Having met Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson, Pauline Hanson is deploying their rhetoric in a country with a very different history of immigration
In a 1950 essay, the critic AA Phillips wrote of a “cultural cringe” in which insecure Australians looked to Britain for instruction. Today, some Australians are championing far-right British actors and importing their visions of doom to Australia.
In June, the former Australian Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, which is organised around the idea of “renewing” western civilisation. “Sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures,” said Abbott, “[is] the surest and swiftest way … to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian foundational ethos (which is actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere).” Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff, now a Sky News Australia commentator, said: “You are a petri dish … [on] multiculturalism and radical Islam, you are where we don’t want to go.”
