Put aside the whole should she or shouldn’t she have met with Tommy Robinson debate.
Forget the sideshow snobbery of her critics who think it just awful that Pauline Hanson went to Taormina.
If the One Nation leader made one mistake on her recent trip to Europe, it was not so much what she did as what she didn’t do.
Because when she was touring Luton in the UK, for just a cheap 72 British Pounds return, Hanson might have taken the chance to hop a Ryanair flight over to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.
And in doing so, she could have put to rest the most dangerous critique of her political tactics – namely, that she is all quarrel, no policy.
So why should Hanson have made the hop to Copenhagen?
Because, unlike Luton – where Hanson saw a once thriving industrial centre that has now become a minority-white ethnic enclave dominated by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis – in Denmark, they do multiculturalism differently.
Since 2015 the Danes have implemented a series of policies on migration that, were Hanson to propose them here, would see the ABC’s news division calling in the counsellors in case any of their journalists were traumatised covering the story.
Just last week, Denmark banned the burqa in schools and universities, expanding a crackdown on full face coverings that had been in place since 2018.
The government said it was a move to prevent “parallel societies” of the sort we’ve seen spring up across Europe and, yes, even some Australian suburbs.
But here is where it gets really interesting.
Denmark has not done this not with a properly right wing party like Britain’s Reform or Germany’s AfD at the helm.
Instead, the Danes are led by a centre-left coalition government which more than a decade ago realised they would never be able to stay in power and maintain a high taxing, high spending, high services government if they also had to take in massive influxes of migrants and refugees.
Unlike their counterparts, they steered away from the prevailing orthodoxy of openness and open borders, where to even question the wisdom of letting in millions of refugees from very different and often oppositional cultures is to risk being marked out as a crypto-fascist.
The Danes only grant temporary asylum to would be refugee claimants, force the integration of neighbourhoods to prevent ghettos from developing, have strict family reunification rules, and uses advertising in migrant source countries to deter people coming.
True, Australia does some of these things, but in a far more haphazard way.
And there’s more.
Denmark is also remarkably open and honest about data when it comes to migration, in ways that would again be unimaginable in Australia.
The Danish statistical agencies put out numbers revealing which nationalities are more over-represented in crimes like rape and sexual assault, and which migrants are more likely to be productive over their lifetimes.
According to figures popularly cited from the Danish Finance Ministry, migrants from other Western countries track similarly to locals when it comes to being net contributors to society during their working lives before drawing on the country’s generous welfare and medical benefits in old age.
But migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, the figures show, on average spend their entire lives taking more than they contribute to the economy.
It is, of course, far more difficult to document much less talk about such distinctions in Australia.
Could you imagine Prime Minister Anthony Albanese keeping a straight face while saying “diversity is our strength”, if our numbers turned out to be anything like Denmark’s?
This is no small part of what makes Hanson popular, and Denmark’s success (even if it comes from the centre-left) provides a model for One Nation to point to when critics say they bring only grievance, not substance to the table.
People sense their country is being changed in various ways that aren’t – no matter what the multicultural lobby says – for the better, and all the delightful foreign foods in the world can’t make up for that sense of loss that comes from trading in a social cohesion that natural and organic for one that is shakily enforced from above.
Joe Biden’s open border propelled Donald Trump into a second term, and right wing parties across Europe often come very close to winning power only to be blocked by the chicanery of an establishment which is determined to stop the heretics at the gate.
The irony is that in Australia both major parties have likewise wanted to stop Hanson and until recently have done a pretty good job.
But it wouldn’t be an issue at all had they, instead of listening to ethnic lobbies or big business, simply given the people what they wanted.
James MorrowNational Affairs Editor