As a Queenslander, I’ve been haunted by the spectre of Pauline Hanson for 30 years

Chuck D from Public Enemy knew about Pauline Hanson. 

Back before the dark times, those of streaming platforms and corporate ticketing, the Australian music industry had quite a big feather in its cap: its music festival season. For decades, gatherings like the Big Day Out, Homebake, Falls, Splendour In The Grass, Summadayze and Soundwave crashed against the shores of Australian summers like backyard cricket, sausage sizzles and rubber thongs. Out of all of them, one of the finest was the Livid Festival. Started in Brisbane in 1989, Livid was distinctly Queensland. The Go-Betweens and Died Pretty started it before bigger, international acts like Souxsie and the Banshees and Beastie Boys followed suit.

Livid’s peak arguably came in 1998, where the lineup included Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, Pulp and a tiny experimental group nobody had ever heard of called The Avalanches. I was in attendance that year, enjoying cans of VB at 10:30 in the morning. One, because that’s what you do at music festivals and two, because that’s what tons of people in Brisbane drank in the 90’s.

This coincided with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and its peak in Australian politics. Well, up until that point anyway. The fish and chip shop owner was disendorsed by the Liberal Party due to her racist comments so she ran as an independent for the seat of Oxley. Despite her false claim that Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians’, she won the vote in 1996. National protests followed her everywhere for the next two years as she built the One Nation party with the intention of taking her vision far and wide across the country. 

By the time of the Livid Festival in October 1998, Hanson’s party had failed to win a single seat. So when Public Enemy frontman Chuck D emerged on the headliner stage to perform their hits like ‘Fight The Power’ and ‘911 Is A Joke’, the Queensland crowd were surprised when he started talking about the failed Senator. Specifically, he said, “If you give me the choice to vote for Pauline Hanson, I’d rather go straight to hell and vote for Marilyn Manson”. The words were forever seared into my memory.

If anything felt like a final nail in the coffin of a fringe political career, this was it. One Nation had imploded earlier that year, Hanson had faded into backbench obscurity and here was one of the most politically-charged musical artists in history reminding us just how loathed she was, even on a global stage. The crowd erupted in agreement and applause for Chuck D and Public Enemy. It was a great end to the day.

Almost three decades have passed and Australia’s banshee of bigotry not only continues to survive but recently, she’s thriving. Recent polling data has her party ahead of the walking disaster known as the Coalition in primary vote preferences. But while Australian politics remains volatile and unpredictable, nothing has changed about Pauline Hanson as a person. She hasn’t evolved at all and as a result, her views have never grown beyond “different = bad”. Since that night at Livid, she failed to win multiple elections, lost control of her own party and has been convicted of electoral fraud.

And yet, her everlasting presence stuck around to haunt anyone whenever the admission of ‘I’m originally from Queensland’ fell quietly from their lips. Her infamous occupancy in the minds of Australians has upheld the negative stereotype of Queenslanders for an absurd amount of time. In some other timeline, she should have simply become another entry in the pantheon of ‘mad bastards’ alongside Joh Bjelke-Peterson, Bob Katter and Clive Palmer.

Cut to 2025 and Pauline Hanson turned up in my new home of Melbourne to complain about immigration and promised to run One Nation candidates in the 2026 Victorian election. Which is exactly what she was doing back in the twentieth century.

Every time she lurches forth from whatever Beaudesert hole she claims to call home to spout racism about ‘diseased Africans’, claim that ‘the gays want to change who I am’ and wear burqas on the floor of the senate in some vague protest against Muslims, the extent and volume of the sigh which emanates from my lungs could rival the sound of a 747 on takeoff. At her latest appearance in Melbourne, she stood by the assertion that she was ‘not divisive’. Which was then followed by a supportive video message from UK far-right advocate Tommy Robinson, who is currently banned from setting foot in Australia. 

