One of the things to watch out for in politics is the false binary. Once you start looking for them, you’ll notice, like a word whose definition you’ve just discovered, that they’re everywhere.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” politicians will tell you when they’re trying to sell an unpopular policy. Usually, in these situations, the other side isn’t proposing “doing nothing” – they’re just proposing doing something different. But in the zero-sum game of political rhetoric, a detailed explanation of the subtle gradations of various pathways doesn’t get you very far.

Really it’s just a version of setting up a strawman: create an opposition that doesn’t exist, then knock it down.

And so it is with much of the rhetoric surrounding Pauline Hanson. Push it one step further – ask what a sentence actually means – and you’re left with very little.

Last night, in her maiden speech, Pauline Hanson doubled down on everything that has made her famous. Australia was at risk of being swamped by Muslims. Sharia law was a real possibility. Immigration should stop, now. The Family Court was partly responsible for domestic violence and the murders of women.

Julie Bishop today felt the need to remind voters that Hanson had “rightly taken her seat in the Senate”. Bishop, along with Liberal MP Craig Laundy, and NSW Premier Mike Baird before that, emphasised that Hanson was entitled to her views. But who, precisely, is suggesting that Hanson and her senate team are not entitled to either their opinions or the senate seat which they won in a fair election? The Twitter fringerati, perhaps, but that’s about it. Labor frontbencher Penny Wong was right to say nobody needs to defend Hanson’s right to speak.

So why say it? Because it’s a way of suggesting that, despite the fact that in the next breath you are going to disagree with Hanson’s views, you still have time for her supporters. You are – wink – more on Hanson’s side than those other phantom people out there who believe she is not entitled to her seat in parliament, or her opinions.

Consider: do you ever hear government MPs, before hacking into Labor or the Greens, preface their attack with “Bill Shorten deserves his place in parliament”, or “I acknowledge that the Greens are a significant presence on the Australian political scene”? No. The government does not agree with their views, and it does not want to indicate that it is even remotely on the side of these people. The message it is sending on Hanson is different.

This issue of false binaries isn’t just about the government, though. The Greens have been widely attacked for their decision yesterday to walk out on Hanson’s maiden speech. They are giving her oxygen, goes the argument. They are giving her power.

Again, push this a little bit and it falls over. Does anybody really believe that Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech, with its historical echoes of her first maiden speech, and its inflammatory language, would not have got a heap of attention, whatever the Greens did? And on the question of power: she is an elected senator, with three other senators in her team, in a parliament in which the government will often depend on her vote. Unfortunately, the power question is already settled.

For my money, the Greens did exactly the right thing. Hanson’s speech was awful, it was hateful, and it was good that some of our parliamentarians saw that there was merit in sending a loud message to vulnerable communities that such hate speech did not deserve the time of day.

Some argue that the Greens have no moral high ground because it was their changes to the senate voting system which delivered so many One Nation senators. But even if you accept that this is true (and there is debate), it is possible both to believe that a particular voting system is more democratic, and to hate the results it delivers.

Did the Greens, because they are seen as crazy and feral by some sectors of the population, play right into Hanson’s hands? Perhaps. But again, criticising them on those grounds assumes the only other option was for them to stay where they were (or not to watch the speech at all, as Penny Wong did). But it wasn’t. Imagine the message that might have been sent if other senators, from major parties, had joined them. Beware of the false choices that are presented to you – there are often other ways.

I realise that many people, to this, would respond with the John Howard idea that we should not condescend to or demonise Hanson because it will simply fan the flames of her support. But that coupling deserves interrogation. Do we know for sure that demonising Hanson will be counter-productive? We don’t – in fact she was demonised by many in the first phase of her career, and she was also largely pushed out of political life. Even if you accept that Howard knows a thing or two, we are talking about advice pertaining to an Australia that existed 20 years ago. Racism is less acceptable than it was then. And isn’t it likely, in fact, that the growth in public condemnation and calling out of racism has contributed significantly to its slow decline in our public life?

But there’s another problem with the Howard argument, which is that the alternative will not fan the flames of her support. Hanson has recently met with both the current prime minister and the most recent former prime minister. She just delivered a horrific speech, after which MPs lined up to shake her hand. One Coalition MP hugged her. And we assume that this won’t give her legitimacy? That it will provide her no help whatsoever? The choice is not between demonisation, which will deliver her support, and some type of appeasement, which won’t. It’s more complex than that.

I don’t want to fall into the same trap I’m complaining about, so let me say that I am not suggesting vitriolic attacks on Hanson, or pretending she does not exist. Yes, Turnbull’s government will have to deal with Hanson to deliver some pieces of legislation. I accept that. And during negotiations they will have to be polite and cordial. But that does not have to extend to sycophancy.

I have avoided writing too much about Hanson over the past couple of months, and I hope not to make a habit of it. I think the “phenomenon of Hansonism” is dramatically overstated. In 2013 we got Clive Palmer, with very similar shares of the senate vote as One Nation in both Queensland and Australia, and in 2019 I am sure that someone, Hanson or otherwise, will benefit from the current disillusionment of Australian voters with politics. There are questions that need to be examined about those unhappy voters, and they are beginning to get some focus. But I don’t think Hanson should occupy a huge amount of our national attention span, except as necessary to call out her racist diatribes and to make clear to targeted communities that they are welcome here.

While she remains on the national political stage, she will continue to make simplistic, reductionist statements that rely on a false picture of the world. Let’s not make the same mistake.

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