Is One Nation the site of Australia's Alt-Right?

Indeed, part of the rejection of these is not due to a wholesale disagreement between conservatives and Pauline Hanson on policy, as much of the conservative base eschews neoliberal laissez-faire approaches to migration and seeks to preserve an Anglo-European core of Australian culture. Rather, it is a difference of tactic, style and representation and the way in which Hanson draws on alt-right theatrics rather than policy formation and debate.

What are alt-right theatrics?

Former poster-boy of the US alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos claimed in 2016 that the alt-right was a movement for "western supremacy" rather than "white supremacy" and supporting capitalism, democracy, freedom of expression and liberalism, although obscured the extent to which it can be described as racist.

However, a more critically-engaged understanding of the alt-right is to view it as a disjunct and non-unified set of claims that includes racism, white supremacy and western superiority, articulated through complex theatrics that disrupt rather than contribute to public debate.

What makes the alt-right distinctive are two aspects of public engagement: the politics of theatrical performance and the cynical adoption of the language of progressive politics of inclusivity and diversity to make claims about white vulnerability.

In the case of the first, Hanson's attempt to wear a burqa into parliament and other kinds of grandstanding are no different from the alt-right attempts-particularly by figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to shock, abuse, upset or de-value the spaces in which they are operating. For Yiannopoulos, that kind of theatrics got him permanently banned from Twitter

in 2016 and kicked off university campuses for his theatrical performances of hate speech and ultimately removed from media roles for the offence caused by his past attempts to shock audiences.

While parliamentary privileges protect Hanson from removal, her antics have the same form: designed to shock, upset and offend in a way which disrupts the ordinary workings of the contemporary western institutions she claims to protect.

Alt-Right Adoption of the Language of Progress Identity Politics

The second tactic of the alt-right and utilised this month by Hanson is that of the adoption of minoritarian political slogans for inclusivity. The phrase "it's okay to be white" has circulated in online settings for some years (often as the hashtag iotbw) and has been used by alt-right identified white nationalists on university campuses in the United States.

Mimicking "okay to be…" phrases that are designed to reduce individual and community feelings of exclusion and shame (e.g., "okay to be gay"), the recycling of this kind of affirmative language by the Alt-Right is both an attempt to put forward a false claim to white male vulnerability and exclusion and, in a different way, to parody and belittle the legitimate claims of minorities.

This was precisely Hanson's objective this month.