A recent change in media attention has landed Pauline Hanson in the fold of a warm public embrace. Having already secured a further season on Channel Seven’s Dancing With the Stars, a glossy spread in January’s Women’s Weekly and a celebrity seat on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, she also has publishers paying up-front for her book on the fraud allegations, due out later this year.
Hanson says:
This is the start of a different phase of my life. It really is … Before, mainly because of the way the media portrayed me, people saw me as a hard and uncompromising woman, but now, on the dance floor, they have seen me in a totally different way.
The caprices of market-driven media have seen stranger things occur, particularly given the obvious novelty and ratings appeal of having Pauline Hanson take her seat opposite Eddie McGuire. But there is more to this development than capitalistic opportunism.
Magazines and commercial television choose whom they give celebrity favour to — a choice that has precisely the effect Hanson describes above: the recipient gets their entire public image made over. As a national culture, we are seeing the media accept and admire the same person who not so long ago featured as a vilified racist, and thus any acceptance and admiration for Hanson in the viewing/electing/consuming public is reinforced and multiplied.
This change in angle reveals a nexus that exists between the market, popular entertainment and politics that is often overlooked. It means alongside the creeping moral conservativism of our government, a person chosen to become one of our ‘brightest stars’ can also be the symbol of some of the most far-Right ideas since White Australia.
The connection between John Howard and Pauline Hanson has frequently been noted over the last nine years, despite attempts by the Liberal Party to distance itself from her clumsy treatment of delicate subjects. But if we consider the prime-time TV slot as a political space, we see that her reputed retirement from politics has not dissolved this connection but broadened its social reach. Her new, prolific and glamourised public presence can tell us much about our entertainment media and our current collective values.
For now, it seems the Australian public are welcoming the beliefs of both Hanson and Howard with ever-widening arms.
Susie Elliott is assistant production editor for Arena Magazine
