The bloke from the anti-Asian party and his Asian wife

I wonder if this guy has ever uttered the phrase, "I'm not racist - my wife is Asian." If so, he wouldn't be the first.

The director of One Nation in Queensland has an Asian wife.

It shouldn't be a curiosity, and wouldn't be, but this is the party whose founder made her first contribution to federal politics by warning that Australia was in danger of being "swamped by Asians".

Just months after Pauline Hanson's 1996 speech, Sansanee Nelson, the wife of One Nation's now-Queensland director Ian Nelson, left Thailand for a new life in Australia.

The couple hasn't had an easy road, and it's becoming a lot harder as Mr Nelson tries to breathe new life into the dormant party.

It's not the word "Asian" in the first sentence that's provocative - it's the words "One Nation".

One Nation Queensland was deregistered in November 2009, as its membership had fallen below the 500 required.
It's preparing to re-launch before the next state election, meaning Queenslanders will be seeing more of Mr Nelson before March 2012.
And if Sansanee, or their daughter Patti, join him on the hustings, voters could be forgiven if they do a double take.
As an aircraft mechanic, Nelson has lived around the world, including in Thailand, where he met his second wife. Like most new Australians, it took Sansanee time to find work because of her limited English.

But she persevered, with the encouragement of her husband, and now works in a restaurant while presiding over the family's neat home and garden north of Brisbane. Despite witnessing his wife's difficult adjustment to a new culture and country, Nelson has no sympathy at all for the most recent targets of multiculturalism's critics. For him, the woman he affectionately calls "little one" is not like the other new Australians, particularly Muslims, at the heart of the current national debate.

"It's the ones that don't [assimilate] and live in their little enclaves that's unacceptable in this country," he said.

"We've got some wonderful people who are coming into this country. They talk like Australians and they have the barbecues and they assimilate right into Australia. The ones who scare me are the Muslims, they terrify me."

His fear seems to stem from a difficult relationship with two Lebanese-Australian apprentices, and the Cronulla riots.

"They are a race that don't assimilate, they treat Australian women like dirt ... how many were gang raped?" he said of the 2005 violence.

But in contrast to his fixed views on Muslim Australians, Nelson is uncertain whether he and Sansanee have personally experienced discrimination. He's even a bit muddled on whether he was offended by Hanson's revulsion of Asians, which surely cast a shadow over Sansanee's first days in Australia.

"I cringed just a little," he says, before adding: "But we sort of have been since then".

People have stopped him in the street and called him a "dirty old man" in reference to what they perceive is the couple's age difference (although Sansanee is 50 years old).

Mr Nelson says the party is fine with his relationship - its president is married to a Filipino woman - and he doesn't consider whether racism played a part in Sansanee's early employment problems.

"Nobody would ever admit that was the problem," he said.

They say love is blind.

As One Nation attempts its comeback in Queensland, Mr Nelson's blinkers, and those of voters, will be tested again.

 Full story here.

Now, it's not my place to suggest that Ian Nelson's relationship with his wife Sansanee is anything but loving and genuine. But some questions just have to be asked...

* So, does the party who first came to prominence with Pauline Hanson's line "Australia is being swamped by Asians" all of a sudden think Asians are OK?
Perhaps now they've realised that compared to the fear they have of Muslims, Asians aren't really all that threatening anymore.

* Would Nelson be mocked as a "dirty old man" if he had a 50 year-old white wife? Almost certainly not. So why the double standard? Well, it has to be said... the combination of older white man and younger South East Asian woman is one that always raises an eyebrow or two. It just has strong colonialist overtones, and too often seems to feature a imbalance of power in the relationship. It's that stereotype of the ageing white guy who prefers the "submissive" Asian woman who "understands her place" better than white women, and "knows how to treat a man properly".

I'm not going to suggest that is true of Ian Nelson. Being the product of a WM/AW relationship myself, I'm wary of the stereotypes that sometimes attach to these pairings. But sometimes you still can't help but wonder. That the party's president has a Filipino wife is perhaps telling as well.

 * Given that Sansanee had problems finding work and speaking English, she sounds exactly like the kind of immigrant One Nation rails against. Thus, I can't help but think she is recognised as having properly assimilated because she is an attractive Asian woman who married a white man. Which is fine... but it just makes me wonder... would the party be quite so accepting of a Somali migrant named Abdul with poor English and little success in finding work, but who married a white Australian woman?

* Now I know that most couples have their own nauseating pet names for each other. I get that. But was it just me, or did you feel like vomiting upon reading this phrase?

For him, the woman he affectionately calls "little one" is not like the other new Australians

* This is apparently what it means to be Australian:

"They talk like Australians and they have the barbecues and they assimilate right into Australia."

So fire up that barbie, Abdul, start saying "faaak" a lot, and hope for the best.