CW: racism, transphobia, anti-First Nations comments
“If I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”
These were the words spoken by Pauline Hanson, in her maiden speech to Parliament in 1996. She’s something of a national punchline. Her fiery orange hair. Her pouty lips. Her voice. No satire of Australian politics is complete without a stab at Pauline Hanson. This is someone who has endured electoral defeat, a prison sentence, and a season on Dancing with the Stars. She’s an easy figure to laugh off.
Yet even though she has failed to reach the heights of Trump in the US, or far-right figures like Le Pen or Meloni in Europe, she has managed to wield considerable influence nonetheless. From our media platforming her racism and conspiracy theories, to our politicians bending over backward to appease her increasingly extreme base, Hanson’s presence has poisoned the tone of our national debate. So, why has Hanson been able to exert power from the fringe — and how has it ruined our politics?
Pauline
Pauline Hanson was not a national figure at the start of 1996. But Australia was ripe for a figure like her to arise. The Mabo case, the Native Title Act and the Wik case (which was unfolding in the High Court) had brought race to the forefront of the national debate. It was only a matter of time before someone like Hanson tapped into the resentments of disaffected white Australians.
A twice-divorced fish-and-chip shop owner from the Queensland suburb of Ipswich, Hanson was preselected by the Liberals to contest the safe Labor seat of Oxley in the 1996 election. They simply needed someone to run — nobody expected her to blow up in the way that she did. Her comments about First Nations peoples would get her attention, and later disendorsed by the Liberal Party, but not in time to take her name off of the ballot paper. Being disendorsed only supported her populist appeal. She became a martyr, a voice for white Australians who had been shut down by Canberra “elites”.
She won with a 20% swing in her direction, pulling votes away from traditional Labor and Coalition voters. Therein lies the danger of Hanson: she wins votes from across the political spectrum. It’s why both major parties feel a need to secure her base.
When she arrived in Parliament, Hanson gave her notorious maiden speech, in which she argued that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” and that First Nations peoples received too many advantages compared to white Australians. The address made headlines across the nation and the world. At first, Prime Minister John Howard remained silent. Then, twelve days later, Howard delivered a speech of his own, in Hanson’s home state of Queensland, extolling the virtues of people now being able to “speak a little more freely”.
“In a sense, the pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted,” he said. If there was any doubt as to whether Howard condoned the comments, he now made it abundantly clear where he stood. Hanson had received the Prime Ministerial stamp of approval.
Her prominence surged even further when she came out against Howard’s gun bans, eating into the Coalition’s core constituency of rural voters. She tapped into the resentments of disaffected voters, and targeted it against the government, cities and the “elites” who sought to change Australia from the way it once was: secure, comfortable and white. A vote for Hanson was to throw a brick through the window of the political establishment.
In the 1998 Queensland election, Howard did a preference deal with One Nation, to the chagrin of his party’s moderate wing, in a last-ditch attempt to save the government of Premier Rob Borbidge. It was a colossal failure. Cosmopolitan Liberal voters flocked to Labor in protest. Hanson didn’t have the party members to hand out how-to-vote cards, so the preferences didn’t flow back to the Coalition anyway. They needed to find another way to deal with the woman from Ipswich.
Howard
After the debacle in the Queensland election, the Liberals announced that they would preference One Nation last. When the federal election came around a few months later, One Nation was all but obliterated. Hanson lost her seat. There was a great deal of gloating from people who believed that Australia had chosen to rise above her rhetoric. It was an appealing fantasy to believe in. A more likely reason to explain her defeat came from journalist David Marr: “Howard made Hanson redundant.”
In the leadup to the ‘98 election and afterward, Howard dealt with One Nation by subtly adopting their policies. Over the course of his tenure, he slashed welfare funding for First Nations peoples and migrants; dismantled the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission; launched The Intervention in the NT; cut immigration numbers; refused to condemn the Cronulla riots; refused to apologise for the stolen generations, and closed Australia to asylum seekers coming by boat. The list goes on.
It wasn’t just Howard, either. In the leadup to the 2001 election, Labor leader Kim Beazley supported Howard during the Tampa affair — where the government blocked the Norwegian Tampa boat (which was carrying 433 rescued refugees) from entering Australian waters. In doing so, he signed the ALP to the Hansonite consensus: the agreement that asylum seekers didn’t deserve a place in Australia.
While on the campaign trail, Howard echoed Hanson’s maiden speech, claiming that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” By using Hanson’s rhetoric as Prime Minister, by taking her stances and incorporating them into national policy, Howard legitimised them. Hanson brought race back to the centre of our politics, but Howard cemented it. In the span of two decades, the Liberal Party’s conservative wing had gone from Malcolm Fraser — who in spite of his faults, encouraged multiculturalism and immigration from non-white countries — to Howard. And while this tactic kept Hanson out of parliament initially, this continual rightward shift would lay the groundwork for Tony Abbott and eventually Peter Dutton to rise to the helm of the Liberal Party.
Wilderness
Pauline Hanson would be out of politics for the next eighteen years after the ‘98 election. In 2002, she was forced out of One Nation in an internal party revolt. In 2003, she was convicted of electoral fraud and sentenced to three years in prison (she successfully appealed and was released after eleven weeks). Yet, in spite of it all, she carried on, and stood for the Senate in the 2004 election as an independent. She lost by a narrow margin, but she garnered more votes than One Nation did. It was a testament to the cult of personality that she had built. Her mere presence had become synonymous with the grievances and prejudices of white Australia. She was a force unto herself. Party or not, what she represented remained the same.