Robinson has been a supporter of Hanson since she claimed in 2010 to want to move to the United Kingdom which honestly, would have been perfect. She could have been finally banished forever and forced into writing aimless columns for the Sunday Sport alongside phone sex ads and stories about NASA discovering rocks on Mars that look like Paul Gascoigne. But we weren’t so lucky. At the last minute, Hanson changed her mind about leaving Australia when she realised immigrants also exist in other countries. 

Much like ‘shrimp on the barbie’, Foster’s Lager and the claim that every animal will kill you on sight, Queensland remains a microcosm of outdated Australian stereotypes that it yearns to escape from. The historic stakeholders of madness that I mentioned before – the corrupt peanut farmer premier, the rage-filled North Queenslander with a big hat and the Temu Trump billionaire who still rants on Facebook in the year 2026 – have harmed the image of Queenslanders across the country but sooner or later, they’re all relegated to the bin of history and their legacy becomes a joke.

But when it comes to Pauline, she holds fast. Her only function is to cause lasting damage to people who have done nothing to her. To accuse those who look and act different being nothing more than ‘other’ and therefore something to be feared and discriminated against. For thirty years, her only talent is her consistency to exude the most vile traits human beings can have with zero evidence of growth or education.

Pauline Hanson is the worst thing Queensland has produced not only because she’s horrific and bigoted but because she has become the lead contributor in stunting any growth that Queensland may have had in the eyes of the rest of the country. The falsehoods that everyone from the Sunshine State is a barefoot bogan who cares more about their Ford Falcon ute than addressing their emotions remain in place largely because of her. This tired pigeonhole that Queenslanders have been forced to inhabit should have died off with Brisbane Bitter but it continues to this day thanks to Hanson, her supporters and the Australian media platforming her views and placing her squarely back in the public eye in 2016. Don’t think we’ll forget, Kochie. 

Hanson’s legacy of hatred might be older than Timothee Chalamet but its power has always been weak and easy to snap. She has spent decades complaining about people she doesn’t like instead of helping anyone in her electorates. So it’s the epitome of irony when you consider her years of ignorance towards immigrants has subsequently upheld years of ignorance towards Queenslanders. 

Every time her withered visage appears on the news or soundbites of her nails-on-a-chalkboard voice hit the airwaves, it’s easy to paint every person from up north with the same brush. I haven’t been back to Queensland since 2010 and I admit to waving that brush around all the time. 

It’s easy and comfortable to view Queensland through a negative lens because we’ve done it for so long. But it is something that is just so tedious that we should put it to bed now. Because it’s the same sad, tired and boring thing that Pauline has done for thirty years. Not only that, but there’s always been pride in the true nature of Queensland people, not the superficial layer that we dismiss. For every Campbell Newman, there’s an Eddie Mabo. For every Sarina Russo, there’s a Shayne Wilde. 

Chuck D tried to warn us but we didn’t listen. After so many years of traditional negativity, Queensland deserves better than to be seen as the place that birthed such a relentless source of monotony. Despite how long she has stuck around, it’s not impossible to see the end of this tunnel. Even a monster like Peter Dutton has vanished into the void and he was Queensland Police. 

Hanson is 71 years old and has perpetuated the backwards stereotype of a huge part of this country. Queensland has problems just like the rest of Australia, but they’re not what Pauline says they are. They never were. She’s a poison that has made us all sick. Complaining about news stories she doesn’t understand, attacking people she’s never spoken to and refusing to see that her only supporters are as lost as she is. 

Like a ghoul that rattles its chains in the attic of your house, she’ll keep making noise until she is expelled. Unfortunately, the Australian media and government clearly have no interest in doing so. Without them, Hanson would still be serving potato scallops in Ipswich. Queenslanders were the ones who banished her the first time. But in 2026, we don’t have the energy to be outraged anymore. We’re just exhausted. She’s the last in a long line of ingrown bastards that have kept us looking backwards instead of evolving in any positive way. When Pauline Hanson is finally vanquished, a new Queensland will emerge for the rest of Australia to see. What will that look like and who will we be?