Why doesn’t Hanson’s free speech extend to kids?
THE One Nation leader is all for saying what you think when it suits her agenda, but when it comes to a nine-year-old questioning the national anthem it’s a different story, writes Seb Starcevic.
HAS Pauline Hanson ever actually listened to the national anthem?
Based on her smear against a nine-year-old girl from Brisbane who ― quelle horreur ― refused to stand for the national anthem at a school assembly, it would seem not.
In a bizarre, rambling video posted to Twitter and Facebook earlier this week, the One Nation leader called Harper Nielsen a “brat” and said she’d like to “give her a kick up the backside”.
“I’ve got no problems with standing your ground, and you know I do. But we’re talking about a child who has no idea of what is history, what’s happening, what we should do, and what we need to do, to pull everyone together,” she raved, adding, “No, take her out of the school.”
Nielsen, who is in Year 4, made national news this week after it was revealed that she sat during her school’s national anthem because she feels it “disregards the Indigenous Australians who were here before us for over 50,000 years”.
Given the uproar we’ve seen this week, you’d think Nielsen is the first Australian to have ever taken issue with the national anthem, but history shows us that’s simply not true.
In 2017, boxer Anthony Mundine called the anthem “racist”, and earlier this week expanded on his original comment by posting on social media that it’s a “white supremacist song”.
Two years earlier in 2015, renowned opera singer and Indigenous leader Deborah Cheetham declined an offer to sing Advance Australia Fair at the AFL Grand Final because of its failure to recognise Indigenous people.
And back in 2001, Nationals Senator Sandy Macdonald simply called the anthem “boring”.
Whatever your thoughts on the national anthem, the benefit of living in a more-or-less liberal democracy is that you’re allowed to air them, preferably without being threatened with violence.
How ironic, then, that the woman who has spent her political career styling herself as an embattled defender of free speech is sent into spluttering paroxysms of rage at the mere thought of a child excusing herself from nationalistic rhapsodising.
But then again, the double-standards Hanson extended to Yassmin Abdel-Magied over her comments on Anzac Day; her threat of taking legal action against Buzzfeed Australia after it questioned the employment status of one of her media advisers in 2015, and her injunction to stop the ABC airing drag performer Pauline Pantsdown’s 1998 cult dance hit I’m a Back Door Man indicate that Hanson’s attitude towards free speech mirrors her views on religious diversity.
Time and time again, Hanson has made it clear her commitment to protecting free speech only extends to speech she agrees with. Anything less is met with dummy-spitting, lawsuits and empty threats, even when the culprit is a nine-year-old.
Perhaps it’s time that the Senator takes another listen to the anthem she so patriotically clings to, particularly the line of “for we are young and free”.
Because until then, she’s nothing but a hypocrite demonising a child.
Seb Starcevic is a RendezView columnist.
Originally published as Why doesn’t Hanson’s free speech extend to kids?