to those
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Bonnie May
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Title: Bonnie May
Author: Louis Dodge
Illustrator: Reginald Bathurst Birch
Release date: September 12, 2023 [eBook #71617]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916
Credits: Sonya Schermann, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Bonnie May
She assumed a slightly careless air and looked airily at imaginary objects. (Page 144.)
Bonnie May
By
Louis Dodge Illustrations
by Reginald Birch
A strolling player comes
C , 1916,
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published August, 1916
TO
THE LITTLE NEW ENGLAND GIRL
WHO (IN COMPANY WITH HER MOTHER) MADE FRIENDS WITH AN AMERICAN SOLDIER ON A JUNE DAY IN 1898 IN THE MARKET-PLACE IN HONOLULU AND PROMISED
“I
SHALL NEVER FORGET YOU”
XXVI.A G A
XXVII.W H A
XXVIII.A C W L
XXIX.T M S
XXX.“T
Illustrations
She assumed a slightly careless air and looked airily at imaginary objects
“I thought everybody knew me,” she said. “I’m Bonnie May” 8
“Good evening,” she said, as if she were addressing strangers 28
“You seem a little old for the part,” she suggested 54 A most extraordinary ancient man stood there watching her 82
“Enter the heroine!” was the child’s greeting 162
“They look as if they were quite happy—and didn’t care to be anything else” 180
“I don’t know what you’re getting at!” he exclaimed. “If you’ve got anything to say, why not say it and be done with it?” 196
“Dear child, do try to love me, won’t you?” 252
Thomason jerked his needle through a tough place and pulled it out to arm’s length 292
“Look at them!” she screamed. “Look! Look!” 318
She had put her arms about the trembling old lady’s neck, and for the moment they were both silent
Bonnie May
Only women understand children thoroughly, but if a mere man keeps very quiet and humbles himself properly, and refrains from talking down to his superiors, children will sometimes be good to him and let him see what they think about the world.
R K .
Bonnie May
CHAPTER I
THE INTRUSION OF AN ACTRESS
S up in the gallery an usher opened a window Instantly a shaft of sunlight pierced the dark interior of the theatre. It created a mote-filled aerial avenue across a vast space and came to an end in a balcony box.
As if it were part of a general theatrical scheme it served as a search-light and brought into brilliant relief the upper part of a child’s body. There were blue eyes made lustrous by dark lashes; hair the color of goldenrod, which fell forward over one shoulder and formed a kind of radiant vehicle above for the support of a butterfly of blue ribbon. There were delicate red lips, slightly parted.
The child leaned forward in her place and rested her elbows on the box railing. Her chin nestled in a little crotch, formed by her two hands. She would have resembled one of Rubens’s cherubs, if Rubens hadn’t conceived his cherubs on quite such a vulgar plane.
It was so that Baron saw her during a brief interval. Then the window up in the gallery was closed, and darkness reigned in the theatre again. The child disappeared as Marguerite always disappears before Faust has obtained more than a seductive glimpse of her.
Baron wondered who she was. She was so close to him that he could have touched her. He wondered how she could have slipped into the box without his seeing or hearing her. The lights had been on when he took his seat, and at that time he had occupied the box alone. She must have crept in with the cautiousness of a kitten; or perhaps she had come under cover of the noise of applause.
Then he forgot her. All sorts of people were likely to come into a playhouse during a matinée performance, he reflected.
Dawn was merging into day—in the play The purple of a makebelieve sky turned to lavender, and to pink. The long, horizontal streaks of color faded, and in the stronger light now turned on the stage a gypsy woman who seemed to have been sleeping under a hedge came into view—a young creature, who patted back a yawn which distorted her pretty mouth. Other persons of the drama appeared.
Baron succumbed to the hypnotic power of the theatre: to the beguiling illusions of the stage, with its beautiful voices; the relaxed musicians, unobtrusively disinterested; the dark, indistinct rows of alert forms down in the parquet. Despite what he was pleased to believe was a distinguished indifference in his manner, he was passionately fond of plays, amazingly susceptible to their appeal.
The act ended; light flooded the theatre. Baron’s glance again fell upon the intruder who had come to share his box with him. The child really might have been mistaken for an exquisite bit of architectural ornamentation, if she had been placed in a niche in the big proscenium arch. Color and pose and outline all suggested the idea. But now her bearing changed. As she had been absorbed in the meaning of the play, now she became equally interested in the audience, rising in long rows from parquet to gallery. She looked almost aggressively from point to point, with a lack of selfconsciousness that was quite remarkable.
People in the audience were noticing her, too; and Baron felt suddenly resentful at being so conspicuously perched before hundreds of eyes, in company with a child he knew nothing about.
She appeared to have scrutinized “the house” to her satisfaction. Then she turned as if she were slightly bored, and gazed with perfect frankness into Baron’s eyes.
“Sold out,” she said, as if she were gratified.
Baron did not clearly grasp the fact that she was referring to “the house.” A question as to her age occurred to him, but this he could not answer. She must be absurdly young—a baby; yet he noted that
she had gained command of a glance that was almost maturely searching and complacent. She was not the least bit agitated.
When, presently, she stood up on her chair to obtain a general view of the audience, Baron frowned. She was really a brazen little thing, he reflected, despite her angelic prettiness. And he had a swift fear that she might fall. Looking at her uneasily, he realized now that she was quite tawdrily dressed.
His first impression of her had been one of beauty unmarred. (He had not seen immediately that the blue butterfly which rode jauntily on her crown was soiled.) Now a closer inspection discovered a fantastic little dress which might have been designed for a fancy ball —and it was quite old, and almost shabby. Yet its gay colors, not wholly faded, harmonized with some indefinable quality in the little creature, and the whole garment derived a grace from its wearer which really amounted to a kind of elfish distinction.
She spoke again presently, and now Baron was struck by the quality of her voice. It was rather full for a little girl’s voice—not the affected pipe of the average vain and pretty child. There was an oddly frank, comrade-like quality in it.
“Do you know what I’ve got a notion to do?” she inquired.
Baron withdrew farther within himself. “I couldn’t possibly guess,” he responded. He shook his head faintly, to indicate indifference. She leaned so far over the edge of the box that he feared again for her safety.
“I think you might possibly fall,” he said. “Would you mind sitting down?”
She did as he suggested with a prompt and sweet spirit of obedience. “I’m afraid I was careless,” she said. Then, looking over more guardedly, she added: “I’ve got a notion to drop my programme down on that old duck’s bald head.”
Baron looked down into the parquet. An elderly gentleman, conspicuously bald-headed, sat just beneath them. Something about the shining dome was almost comical. Yet he turned to the child coldly. He marvelled that he had not detected a pert or self-
