This essay aims to explicate the conditions enabling Hansonism. Politically, it argues that the party's exploitation of cynicism about mainstream politics and deepening economic and social divisions have been enabled by the Howard government's zealous pursuit of neo-liberal politics, its dismantling of Labor's welfare safety net, its wedge politics, its cynical reneging on election promises, and its attacks on the fourth estate, not to mention his endorsement of Hanson's freedom of speech'. In terms of the media, the essay argues that Hansonism's protest vote is based on a ‘plague o’ both your houses'. The allied populist prejudices of several radio talkback hosts have drawn their strength from television's virtual displacement of political debate in its posture as voice of the people, its actual address to viewers as domestic, atomised consumers and the increasing populism of vernacular genres such as lifestyle programs and sitcoms. Examples include the most popular Australian film of the Howard-Hanson era, The Castle.

The increasing inability of State and Federal governments to develop policy which articulates with the lived experiences of the many different regional communities has been a significant factor in electoral disenchantment with the political system and the subsequent rise of One Nation. The situation has not been helped by metropolitan intellectuals' penchant for resorting to patronising provincial stereotypes of the regional cultures so as to fashion themselves as an ethical, because multicultural, site of modernity. This article explores the tensions between local, State and Federal decision making processes and their reception in a regional community by examining the racially inflected controversy over the redevelopment of the Bridge street quarry in the ‘conservative’ garden city of Toowoomba.

There is continuing acceptance that the One Nation phenomenon remains a significant local response to a global problem – the adoption by national polities of internationally- oriented economic policy ‘reforms’ which are despised by populations. The dismantling of public responsibility for social and economic development has emerged as a cause of internal disaffection with conventional forms of politics. This paper attempts to separate the anti-liberal from the illiberal aspects of the responses to internationalisation and de-politicisation. It suggests that there have always been intellectually respectable anti-liberal traditions of analysis and that One Nation has tapped into some of these strands of analytical opinion. The lesson for mainstream parties is that they continue to insist on the inevitability of globalisation, and to risk further societal discontent and intolerance, only by ignoring the real alternative approaches to the responsibilities and possibilities of politics that have long been available.

The rise of ethnic nationalism (as expressed by the political ascent of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party) has created divisions within the Right of Australian politics and impediments to a privatisation program which had been proceeding under the aegis of the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Party Coalition over the last fifteen years. This paper focuses on how Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party has opposed privatisation of government assets on the basis that privatisation offers opportunities for subversive foreign capital to weaken national solidarity, which is conceived in ethnic and racial terms. The One Nation Party, this new anti-privatisation movement, is interpreted on two levels:

1. 1 as one of a growing number of ethnic nationalist movements across the globe which are recurrent outcomes of hegemonic decline and increasing multipolarity in the world-system (e.g., the current situation of declining American hegemony being similar to the crisis of British hegemony in the interwar period of the early twentieth century)

2. 2 as the outcome of neo-liberal policies (including privatisation) which have failed to produce full employment or to arrest the decline of the petite bourgeoisie, which forms the primary basis of the support for Hanson and her One Nation party.

Manufacturing industries continue to be promoted by governments and commentators as vital to the provision of quality employment and the furthering of export performance. It has been extensively argued that the adoption of advanced manufacturing technology which require highly trained staff will provide quality employment and facilitate the building of the national skills base. However, women employed in manufacturing have generally been concentrated in low skilled employment and non-trade occupations. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that that the upgrading of skills in manufacturing industries will benefit women. This paper examines women's employment in two manufacturing industries in the Brisbane area — Food Processing and Light Metal Products. It shows that, although there is increasing evidence that these industries have increased their training effort, there is little evidence to suggest that women employed in manufacturing in Queensland have been able to capitalise on these opportunities.

The four-month struggle between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) was the most significant industrial dispute of the 1990s and one of the most important since the 1960s. At stake were not just the jobs of 1,400 wharfies but the Howard Government's entire industrial relations agenda of union-busting. In every one of its key aims, the Government failed, and a gathering employer offensive against unionism was stopped in its tracks. Nonetheless, the wharfies took some important casualties in terms of jobs and working conditions. This article looks at both the inspiring elements of the struggle by Australian wharfies, but also asks the question, why, when the Government and the employers were on the ropes, did wharfies give up so much? The article argues that the terms of the final settlement cannot be divorced from the campaign strategy pursued by the union leadership, which was highly centralised and which looked not to industrial solidarity but to the courts and the ALP for salvation. This strategy was in turn the result of the union leadership seeking not to protect wharfies' jobs and working conditions, only to ensure reinstatement and a resumption of negotiated ‘waterfront reform’.