A university subject about contemporary politics in Australia for international students—many of them in the country for only a semester—is an education indeed. For me, the tutor. I always tell them (partly in the hope of getting them talking from the beginning) that I learn at least as much about Australia through their eyes as they do. I have always lived here, I tell them, aside from some brief sojourns in Western Europe. Perhaps I have an overly benign attitude to Australia’s perceived egalitarianism, relatively trouble-free multiculturalism, and longstanding democracy. Perhaps, I tell them, I need to have this problematised by an outsider’s eyes.
For the most part polite and respectful, the last thing this mélange of Asian, American and Northern European twenty-somethings would wish to do is cause a problem, much less problematise. However, they do it by default.
In a subject that spans a lot of recent issues, Pauline Hanson is of course one hurdle. Curiously, 2004’s batch of internationals (proportionally, pretty much the same groupings) brought Hanson up as a phenomenon. They’d heard of her and were worried about her influence on Australians’ attitude to race (an Asian student was adamant that she had made a proclamation on television early in 2004 that she had become a lesbian, a claim I took merely to indicate the degree of her celebrity in the Asia-Pacific).
Last year I adjusted the course to pre-empt their queries. None of the new group even claimed to have heard of her.
Irritated (I see her as a blip we had to have, and a manifestation of perceived disenfranchisement among the lower-educated and/or regionals, rather than as an important indicator of Australian attitudes on race), I was stuck with Hanson over my shoulder for the rest of the semester. Students later wrote in essays about the ‘Hanson government’ or about her introduction of racist ideas to Australia; as I feared, they quickly came to ascribe her too much importance. Or did they? In one class, they passionately argued with me that her clear electoral appeal in the late ’90s—not to mention the way Howard has adopted a number of her ideas—shows that Anglo-Australians are racist. I retreated into entreaties that one should not generalise.
All students—including some Australians—have a major difficulty with the appellation ‘Liberal’ on a major conservative political party. By a process of elimination, they tend to assume that since the Liberal