One might think that she’d make her comeback once Labor returned to power in 2007. After all, Rudd was criticised by the Murdoch media for promoting the idea of “big Australia” (increasing our population to 35 million by 2050) and ending Howard’s asylum seeker policy. But by 2009, One Nation voters found a voice in the new opposition leader, Tony Abbott. Egged on by the media, he shifted the dial of our national debate even further than the arch-conservative Howard ever did, and doing so, brought more of Hanson’s views to the mainstream. By 2010, the Gillard Government had dumped “big Australia” and resumed offshore processing. Of course, it was too late. Nothing less than Abbott’s extreme views on immigration would keep Hanson’s supporters satisfied.
Return
It was inevitable. Pauline Hanson could not be kept out of Parliament forever. The parties could only keep her base appeased with race-baited red meat for so long. Even when she had lost, those electoral defeats were razor-thin. With the fall of Tony Abbott and the rise of “moderate” Malcolm Turnbull, the doors opened for her return. Her latest target? Australia’s Muslim community.
When she announced that she was running for Senate in 2016, the media pounced on her. And why wouldn’t they? Her greatest skill is her ability to generate a headline. ABC’s Q+A brought her on and experienced record ratings, and Sunrise gave her a weekly segment. Conservatives called it freedom of speech, while some progressives justified it by claiming that she deserved a higher level of scrutiny as a potential politician.
Either way, Hanson got what she wanted. A platform to peddle her hate and conspiracy theories, to call for a national Muslim ban, a burka ban, claims that Halal certifications funded terrorism and more. The discourse opened the floodgates for more figures to come out and stoke racial fears. Peter Dutton, a government minister at the time, made headlines for saying that it was a mistake for Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser to let Lebanese refugees into Australia.
It worked. She won four seats in the Senate, meaning that One Nation now held the balance of power. She’d gone from the political wilderness to being able to hold the government hostage overnight. She began exerting her influence immediately.
So, at the height of hate-fuelled attacks on Muslims living in Australia, the Turnbull government saw fit to attempt to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, aimed at protecting people from being targeted based on race. Even with Hanson’s support, the legislation failed to pass. But damage was already done. It was never about the legislation. Race politics, and by extension, Pauline Hanson, would dominate news coverage throughout the period. She was in her element.
2020s
Hanson is at her most effective when she can tap into voters’ resentments and prejudices. In many ways, COVID gave her that opportunity. By integrating vaccine sceptics into her base, Hanson was able to harness the resentment of the anti-vax movement. She became their face in Parliament, teaming with Coalition senators to pressure Scott Morrison into scrapping vaccine mandates. When Pauline Hanson led an anti-vax rally in Canberra, Morrison spoke in support, blaming the state governments for the situation.
As the national debate moved on from the pandemic, so too did Hanson. She needed something new to generate headlines and controversy. She did what she did best: beat up on a minority group. This time, it was the trans community.
Whether it was arguing that trans children should be taken from their parents or moving a motion to ban gender reassignment surgery, One Nation beat the drum of the trans culture wars — and Morrison and Albanese were more than eager to join in. In 2022, the Religious Discrimination Bill passed in the lower house as Albanese echoed transphobic dog-whistles to the Daily Telegraph.
On 18 March 2023, neo-Nazis gathered outside the Victorian parliament and performed the Nazi salute in support of anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen. When Victorian Liberal MLC Moira Deeming was threatened with expulsion for attending the rally, Hanson offered her a spot in One Nation. While Albanese condemned the presence of neo-Nazis, he did not stop using transphobic rhetoric.
Four days later, queer activists were pelted with stones and glass by a far-right mob at an anti-trans rally led by former NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham. It also made national news, but this time it took place in Belfield, a fifteen minute drive from Albanese’s Marrickville home. This time, the Prime Minister said nothing. Chris Minns and Dominic Perrottet were three days out from an election where One Nation was expected to perform well. They condemned the violence, but said nothing of the transphobia that led to it. One Nation did not win any more seats at that election. They didn’t need to.
Hanson
Pauline Hanson’s current target is the same one that got her booted from the Liberal Party and made her a celebrity: First Nations peoples. One Nation was the first party to come out against the Voice to Parliament. Like every other issue she has inserted himself into, she has spent the past year spreading lies and misinformation on the subject, cementing a space for post-truth politics in Australia.
Realistically, Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party was never going to support the Voice. They’re too far gone for that. Two decades of lurching ever further to the right to appease Hanson’s insatiable base has taken its toll on the Liberal Party. The moderate wing is all but wiped out. The fact that Peter Dutton is now its leader speaks for itself.
It’s hard to pinpoint how much of this we can attribute directly to Hanson. After all, she didn’t create the people who vote for her. And she’s certainly had a lot of help from right-wing shock jocks and the Murdoch media. But no other figure in Australian politics has become more synonymous with racism and ignorance; no other figure has been able to exert influence from the fringe as effectively as Hanson has, or for as long as Hanson has. There, she is in a class of her own.
Much of this article has focused on the effect that Hanson has had on major parties from a policy standpoint. She has had a real effect, and we are all worse for it. But the real impact of Pauline Hanson is less quantifiable. And that is the effect that her racist rhetoric has had on our country.
This is neither a new nor a radical observation, but it cannot be overstated. There is no way to measure the emotional trauma that Hanson has inflicted on the people from the groups she has targeted. She has used the nearly three decades of her public life to spout bile and stoke hatred for political gain. And she will probably be re-elected.
And even if she isn’t, it’s unlikely that much will change. There will come a time when she begins to give less interviews, and that orange hair will go grey, and Pauline Hanson will die. But the stain that she has left on Australian politics will remain.
