If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Appropriate ‘Em: How The Political Establishment Neutralised Extremist Challengers in Contemporary Australia Through ‘Mainstreaming’

This paper addresses the establishment’s reaction to extremist challengers in contemporary Australia, and shows why the adaption and ‘mainstreaming’ of elements of extremist’s discourse, style and policies have essentially neutered extremist challenger’s chances at power and legitimacy at the present time. Unlike the recent experience of many European countries, Australia has not experienced the rise or particular success of any sustained extremist political movement or party over the past decade, despite a number of such challengers emerging. Much of this has to do with the continued legacy of how the ascendance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party was neutralized in the late 1990s by the two major political parties. The ruling Liberal-National Coalition nullified One Nation’s encroachment onto their traditional conservative voter base not by outright repudiating One Nation, but by selectively adopting elements of Hanson’s rhetoric and refiguring these elements in a ‘softer’ manner, and by adapting elements of their policy platform to the extent that Hanson accused the Prime Minister of stealing her party’s policies. In the meantime, current Prime Minister Tony Abbott then secretly established a ‘slush fund’ to back legal challenges against One Nation. The success of these tactics – and the continued adoption by both major parties of those elements that were previously described as ‘extremist’ – has left a situation in which genuinely extremist challengers have failed to gain a foothold, and instead, perceptions of ‘extremism’ are foisted upon third-party alternatives that fall outside the narrow ideological gap between the major parties, with such actors being portrayed as ‘extremists’, ‘nutters’ or ‘socialists’, often with enthusiastic backing from the Murdoch press. This paper will trace these trends, and consider what the Australian combination of policy and discourse ‘mainstreaming’, judicial challenges and a sympathetic media can tell us more broadly about how the establishment deals