The (re)birth of far-right populism in Australia: The appeal of Pauline Hanson's persuasive definitions

Abstract

Pauline Hanson is Australia’s most significant far-right populist of recent times. She is arguably the nation’s most recognizable and effective political communicator and leads a far-right party of influence in a tightly balanced federal Senate chamber. However, empirical analyses of Hanson’s rhetorical style are almost non-existent. To redress that gap, this paper analyses a corpus of Hanson’s major speeches through the lens of persuasive definitions—that is, the premise that when politicians define objects, events, or ideas, they do so with a view to influencing the public’s attitudes about them. It is argued that Hanson uses four such techniques in the discursive construction of ideology: dissociation (breaking concepts into parts), reframing (placing new frames of reference around subjects), floating signifiers (making claims about contested cultural keywords), and definitions by effect (explaining concepts by reference to their negative social impacts). The ways in which these techniques may accord with far-right populists elsewhere are discussed.