HAYDEN AND HANSON REVISITED.(Bill Hayden, Pauline Hanson)(Brief Article)

IT WAS JUST AFTER nine on Monday morning, 7th April 1997, when the phone rang in Bill Hayden's Brisbane office. "I understand Bill Hayden is a supporter of Pauline's position. Is that correct?"

This was no idle enquiry; nor was it the start of one of the many attacks from former allies and friends of the ex-governor-general, ex-Foreign Minister, ex-ALP leader. The caller was no other than Pauline Hanson's minder, David Ettridge, on a mission to drum up people to appear on the Seven Network's national program Today Tonight as supporters of the woman who was at that time launching her very own political party: One Nation.

Hayden wasted no time in sending back the message which neither Hanson--under fire from many in Australian public life and needing as much respectability as she could rapidly muster--nor Ettridge wanted to hear. "I am definitely not a supporter of her views," was Hayden's immediate response to the woman who just thirteen months earlier had won from Labor the Ipswich-based federal electorate of Oxley that Hayden himself had held for some twenty-eight years until his move to the viceregal office.

It was neither the first nor the last time that Hayden would have to fend off the view that he was some sort of closet, even public, follower of Hanson.

In its 1st May 1997 edition, the Sydney Morning Herald was forced to acknowledge that an assertion by the paper's Brisbane correspondent Greg Roberts five days earlier, that Hayden backed Hanson's views, was wrong.

Yet, there was a good reason why that false impression had taken root. In the final issue of the magazine the Independent Monthly, published in July 1996, Hayden had written what prominent Sydney public affairs critic Gerard Henderson was later to describe as a "gushing" tribute to the then-recently elected federal MP for Oxley. It was an article that would sour Hayden's relations with his former ALP friends, and further reinforce the view among many that Hayden was becoming increasingly eccentric and objectionable as he grew older. But it was also an article that, had it been read more dispassionately by other people with an interest in national affairs and had its warnings been heeded earlier, might have led to a more effective response to the emerging political forces that Hanson represented then and still represents.

What really got up the noses of many in mainstream politics, and especially in the ALP, was Hayden's assertion that Hanson's win owed much to her view "that it was unfair that Aborigines get preferential treatment from the government". That was, Hayden told readers of the Independent Monthly, "something which resonated with the locals"--