Editorial
The rise and rise of Pauline Hanson

Late last week, Pauline Hanson was a guest at Donald Trump’s Halloween party. She went as herself.

Hanson was at Mar-a-Lago to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference. She was there with her regular din of outrages: climate change, Indigenous rights, gender diversity, mass migration.

Australia was a “social tinderbox”, she said. Migrants were “flooding” the country, many from “hateful, radical” backgrounds. She made up some figures for this, twice the actual annual intake.

“No wonder Australian police have their hands full,” she said. “It didn’t happen by accident, and if you speak out about it, you’re branded Islamophobic, racist, or even a Nazi.”

Earlier, in her hotel room, she outlined her speech for Sky News. She has the eyes and deportment of a box-dyed pterodactyl. It is fitting that a person with her views looks so much like a dinosaur.

“I’m going to tell them the situation what’s happening in Australia,” she says, “not unlike what they’ve faced here, the mass migration, the impact it’s having on our country with homeless … to tell you the truth, our facts that we found out is that Australia has a 350 per cent more homeless in Australia than what America does. We’re in a worse situation than what they are and mass migration.”

The thoughts bounce off one another. The adjectives are sometimes nouns. The words don’t fit neatly into sentences. The foreign ideas stand slightly proud, like nails in a floorboard. She wants to better equip the military “and of course gender dysphoria and what’s happening in our country”.

Hanson’s party is polling higher numbers than ever before. The latest Newspoll has her primary vote at 15 per cent, up four points in a month. Her previous high was 13 per cent in 1998.

The unhappy truth of the Coalition’s dysfunction is that it benefits fringe parties such as One Nation. The absence of a functioning conservative movement has created opportunities for hateful charlatans. There is no intellectual frame for this. There is only prejudice and opportunism.

Hanson knows this. It is why in almost 30 years she has never built a proper party structure. Politics is a business for her and she sells to the lowest common denominator. She has stuck with a winner on immigration, trading Asians for Muslims as the market required. Climate change came on a bit later. She has a recent special on sad men and the Family Court.

There is a curious aspect to One Nation voters, which comes through in focus groups. Many voters express a desire for simpler times but recant when asked if they would give up modern concepts like divorce. One Nation voters do not. When they say they want to go back to the Australia of their fathers’ youths, they mean it. If they are promised no migrants, they will accept the six o’clock swill.

That there are more people prepared to vote this way is a serious concern. It augurs an ever more divided parliament. It speaks of a fractured country. Hanson has no interest in healing such a country. She wants only to force open the cracks and hunt out whatever grim advantage might wait for her there.

This is another test for Anthony Albanese’s gradualism. His lack of vision produces the disengagement on which Hanson lives. This is a schism that can only be bridged with leadership. It is Albanese’s task to show it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "The rise and rise of Pauline Hanson".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.