Conservatives with no imagination and little education always want to go back somewhere - usually somewhere back in time.

Egotistical conservatives with no imagination and little knowledge of history want everyone else to go back with them. They reckon their picture of the world should be compulsory for everyone.

Not having the imagination to visualise and work towards a perfect future, their perfect destination is always to a time that has gone - and they bust their gut to go back there.(Remember John Howard's pull to the 1950s?)

They are the ones grumbling about the world not being like it used to be, wanting to ban this or that, blaming the government for not stopping one thing or another and accusing something called society of taking the rest of society to hell. And all because the present doesn't fit in with their mental picture of how things should be. Perhaps they are just frightened by their lack of imagination - by their inability to draw a picture of tomorrow.

Hanson's mental photograph is likely to be of sunny Ipswich when Luigi the fruit merchant and Con the cane cutter knew their place in a largely Anglo community.Con and Luigi hadn't yet got around to opening lasagna and moussaka restaurants and sending their kids to law school. The Anglos dreamed of the soft green meadows of home where everybody had pale skin and freckles and ate mutton and potatoes .. or fish and chips. The white

god and white monarch ruled together. There were no obvious Asians with their pork dumplings and bok choy, and certainly no yum cha or those funny people doing tai chi in the parks. And people of Middle Eastern appearance hadn't yet been invented. Nothing was ever meant to change.

Who let things get so out of control?

Her sort of people would have been burning books before The Enlightenment, machinery before the Industrial Revolution and scientists and philosophers at any time before or since.

They probably dreamt of the cave and barbecued bison long after neanderthals had taken up farming.

Those sort of thinkers are common. They are related to you and they are sitting next to you at work.

But should they be taken seriously as politicians? Or taken seriously at all? They walk backwards and have nothing new to offer. History, science and everything we know about life says that change is a constant. You can't go backwards. You have to get creative about the present and dream up an exciting future.

Hanson is probably hoping to find a nice piece of white Anglo past history where those nasty multicultural types don't exist. She'll be in for a shock.