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Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has ramped up Labor’s attack on One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, accusing her of hating modern Australia as the party tries to claw back support from the surging populists.
Labor hardheads believe Hanson’s recent controversies – criticism of Indigenous culture, One Nation’s labelling of Liberal Andrew Hastie as a traitor, and questioning Anthony Albanese’s mother’s use of public housing – has altered the dynamic and created space for a more strident line on Hanson.
Labor and Coalition figures have at times avoided arguments that might rankle Hanson’s voter base, but Bowen used a speech on Friday night to turn Hanson’s brand of patriotism against her.
“You can’t claim to be a patriotic Australian when you don’t actually like the country we have become,” Bowen told the John Curtin Research Centre, according to an advance copy of his speech.
Bowen, whose green agenda has made him a figure of derision among conservatives, said Hanson’s was an “exclusive” and “angry” patriotism that “demonises some Australians in order to energise and legitimise their own sense of being Australian”.
“It seeks to reserve the right to love our country to themselves and deny the right to love Australia to those who don’t look like, or pray like, themselves,” he said, talking up Albanese’s “progressive patriotism” slogan.
“It’s small patriotism which seeks a more inward-looking Australia. A smaller conception of what it is to be Australian. It involves shrinking in a fear of globalism, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other conspiracy-theory laden concepts of a scary world.”
Labor is not in full panic mode about One Nation’s shock rise that has put it at a 27 per cent primary vote across an average of all polls. Labor is at 28 per cent and would still win an election if one were held today. But the party’s primary vote has been in slow and steady decline for months and is in perilous territory.
Labor MPs are keen to neutralise the migration issue, as Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke attempted to do on Thursday, then move to fresh cost-of-living relief next year as it scrambles to win back the approximately 5 percentage points of Labor supporters who have drifted to Hanson.
Bowen represents a working-class Sydney seat in which One Nation could poll well, but where migrant communities might be uncomfortable with Hanson’s position on migration and race relations.
A survey of 1000 One Nation voters conducted by Labor-aligned figures Bruce Hawker and John Utting showed Hanson was adored by her voter base despite the increasingly harsh critiques from her opponents. Albanese and Labor were uniformly disliked by those surveyed, meaning Bowen’s arguments may not be given much weight by Hanson’s supporters and could actually bolster Hanson’s claim she is unfairly pilloried.
“I don’t believe you can truly call yourself an Australian patriot if you describe the Indigenous culture of our country as primitive,” Bowen said. “It’s people like Anh Do and Usman Khawaja who were raised in western Sydney and are now, rightfully, among our most celebrated authors and sportsmen.”
Bowen invoked the history of Labor’s wartime prime minister John Curtin to launch a new strategic and geopolitical case for maintaining an open, liberal stance that One Nation would put at risk. He said there were huge economic opportunities in being linked to global moves on renewables and national resources such as critical minerals, as Albanese jets to a United Nations gathering in New York to talk up Labor’s tech regulations and try to secure AI investment.
“Progressive patriots want a stronger, more influential Australia,” Bowen said. “An Australia with more sovereign supply chains, more value added to our natural resources and more of our natural advantages in renewable energy harnessed and put to use.
“It’s cultural cringe and fundamentally unpatriotic to want your country to be less influential in the world.”
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Paul Sakkal is Chief Political Correspondent. He previously covered Victorian politics and won a Walkley award and the 2025 Press Gallery Journalist of the Year. Contact him securely on Signal @paulsakkal.14.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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