James Campbell: Hanson’s fancy dress show was pointless politics of fear

PAULINE Hanson’s entry to the Senate dressed in a burqa was like a Sam Newman stunt on The Footy Show, writes James Campbell.

One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson. Picture: AAP

PAULINE Hanson’s entry to the Senate dressed in a burqa was like a Sam Newman stunt on The Footy Show.

PAULINE HANSON TURNS UP TO PARLIAMENT IN A BURQA

SUSIE O’BRIEN: BURQA STUNT ONLY PROVED SENATOR WRONG

ANDREW BOLT: WORRYING RESPONSE TO PAULINE’S BURQA STUNT

Back in the days when people still watched it, Sam would arrive on the set in fancy dress, to ecstatic applause.

The dress-up never led to anything. There was no point to it. In the minds of The Footy Show’s producers and its audience, it was apparently an event in itself — and a hilarious one at that — to have Sam dressed as a chicken.

Hanson’s effort on Thursday was similarly pointless. We already know she wants to ban the burqa. Wearing one did not advance her argument.

It was a stunt, plain and simple, and should, some Coalition senators said later, have been ruled out of order by Senate president Stephen Parry under the “no props” rule.

Pauline Hanson sits in Parliament wearing a burqa. Picture: AAP

Hanson was quickly out of her burqa and back to her usual malevolent self, just as Sam would be back in a suit after the first ad break.

All of this is not to say that there aren’t plenty of reasons to object to the burqa.

There are, not least that it erases the women who wear it from the public space.

More importantly, you would have to have been living under a rock for the past twenty years not to have grave concerns about how compatible Islam is with the secular Western world.

But Hanson’s emphasis on the security threat that the burqa apparently represents gives her away her real agenda: fanning fear and hatred which, let’s be blunt, has been her core business since she began trading in 1996.

One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson takes off the burqa during Question Time at Parliament House. Picture: AAP

Back then, she was selling fear of an Asian invasion.

But she retired that product a few years ago as the public moved on to worrying about Muslims.

Not that she wouldn’t like to relaunch the line if she got the chance.

Referring to her notorious maiden speech of 20 years ago, with its dire warnings about being “swamped with Asians”, Hanson told the Senate last year “it was relevant then and it remains relevant today”.

Truly, she and her party are what the Communists were to the 1950s and ’60s — a parasite which attaches itself to good causes and gives them a bad name.

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