Lucy Hamilton
One Nation’s ascendancy is a result of duopoly party failures
Pauline Hanson addressed the National Press Club this week amid significant shifts in Australia’s political landscape. Recent polls have shown her leading or competitive as preferred Prime Minister, with One Nation surging in primary vote intentions. The veteran parliamentarian highlighted long-standing structural challenges — including housing affordability, cost-of-living pressures, and immigration levels — that major parties have struggled to resolve over decades. And while her rhetoric carried a familiar divisive tone, she framed these issues as failures of policy rather than inherent societal flaws, and couched glaring social and economic critique in the politics of fear.
Pauline Hanson has long polarised Australian politics, from the day she gave her 1996 maiden speech to Parliament in which she warned the country was “in danger of being swamped by Asians.” She was polarising from the start of her National Press Club address, when she opened by rejecting what she called a “divisive” Welcome to Country, instead acknowledging “the men and women who have sacrificed their lives for our democracy and freedom,” along with “migrants, those people that have worked extremely hard, and those Australians born here,” who built the nation.
The One Nation leader kicked off with a critique of the housing crisis in Australia, quoting the industry advocacy group HIA statistic claiming 11 million households need to fit into 10 million homes, before hastily citing high immigration as the primary cause of the situation. Bouncing off the housing subject, Hanson declared multiculturalism an “utterly flawed” and “failed policy”, stating that Australia was not a multicultural country, but a “multiracial” country that must be “mono-cultural”. A recurring theme of citing a glaring social problem and using it as a cudgel to attack sections of the Australian community developed.
Hanson attacked the issues kept hidden by the major parties, many that have been echoing through the political discussion for longer than we can imagine, waving on the rancorous vine in Canberra, the lowest hanging fruit: housing, poverty, grievance and uncertainty. She then spoke to the one-in-six Aussie children that live in poverty with their parents, the marginalised Australians that live on one meal a day and go without heating and cooling – blaming the major parties for allowing a broken system to develop – before piling on immigrants for ruining that broken system.
Hanson pivoted from showing concern for one group of marginalised Australians, back to denigrating another, but she, notably, refused to blame any of this on the corporate duopoly leviathans, AUKUS, the State of Israel, and billionaire power, instead saving most of her vitriol for Australian Muslims.
As she spoke, a GetUp banner dropped behind her, highlighting her poor history of support for low paid Australians.
It was surreal hearing Hanson quote figures from the Salvation Army and Oz Harvest about the plight of Australia’s poor, brutally revealing statistics. Words you don’t hear from Anthony Albanese or the Labor government, or Scott Morrison and his predecessors. Hanson pivoted to energy prices via the sovereign fuel crisis that the government wants to keep on the hush, before using the force of 1000x bipartisan policy failures to propel her through Net Zero and the “climate hoax”, defunding SBS and the ABC, and a regressive take on abortion, Industrial relations and the United Nations.
“Is that what the electorate wants or supports?” she asked about overseas university enrolments that have made vice-chancellors richer than Croesus. “Is that what Australia supports?” she repeated, pointing to the 32 percent of the population born overseas now wiping the arses of our elderly in care facilities. “Is that what Australia wants?” Hanson claimed to speak for every fed-up Australian sick of the political duopoly and its clapped-out neoliberal jalopy, so angry they’ll vote for anyone, even her, in protest.
Hanson hearkens her rhetoric back to the ‘meat and three veg’ Australia of the 1950’s, where burnt chops and overcooked oyster blades were readily available, and no one had ever heard of broccoli. It was the peak of the White Australia policy, where the constitution said “Aboriginal natives shall not be counted,” and there were more fly-blown sheep than there were people in a country that numbered around 9 million.
1950s White Australia and its constitutionally sub-human Aboriginal subjects faced labour shortages, infrastructure and developmental constraints, and a housing shortage of its own, stagnating the economy. The post-war reconstruction boom highlighted a small domestic workforce, limited skilled labour, and gaps in major infrastructure like power, roads, and water. And solutions were needed. It wasn’t till Australia recognised its First Nations people as legally human, and the pizza, kebabs and Thai curry came in, that the country really saw the limited golden age Pauline is pining for. Hanson wouldn’t have known Fish and Chips, her tradecraft, if it were not for the Greeks who came before her!
