What’s Behind One Nation’s Attacks on Andrew Hastie?

Por Grant Wyeth — The Diplomat

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In its relentless attacks on Liberal Party MP, the One Nation party’s contempt for the rule of law is on full display. 

What populist nationalists find most offensive about liberal democracy is the rule of law. The idea that there should be an equal and impartial exercise of laws is an affront to both their belief in social hierarchies, and also their desire to exercise power in an arbitrary manner. To them, the law should be used to advance their concept of the nation, and privilege or discriminate based on who represents or challenges their beliefs. This hostility toward the rule of law intensifies when they find a prominent symbolic vehicle for their political ambitions. 

This attempt to bend the country to their will is now being demonstrated in Australia through the One Nation party and its relentless attacks on Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie. The party has commissioned cartoons that refer to Hastie as a “traitor” and a “gutless maggot.”  The social media swamp that One Nation swims in and facilitates has become so aggressive and threatening that Hastie has had to employ security at both his electorate office and his home – something incredibly rare in Australia. 

Hastie’s crime, in One Nation’s eyes, is that he testified in the defamation case that Ben Roberts-Smith, a former corporal in the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment, launched against the publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times, after they reported on allegations that he had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. 

Hastie, a former SAS captain himself, and 20 other SAS veterans were subpoenaed to provide evidence in the case. A Federal Court judge found that on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith was responsible for, or complicit in, unlawful killings in Afghanistan. The full bench of the Federal Court subsequently unanimously dismissed Roberts-Smith’s appeal. A criminal trial for Roberts-Smith remains pending. 

For One Nation, the question of Roberts-Smith’s guilt is irrelevant because they believe the law itself to be fraudulent. The idea that there should be rules of engagement that the Australian Defense Force (ADF) is held to is something One Nation rejects. The military is considered an institution that sits above both domestic and international law. 

For the ADF to investigate itself – as it did over allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan – is evidence to One Nation that it has been captured by a weak and “woke” series of ideas that have no place on a battlefield. Roberts-Smith has therefore become a symbol of the unrestrained manhood that the military should be a demonstration of. Those SAS soldiers – and especially Hastie – who testified in the defamation case therefore are guilty of betrayal. 

It is here that “patriotism” in One Nation’s view has shifted from loyalty to the country’s institutions and principles toward loyalty to an individual who is deemed to embody what they see as a national virtue. This has also become bound to an immense sense of victimhood that One Nation cultivates. The rule of law is victimizing not just Roberts-Smith, but the nation itself. And if this is the case, then the rule of law must go. What is being challenged is whether Australian institutions have the authority to determine what conduct in war actually means. 

Hastie has also become a perfect target for One Nation because he is a Liberal Party MP. One Nation may be mired in dystopian fantasies about global left-wing conspiracies, but the electoral threat they pose is actually to the Liberal Party. This is the party they want to replace, and it is the Liberal Party’s traditional voters from which One Nation are drawing most support. Bringing down Hastie therefore also has an electorally symbolic value. One Nation just won a by-election in a Western Australian state seat that overlaps with Hastie’s federal seat. It was another shot over Hastie’s bow. 

One Nation’s attempt to replace the Liberal Party has further symbolic value because as the party that claims to be the holder of the classical liberal tradition in Australian politics, belief in the rule of law should be central to the Liberals political project. Theoretically, it should make the Liberals the party most resolutely opposed to One Nation and its radical objectives. Bizarrely, however, the Liberal Party seems to be a willing participant in its own decline. The party’s psychology is bound to its opposition to the Labor Party; it can’t comprehend threats from anywhere else.  

Yet the threat here is not just against the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party, or the reputation and physical personhood of Andrew Hastie. There is a wider battle taking place over what “patriotism” actually means. One Nation’s political strategy is to wrap itself in the flag and present its politics as an expression of national loyalty, while directing its hostility toward the institutions and principles that actually constitute the nation’s liberal democracy. 

