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This is the written version of a paper given at the Conference in Honour of Robert Manne: Thinking for Yourself on the 1st of March 2013.Unlike many of its western counterparts, Australia has been spared powerful surges of the extreme right throughout its history. While the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw European democracies threatened time and time again by movements relying on ethno-exclusivism and thriving on capitalist crises, Australia suffered only relatively weak extreme right bursts whose impact remained marginal.Even the rise of the One Nation Party in 1996, as sudden as it was impressive, showed the limits in the Australian context for organisations which have proved long-lasting in Europe.Pauline Hanson’s party proved little more than a flash in the pan, a weak and amateurish attempt to ride a growing wave of discontent, and ultimately failed to take root in the country’s political system.This brief outline could bear a simple conclusion: Australia must be immune to the extreme right. Its democratic system must be strong enough to prevent such a rise or to quash it before it does too much damage. In fact I have argued elsewhere that it is not their strength and resilience in the face of the extreme right which achieved such a result, but rather the capacity of mainstream Australian politics to more readily, openly and officially absorb the values promoted by the extreme right than its European counterparts.Australian mainstream politicians suffocated the extreme right, not merely by borrowing some key ideas of the extreme right, but by negating entirely its ability to appear as an alternative to the power in place. More particularly, by implementing policies of ethno-exclusivism, and advertising them as such, the Australian ‘establishment’ removed from the extreme right its most appealing feature.This paper discusses the revival of exclusionary politics in Australia in the 1980s, culminating in the rise of One Nation in the late 1990s. It highlights that despite the disappearance of Pauline Hanson’s party, the multicultural consensus was broken and the politics of exclusion were allowed to remain centre-stage.Reaction returns in the 80sAs the novelty of multiculturalism and the positive image of such a powerful and progressive change slowly wore off in the 1980s, a reaction began to take shape.The first attempt at mainstreaming an ethno-exclusivist feeling after can be found in 1984 (a tribute to Orwell perhaps?). At a small meeting , University of Melbourne Professor Geoffrey Blainey accused the government of granting entry to too many Asian immigrants and, as a result, putting Australia at risk.While the story could have ended there and Blainey retracted what may have been an impulsive statement, he chose instead to launch a campaign to promote his views on the radio, in newspapers and eventually in a book, All for Australia. He argued that he had always expressed his satisfaction at the abandonment of the White Australia policy; his opposition to current policies was therefore not racist, he merely feared that the integration of immigrants would be a failure.Cleverly, Blainey based his neo-racist argument on cultural grounds and incompatibility, rather than on the question of race. His problem with Asian immigration was not with Asians themselves, but with the consequences of their arrival; Asians were not lesser people, just different. For Blainey, the case was simple: it was a matter of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. His ‘Them’ was in fact twofold: the invaders and the enemies from the inside. Immigrants were not the only ones to blame for the state of the economy and for street violence; the elite shared the responsibility, since they had been selling Australia out.Despite creating a major controversy in elite circles, Blainey’s enterprise did not ultimately succeed in bringing the immigration issue back to the forefront of politics. While both shadow immigration minister Michael Hodgman and Blainey himself argued that the Coalition could win many marginal seats with the immigration issue, Liberal leader Andrew Peacock thought otherwise; ‘it was clear that rank and file Liberal opinion [...] rejected any racial element in the policy’.Blainey did however open the door for other populists by attacking a conspiratorial elite and becoming a martyr for the cause of the people.Hugh Morgan’s attempts resembled Blainey’s but were aimed at the indigenous people of Australia; his agenda was far more precise though, and as such he was was much more successful in achieving his goals. The director of Australian National Opinion Polls said in 1987 that the campaign Morgan led against land rights was ‘the most brilliant public relations effort of the decade’; by the end of the campaign, national opposition to land rights had grown from 35% to 75%. Fearful of electoral repercussions, prime minister Hawke backed down on his proposed programme and announced that the national land rights legislation could be limited to a set of principles.While Morgan’s arguments or intentions were not always concordant with Blainey’s, and while neither can be described as an extreme right advocate, they helped to (re)normalise the use of populism in Australia.Hansonism: the extreme right’s victory or business as usual?Yet it would be another ten years before the populist wave swept over Australian politics.Pauline Hanson and her One Nation emerged at time when a convergence towards populist politics was taking place in most western countries.Hanson’s views contained all the elements usually found in extreme right propaganda, the most obvious being the stigmatisation of weak minorities, Aborigines and immigrants, and the victimisation of the well-off majority, the white Anglo-Saxons. In a typical populist manner, she also implied that these minorities did not act alone, but with the help of politicians and the elite, the loathed intelligentsia.Not surprisingly, in her Maiden Speech, Hanson presented herself as the real representative of the people. As a champion of ‘real’ representative democracy, the ‘fish and chip shop lady’ was elected to force ‘some of these economists [...] to get their heads out of their textbooks and get a job in the real world’.In June 1998, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, in its first electoral battle in Queensland, received 22.7% of the first preference vote, becoming the second largest party in Queensland, behind the Australian Labor Party. Three years later, the party barely managed to remain above 1% in the federal election, and in March 2009 only obtained 0.4% of the vote in the Queensland state election.While the long-lasting success of