How Pauline Hanson kicked satire out the back door

It’s an unnerving thing to find oneself agreeing with Pauline Hanson, but here we are.

But at least there’s some solace that, in doing so, there’s an opportunity to remind our dear readers of the Queensland senator’s history with satire – and the sheer hypocrisy it exposes.

Pauline Hanson hasn’t always been a fan of satire. Just ask Pauline Pantsdown.Credit: Jamie Brown

Late last week, lawyers for Robert Irwin sent a cease-and-desist letter to the production studio behind Hanson’s Please Explain series, uploaded to her social media. They claimed the latest edition, featuring Irwin’s likeness – and Bluey, to boot – was defamatory and deceptively used his image.

In response, the One Nation leader told Irwin to “lighten up” and suggested his late father would have had a “good laugh” about the whole thing.

“It’s satirical; have we become so precious that we are actually looking at ourselves all the time without having a joke?” she said on Monday.

“Where’s the Australia that I grew up in, where you could have a laugh and a joke at yourself?”

Hear hear, Pauline! Satire is an important part of a free democratic society, and must be protected, whether one agrees with it or not – especially if not.

Now, Pauline, if only you could have had a word with the 1990s version of yourself. Australian taxpayers might have saved a bundle.

Those of us with long enough memories will recall the umbrage Hanson took at a little musical ditty, released by Sydney drag queen Pauline Pantsdown (aka Simon Hunt) in 1997, called I’m a Back Door Man.

“I’m a backdoor man for the Ku Klux Klan with very horrendous plans,” the song depicts Hanson as saying, through spliced and rearranged recordings of her voice.

Pauline Pantsdown, also known as Simon Hunt, in 1998.Credit: Stuart Davidson

“I’m a very caring potato,” it adds, just to avoid any confusion.

Crass? Certainly. Funny? That’s subjective. Satire? 100 per cent.

On that note, this is what Pantsdown had to say about it at the time: “I think we are just showing that the true Aussie satirical spirit is alive and kicking.”

Sounds pretty similar to Hanson’s comments this week defending her video, doesn’t it? Both Paulines singing from the same hymn sheet, decades apart.

But ’90s Hanson was so enraged at the lampooning in Pantsdown’s song that she successfully sued to have the song banned in her home state.

Pauline Hanson and her legal team outside the Brisbane Supreme Court in 1998, after winning an injunction to prevent the song airing.Credit: Dean Sewell

A group of three Queensland judges – headed by future state governor Paul de Jersey, no less – banned the song from the state’s airwaves, with the ABC (the song was on heavy rotation on Triple J) taking it all the way to the High Court.

“If this judgment is allowed to stand uncorrected ... then it would make examples of political satire extremely difficult,” Bob Mulholland QC, for the ABC, argued in the High Court.

But it was to no avail.

Sadly for satirists everywhere, the High Court refused the ABC’s application for special leave to appeal the ban in 1999.

“Any reasonable listener would not accept that Pauline Hanson believes she is a potato,” Pantsdown said at the time, in defence of her now-infamous song.

That Hanson feels she can tell Irwin, who rightly or wrongly feels defamed by the video, to “lighten up” when she fought so hard to stifle satire aimed at her is as sanctimonious as it is unsurprising.

Hanson successfully fought against satire aimed at her in the 1990s. Now, she is vowing to fight for her right to satirise others.

She can’t have it both ways.

Perhaps it’s time for another appeal of the Back Door Man decision. If Hanson was serious about being a defender of satire, she would not object.