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What populist nationalists find most offensive about liberal democracy is the rule of law. The idea that there should be an equal and impartial exercise of laws is an affront to both their belief in social hierarchies, and also their desire to exercise power in an arbitrary manner. To them, the law should be used to advance their concept of the nation, and privilege or discriminate based on who represents or challenges their beliefs. This hostility toward the rule of law intensifies when they find a prominent symbolic vehicle for their political ambitions. 

This attempt to bend the country to their will is now being demonstrated in Australia through the One Nation party and its relentless attacks on Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie. The party has commissioned cartoons that refer to Hastie as a “traitor” and a “gutless maggot.”  The social media swamp that One Nation swims in and facilitates has become so aggressive and threatening that Hastie has had to employ security at both his electorate office and his home – something incredibly rare in Australia. 

Hastie’s crime, in One Nation’s eyes, is that he testified in the defamation case that Ben Roberts-Smith, a former corporal in the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment, launched against the publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times, after they reported on allegations that he had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. 

Hastie, a former SAS captain himself, and 20 other SAS veterans were subpoenaed to provide evidence in the case. A Federal Court judge found that on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith was responsible for, or complicit in, unlawful killings in Afghanistan. The full bench of the Federal Court subsequently unanimously dismissed Roberts-Smith’s appeal. A criminal trial for Roberts-Smith remains pending. 

For One Nation, the question of Roberts-Smith’s guilt is irrelevant because they believe the law itself to be fraudulent. The idea that there should be rules of engagement that the Australian Defense Force (ADF) is held to is something One Nation rejects. The military is considered an institution that sits above both domestic and international law. 

For the ADF to investigate itself – as it did over allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan – is evidence to One Nation that it has been captured by a weak and “woke” series of ideas that have no place on a battlefield. Roberts-Smith has therefore become a symbol of the unrestrained manhood that the military should be a demonstration of. Those SAS soldiers – and especially Hastie – who testified in the defamation case therefore are guilty of betrayal. 

It is here that “patriotism” in One Nation’s view has shifted from loyalty to the country’s institutions and principles toward loyalty to an individual who is deemed to embody what they see as a national virtue. This has also become bound to an immense sense of victimhood that One Nation cultivates. The rule of law is victimizing not just Roberts-Smith, but the nation itself. And if this is the case, then the rule of law must go. What is being challenged is whether Australian institutions have the authority to determine what conduct in war actually means. 

Hastie has also become a perfect target for One Nation because he is a Liberal Party MP. One Nation may be mired in dystopian fantasies about global left-wing conspiracies, but the electoral threat they pose is actually to the Liberal Party. This is the party they want to replace, and it is the Liberal Party’s traditional voters from which One Nation are drawing most support. Bringing down Hastie therefore also has an electorally symbolic value. One Nation just won a by-election in a Western Australian state seat that overlaps with Hastie’s federal seat. It was another shot over Hastie’s bow. 

One Nation’s attempt to replace the Liberal Party has further symbolic value because as the party that claims to be the holder of the classical liberal tradition in Australian politics, belief in the rule of law should be central to the Liberals political project. Theoretically, it should make the Liberals the party most resolutely opposed to One Nation and its radical objectives. Bizarrely, however, the Liberal Party seems to be a willing participant in its own decline. The party’s psychology is bound to its opposition to the Labor Party; it can’t comprehend threats from anywhere else.  

Yet the threat here is not just against the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party, or the reputation and physical personhood of Andrew Hastie. There is a wider battle taking place over what “patriotism” actually means. One Nation’s political strategy is to wrap itself in the flag and present its politics as an expression of national loyalty, while directing its hostility toward the institutions and principles that actually constitute the nation’s liberal democracy. 

Grant Wyeth is a Melbourne-based political analyst specializing in Australia and the Pacific, India and Canada.

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Fonte: The Diplomat