Is One Nation trolling the Coalition?

Pauline Hanson is often likened by her detractors to Donald Trump. Now, I don't want to detract, but she's no Donald Trump. However, their political styles do have a few things in common, trolling being one.

It is my opinion One Nation might have been trolling when Pauline Hanson rejected multiculturalism in favour of monoculturalism. It was a word likely to enrage her enemies and titillate her friends.

As with Trump, the best way to read Pauline is seriously, but not literally. When she said 'monocultural' her mind wasn't a political vista full of identical pine trees, or fields of hybridised wheat.

She means there is one Australian culture.

You can come here and contribute to it, but if you come here you must be part of it, not part of something that is not Australian, and there is such a thing as Australianness.

But Labor wanted to shore-up their ethnic constituency and wedge the Coalition – why not? That's what political parties do. So, they put it on Angus Taylor – does he agree with multiculturalism?

There is a serious problem in the Liberal Leader's office that this was not predicted and catered for. The answer was not to go on the defensive, but to attack Labor.

Labor's idea of Australia is 'hotel Australia'. If you live here, you are Australian, no matter how you identify, what language you speak, what country your allegiance lies with, whether you accept our values or not.

It is not an idea that most Australians share.

But the alternative is not a country of automatons who all believe the same things, dress the same way, go to the same schools, eat the same food, with 2.2 kids and a house with a white picket fence.

The alternative is 'team Australia' – a group of people with different skills, different habits, but the same ethos.

Labor's multiculturalism worships difference as the essential good and demands no adjustment from migrants. Most of the Coalition's constituency, if they say they believe in multiculturalism, believes that pluralism is an essential good, and integration an end goal.