Pauline Hanson has been shown genetically to be of Middle-Eastern heritage (though not, apparently, appearance). Hanson showed her appalling racism and total lack of understanding of history by claiming off the cuff that Middle Eastern stock in her must be the result of rape. This of course implies paradoxically that she is the descendent of rapists as well as those raped. She tried then to cover for her disgusting racism with a spot of her more default neo-racism, claiming that this was irrelevent since she was 100% Australian, of course alluding to the fact that her problem was not with other races per se, rather the cultural foreignness of migrants to Australia.



Peter Beattie was shown to have a much larger admixture of apparently non-European DNA. His response to this was far less superficially appalling, but in fact shows much of the same confusion as Hanson. Beattie claimed that his genetic diversity demonstrated the inherentness of multiculturalism. Culture of course is not genetic, however. Hanson's horror at her genetics show that her cultural racism is undergirded by a good dose of old-fashioned racialism. Beattie's happy acceptance of his racial diversity as proof of the appropriateness of multiculturalism show an appalling tendency to believe that culture is generated as a genetic, racial characteristic that cannot be wiped out by enculturation, exactly the opposite lesson that one should take from Hanson's genetic profile, namely that racism is itself a cultural construct, and that culture, unlike genetics, is malleable and highly contingent.