Political Rant

Political Rant

Pauline Hanson has gone to prison. The public furore surrounding her case has been breathtaking. Within the past few days, she has ostensibly achieved a level of martyrdom akin to that of Socrates, Jesus, or Joan of Arc, a feat all the more remarkable because she's never been dead and, indeed, is still sufficiently alive to raise objections about her circumstances. There are people comparing her to Nelson Mandela (though no one has yet compared Nelson Mandela to her). Prison life is harsh, we're told. While innocents like Hanson are sentenced to three years, rich men like Rene Rivkin and Alan Bond spend only minimal time in prison for crimes from which they directly profited. Like a blocked prison toilet bowl, radio switchboards have been jammed with calls from outraged listeners demanding that Pauline's sentence be reduced. In an exclusive interview with Hanson's daughter last week, Ray Martin wondered whether Our Lady of Ipswich was at that moment watching them on tv. Gone are the days when prisons were Benthamite panopticons, when prisoners were kept in jail for the express purpose of being monitored; apparently now prisoners are meant to watch us.

As a politician, Hanson always relied more on the aura of her personality than on actual policies. (And what she called policies were generally fantasies, extravagant dream-wishes, rather than plans for an improved state. Remember her zero-tax policy?) Now that she's in prison, her supporters are able to envisage what they had hitherto denied. The image of her in prison has made manifest what abstract statistics had failed to make clear to them: that prison isn't a very nice place to live in at all. But in ongoing testament to Hanson's ability to make people focus on her persona rather than on her actual abilities as a politician, the media has taken up and run with the suggestion that she's a hapless innocent who has fallen prey to a malign, draconian institution. Note how journalists have this week insistently compared Hanson to specific individuals rather than relate her situation to common occurrence. The Mandelas, the Rivkins, the Bonds: it's a veritable coterie of lively figures, in the best tradition of a Charles Dickens novel. Journalists, moreover, have focused on bold, stark images of Hanson in prison. The Australian even printed a photo of her toenails.

While no one questions that Hanson has breached the law, several commentators have paradoxically suggested that the crime is of negligible importance, and that therefore no sentence, whether to prison or to community service, is necessary. And it's on this basis that Hanson's supporters argue her innocence. Significantly, little has been said by way of compassion for the many other men and women who are currently in prison, or to the possibility that, if Hanson has received an excessively harsh sentence, so might many others.

Of course prisons are terrible places. And of course prison life is tough. Why the surprise? If Hanson's sentence is excessive, then let it go to appeal and see what happens. The judicial system is working, and it's a measure of our civic state's functioning democracy that Hanson has been given a fair trial. Sadly, that doesn't always happen for everyone.