One Nation rails against high immigration numbers today, yet between 1945 and 1965 nearly two million immigrants poured in — mostly British, southern and eastern Europeans derided as “wogs” until the Vietnamese and Lebanese took the flak in the 70s and 80s. And the circle of life moves on in this ideological Terra Nullius. Now, many of those black and brown communities, from Italy to Barundi, some with multiple generations of deep roots here, are even drifting toward the One Nation protest vote. History has a wicked sense of irony.
When question time came, the mainstream press largely had none. Margo Kingston, journalist and unofficial chronicler of Hanson’s ethos, praised Guardian reporter Sarah Martin as the only journalist who actually understood the “structure, funding, financial dealings and misuse of public money.” Hanson hates scrutiny. Martin asked about her daughter Lee receiving campaign funds from One Nation. Pauline Hanson bit back viciously, labelling the quietly spoken Martin a “trashy journalist” and vowing to ban her from future events.
The rest of the journalists, sitting in a room sponsored by arms manufacturers, banks, and mining giants, a place that entertained the Israeli Ambassador and barred Chris Hedges, said sweet FA to challenge Hanson, or back their colleague. James Massola’s question, “Is Australia in danger of being swamped by Muslim migration?” summed up the soft questioning of the legacy media class perfectly. As independent media stalwart Michael West put it: “Pauline was always going to be a circus. The mainstream media use her for engagement. She is a symptom of a sick system.” The softballs flopped around the room exactly as intended.
Via Kingston, Martin’s delivery demonstrates how to effectively fight Hanson by hitting harder where legacy media refuses: offering rigorous real-time fact-checking of her claims, relentlessly exposing the gap between One Nation’s fiery rhetoric and its thin policy delivery, and focusing on the material conditions; the housing, wages, and cost-of-living, that actually fuel her support. The media seeking to counter ON’s narratives need to build audiences through trust, transparency, and non-sensationalist coverage instead of chasing clicks, and coordinate across independent outlets to deny her free oxygen. The uniparty created this monster through neglect; the only way to kill it is by addressing the real grievances.
Pauline Hanson is no panacea, despite the hopeful Murdoch polls or the range of historical figures our legacy media has assigned to her. She is not Martin Luther nailing theses to the door, not Bob Hawke forging consensus and real reform, and she is not even Margaret Thatcher reshaping a nation with iron conservative conviction. Hanson is a neoliberal populist hammering racially charged grievances and preying on fear, and her willingness to impress the ideologically aligned donor class will be more ravenous than the major parties’. She offers no broad coalitions, no detailed policies, and gives every impression she wouldn’t know what to do with the Prime Ministership if it hit her in the burnt chops.
Many of the people looking to vote for One Nation have more nuanced takes on the grievances that Pauline mumbled in Canberra this week — less hateful and more ambiguous. One Nation has simply identified those pangs of distress and despair, nursed them, and rocked them into poisonous, divisive slumber with soothing lullabies of division. The party is moderating its edges to broaden its appeal, and Hanson’s opening acknowledgement of migrants is proof. She doesn’t need dispossessed Aboriginal people, nor inner-city lefties who turn up to protest her, but she is carefully choosing which migrant communities she needs for this foreign-funded, media-amplified fever dream of Pauline Hanson as Prime Minister.
And, it cannot be stated enough, a large portion of the blame lies with the current Albanese government, and the faceless cowards in the party engine room. Forever wounded by the Shorten platform that saw narrow defeat, and chickenshit from ten years in the political wilderness after the bloody Gillard-Rudd knife fight, Labor has failed to be the party of change, opening the path for Hanson to play the friend to embattled Aussies. The same government that scraped into office with a Chifley-era primary vote, secretly parlayed with Lachlan Murdoch, broke bread with the business and Israel lobbies, and rammed through AUKUS after a 24-hour ultimatum, now finds itself hamstrung by its own cowardice and mediocrity. It is the failure of the Albanese government, the collapse of LNP cohesion, and the uniparty’s contempt for ordinary Australians that has set this fire.
Hanson claims to care about the everyday Australian — in fact she claims to be their champion. In a sea of emptiness where political courage is cast adrift, her words stand out precisely because others chose to stand mute. Now the void is being filled by a group of charlatans. One Nation talks protectionism and economic nationalism while courting the same billionaire class the majors serve. Trump had Miriam Adelson; Hanson has Gina Rinehart. She looks less like Martin Luther and more like a Milei-style performer, big on grievance, light on delivery, and devastating to our vulnerable liberal democracy. The policy failures Hanson picks up off the ground, long neglected by the uniparty on the rotten vine, were always ripe for exploitation.
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