Where One Nation lies

Let’s cast our minds back to the Farrer election victory speech this month where our saviour of Facebook comment’s sections and men on intervention orders, Pauline Hanson, miraculously became both the victim and the victor. With her beloved microphone in hand, Pauline once again seized the spotlight of another person’s moment to remind Australia who the real victim is – her.

“I’ve been put down for the past thirty years,” her voice quivered not long after she’d departed her $1.4 million private aircraft flown by her own private pilot, gifted to her by a billionaire. We’re dealing with a weight of hypocrisy here that defies physics. The crowd cheered again when she screamed, “We must get our returns from gas,” even though she only voted in April against a 25% tax on gas export revenue, because why bother telling the truth about how you’re screwing the little people over when the little people are too busy cheering for you?

Pauline’s never met a hypocritical moment she didn’t like. “We’re going to get our country back,”Pauline shouted from the election stage of an Albury pub owned by Hong Kong investors. 

Even if Pauline’s supporters say they want the truth, they don’t seem to care that she’s not telling it. Some truths are just too truthful, apparently. They just want the reassuring, warm-in-the-pants moments that sound good shouted out in a boozy pub but mean very little in real life. We’re going to get our country back? Back from who? Take it where? And who said you own it? Don’t bother asking questions, thanks, One Nation is here for the shouting, the reality is your problem.

The candidate in Farrer, David Farley, was always going to win, with his resting One Nation face and matching Barnaby belly. Straight out of central casting, Farley rode the culture-war’s horse for all it was worth, taking lessons from Pauline in how to manipulate a desperate population of politically disengaged people too depressed to bother asking why One Nation hasn’t changed a thing in the thirty chaotic years they’ve already had in politics.

Just as she’s done to the rest of Australia, Pauline Hanson told people with no hope that she was the hope they needed while offering them nothing real. In Farrer, suddenly the saviour Pauline was all for the water, all for the irrigators of the southern Riverina. After having done nothing for irrigators in the southern Riverina over the past thirty years except enable water harvesters in Queensland to keep all the water from the southern Riverina, Pauline Hanson – who thinks the Murray Darling Basin Plan is the name of her plumber Murray’s work schedule – now wants you to believe she’s going to save them. Shout and yell for Pauline everyone. You’re not the ultimate victims of our political system, poor Pauline is.

It seems incredible, but a recent Roy Morgan poll cited One Nation respondents saying their biggest admiration is reserved for Pauline’s “honesty”. They’re out spouting off about her honesty and crying into the talkback lines about how the cost of living is killing them, when as recently as 2024 Pauline voted against major industrial relations reforms that aimed to improve worker’s lives like stronger enforcement against wage underpayment. Who said irony isn’t dead?

Our Pauline claims to champion the little people while she flies to the USA in Gina Rinehart’s private jet to quaff champagne with millionaires. She continually speaks out against welfare cheats yet has pulled in $3.5-$4 million of taxpayer’s money over her parliamentary career while only turning up in parliament to vote 54% of the time. When she has turned up, she has voted against legislation that would have increased access to health services in regional Australia and voted for legislation likethe Treasury Laws Amendment Personal Income Tax Plan Act, disproportionately benefitting high-income earners while offering little benefit for low-income households.

Hanson owns investment properties, company shares and small businesses, and is estimated to be worth anything up to $12 million as she shouts she’s in politics for the little people. Like the attention-seeking missile that she is, Pauline has even recently crafted herself as the saviour of Australia’s Jews and Christians, proving my long-held theory that some people only find God when everyone else has had enough of them.

If we can all agree to call misinformation by its normal name – lies – then Pauline Hanson lies. It’s a hypocritical puzzle beyond measure how one of Australian politics’ most experienced liars can be allegedly admired for the quality she lacks – honesty. Honesty is not a well she drinks from. Never has Australian politics seen such an endless, shameless bullshitter. She lies like other people breathe. But Pauline “tells it like it is,” they say. Then if we’re all allowed to “tell it like it is”, Pauline Hanson is an inveterate liar and a perennial victim who perpetually dodges accountability aided by a circle-jerk media more intent on clicks than democracy. 

One Nation doesn’t want honesty, they don’t want facts. One Nation wants more victims, more people pissed off at political parties and big business so One Nation can build a big business and a political party out of them. Exploitation is what One Nation does best.

They exploit the downcast and the disenfranchised. Her core base are people who lean toward conspiracy theories and contrarianism, the ones who have traits like social desperation, poor emotional intelligence, a lack of their own identity and a history of feeling unseen. It’s why so many of them took to filming themselves in their front car seats and screaming on YouTube during covid – because suddenly, for a brief, shining moment, they were noticed. They were somebody.

It’s this model of sudden love and attention lavished upon the abused child that Pauline Hanson has exploited to her own ends. And it is in turn, her own narcissistic naivety that handlers like Advance, the Atlas Group and assorted billionaires have exploited for their own ends. Let Pauline do the dirty work of exploiting the masses and in turn, we can exploit Pauline.

One Nation is a policy-free, empty shell of nothing pumped up by fossil fuel money, hardcore conservative groups and poodle-haired media commentators who like to say ‘woke’ a lot. It exists as a PR firm for the hard-right, harvesting vote-money and inflaming culture wars while it masquerades by day as a political party.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and her hidden puppeteers profit from anger – not answers. That’s why it’s now become the angry has-beens club for political players genuinely deemed some of the worst people in the country. Take a look at the recent headlines around political defections to One Nation and it reads like somebody dipped their scoop into a day drinking, white woman’s Instagram page and a club for men who are only allowed to see their kids heavily supervised every other weekend.

But if we’re busy calling One Nation supporters the spectrum of “ists” – racists, sexists, beerists – then are we not also supplying fodder for Pauline and her handlers? The more we analyse them, the more we point out what One Nation lies on, the more One Nation supporters dig in. Trump worked this out a long time ago. And Barnaby worked this out before Trump did. Find out what makes them feel ostracised and repeat their grievances back to them. It’s why Barnaby, the private school educated, university graduate on $300,000 a year pretends to be the common working man and writes books about people he doesn’t care about who live in houses he wouldn’t be caught dead in. 

Even if her supporters are a single-issue cheer squad whose only issue is cheering for Pauline Hanson, we have to accept that the major parties have become so incredibly toxic that people will vote for anything other than Labor or the Coalition. They now garner barely more than 50% of the vote. For this, yes you can blame the Coalition who spent years in government as corporatist lap-dogs indulging in an orgy of self-interested greed and duplicity, but you can also blame the party currently masquerading as Labor, whose only claim to fame seems to be spending their last four years in government in desperate pursuit of impersonating the Coalition.

If you want to point to the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation being about the exploitation and gullibility of the forgotten Australians, then point even harder at the politicians and the power brokers who’ve increasingly spent their time existing purely for the party machine.

Point at the politicians now wringing their hands wondering why pissed-off voters have pissed off and wandered over to the fringes. So much of the rise of One Nation is about a political duopoly and a system infested with politicians busily chewing off their own feet. The pity for all of us is, most political leaders’ blind allegiance to the party machine will never allow them to admit they were meant to be leading Australia, when all they were doing was following their party instead.