the amateur One Nation Party was always unlikely due to Australia’s particular politics, and would indeed have been an anomaly, the rise of the extreme right was inevitable in the Australian context of the mid-1990s, a time that Paul Kelly termed ‘the end of certainties’.It is no coincidence that One Nation rose when neo-liberalism was hegemonic in both government and opposition, and with Labor responsible for implementing many deregulatory reforms during its 13 years in power. Hanson’s populism directly affected the parts of the electorate which increasingly resented their abandonment by politicians. They were witnessing a growing gap between their own day-to-day priorities and the elite’s central concern with the supra-national. This shift in priorities translated into the governing elite no longer representing the people, and ultimately no longer caring.By speaking the way she did, Hanson’s appeal was that she provided the illusion of bridging the gap between politics and the people. Hanson was a symbol of simpler times when exclusionary policies had been synonymous with prosperity. And for many of those faced with an ever-changing world from which they felt excluded or alienated, this unrealistic symbol came as a blessing.However, One Nation’s popularity proved short-lived for two main reasons.First, the party structure was built along authoritarian lines which could not survive the amateurism of its leaders. More importantly, as early as the 1996 election, Howard had begun moving rightward.To assuage the fears and insecurities of the part of the population who felt they risked the most in the era of globalisation, Howard pledged to wage a war to make Australians feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’. To relieve deeply-rooted social and economic insecurities, he offered ‘the mainstream’ a Manichean vision of Australian society where forces threatened the very existence of Australia as it was. In the name of democracy, Howard bravely attacked both the ‘noisy’ privileged minorities to restore ‘egalitarianism’, and those refugee ‘queue jumpers’ who took advantage of Australian generosity. When Howard returned as Liberal leader, he would not govern for the minorities; he would govern ‘For All of Us’.  This ‘All of Us’ was limited however, applying to all of those within Howard’s hazy ‘mainstream’, a term whose definition changed depending on Howard’s audience and the climate of the time.Howard’s intentions have sometimes been misinterpreted and his failure to denounce Hanson wrongly defined as a serious political and moral failure. In fact, Howard used Hanson’s rise superbly. Her political adventure, while certain not to last, allowed Howard to make important headway in his cultural ‘counter-revolution’. After the success of Hanson’s racist theories, it was not only harder for Howard to be called a racist as he appeared far less extreme than Hanson, but it was also far more difficult to deny the potency of ethno-exclusivism or to stereotypically restrict such ideas to marginal neo-Nazi groups.In a strategic move, instead of denouncing the elected member from Oxley and her political comments, the new prime minister showed his satisfaction that the ‘pall of censorship’ of the Keating years was finally being lifted. He ‘welcome[d] the fact that people [could] talk about certain things without living in fear of being branded as a bigot or a racist’. This strategy was highly effective as it presented Howard as the defender of the ‘silent majority’ whose voice had been stifled by years of a ‘political correctness’ dictatorship.Within a few years, the One Nation Party and its leader were all but forgotten, appearing as little more than a dot on the Australian political landscape. Since then, the extreme right in Australia has been inaudible. However, some of its ideas and much of its rhetoric have returned under the guise of mainstream politics. During his eleven years in power, John Howard attacked in turn the intellectual elite, indigenous people and immigrant minorities such as asylum seekers.The Cronulla riots in 2005 were an embodiment of ethno-exclusivism as common sense.Despite the obvious racism that triggered these violent confrontations between white Australian-born males and anyone with suspiciously dark skin, Howard declared that he did not think they were a result of racism; ‘the Sydney riots were an example of hoodlums who got out of control’. Howard was relaxed and comfortable in the Australia he had spent nine years reshaping. He felt confident in saying that he did ‘not accept that there was underlying racism in this country, [and he had] always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people’. With this statement, Howard gave his benediction to all prejudiced, xenophobic, ethno-exclusivist and racist behaviours, even if they were the ideas of a small minority.  If they had gone too far, it was just that they had got ‘out of control’; it was a risk that needed to be taken to create and protect his Australia. Kim Beazley, who by the time of the Cronulla riots had returned as Labor leader, agreed with Howard, declaring that these were ‘simply criminal behaviours. That's all there [was] to it’.The effects could still be seen during the last Federal election.After three years under Labor and a partial and cautious rebuttal of Howard’s exclusionary rhetoric, that 2010 witnessed a series of back-flips from prime minister Kevin Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard. As the party’s political fortune began to wane, the Labor leaders retracted many of their progressive proposals and measures, instead willingly partaking in a right-wing populist race with Howard’s most faithful heir and polemical Liberal leader Tony Abbott. Abbott’s ‘boat people’ scare campaign proved successful, further entrenching Howard’s legacy in Australian politics. He declared that his first telephone call as prime minister would be to Nauru’s government to reinstate the Pacific Solution to solve the ‘problem’ of asylum seekers.Similarly, after taking office in June 2010, Julia Gillard pushed Labor’s populist shift further, telling Australians on 5 July that they should not be scared to say ‘what they feel’. Howardesque, she told Australians not to be deterred by censorship and political correctness.  Saluted by Pauline Hanson, she declared that the ‘people’ who are ‘anxious about border security’ are ‘expressing a genuine view’. Gillard promised the people a voice; instead of a Pacific Solution, she promised a ‘Timor Sea Solution’.The extreme right itself might have disappeared from the political radar but its ideas and rhetoric remain an implicit and overt part of Australian politics.----A longer version of this argument can be found here and here