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One Nation appears to be breaking free of its political moorings to become something bigger – an Australian countercultural movement. It offers itself as a political party with some policies. Remove excise on beer in venues, for instance, and allow income splitting for couples. Its policies are neither complete, coherent nor costed. Neither are the Liberals’, however, so it’s not alone in this.
More important than One Nation’s policy specifics is its posture overall. Its attitude of rejectionism sets it apart and suits it to the mood of a disgruntled people.
It doesn’t only oppose the existing political establishment and the supposed elites. It rejects the mainstream, middle-class consensus on a wide range of social and cultural matters.
It’s anti-immigration, of course, but it’s also pro-gun and anti-abortion, putting it outside bipartisan politics and beyond mainstream opinion.
And it doesn’t politely disagree. Central to its character is its bad manners. It is rude and rule-breaking. Pauline Hanson routinely offends, the party organisation misbehaves.
It’s populist, it’s nativist, and Hanson herself has a 30-year history as a racist. It’s long been scandalous and dysfunctional. And, even as the party ascends to the top in the poll rankings and a billionaire hands it a free plane, it manages to maintain underdog status, Hanson the perennial victim.
Her history of speaking the unspeakable has inoculated her.
The core of One Nation’s support is, as its new MP, David Farley, told me last week, that a growing number of Australians feel financial “desperation” in a struggle for “survival”. As persistent inflation eats more deeply into people’s incomes and living standards, the sense of desperation spreads. Amid despair that the main parties can solve the problem, One Nation’s support rises.
Among established parties and observers, there’s been a quiet confidence that the party’s rise will falter and flop under the weight of its own meanness and malfunction. But the evidence of its momentum suggests increasingly that its appeal goes beyond the economics of voter self-interest to a countercultural nihilism.
“Pauline Hanson has gone from being the least-liked politician in the Australian Electoral Survey ever since she’s been in politics to now, when suddenly she’s the most favoured,” says an academic specialist on One Nation, Dr Jordan McSwiney. “This has come out of nowhere.”
“Perhaps the anger is so raw,” poses McSwiney, senior research fellow at Canberra University’s Centre for Deliberative Democracy, “that scandals and stuff-ups don’t matter any more. I’m not sure that another scandal or extremist in its ranks will make much of a difference. Does that mean there’s something more than political choice behind it?”
If so, it will be much more difficult to defeat than a mere political party.
Consider the past few days alone. First, Pauline Hanson says in an interview with my colleague Paul Sakkal that she can’t think of any mistakes that Donald Trump might have made as president. The man imposing unjustified tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium, and shortages of fuel and fertiliser on the world, can do no wrong, apparently. But neither can Hanson, it turns out.
Peter Dutton lost an election partly because he was seen to be too uncritical of Trump. But Hanson suffers no backlash. Her history of speaking the unspeakable has inoculated her. Not that One Nation supports actual inoculation; it opposes vaccination mandates. To hell with public health.
In the same interview, Hanson concedes that her party struggles to control extremists in its midst: “I’m being infiltrated by these extremists, so it’s all the time happening with One Nation, they set us up all the time, and I’ve really had enough of it.” Consequences, zero.
Next, Barnaby Joyce announces in a Sky News interview that One Nation would ban permanent residents from owning a home. Only to go back on air a few minutes later to correct himself: “No, we are not going to be kicking permanent residents out of their house.”
For a Labor or Liberal politician, the consequences of such a blunder would be serious censure. They’d typically be ordered to stay out of public view for some weeks.
But for Joyce, there were no consequences. Hanson congratulated him: “Australians trust owning up to mistakes, not spinning them.” Authenticity trumps blunder.
Then The Guardian reveals that the Queensland branch of One Nation “reported more than $1 million in missing and worthless assets in more than six years of filed financial records”. And that was in the years when it bothered with such things as legal requirements. The masthead reported that One Nation had not filed annual returns with the regulator in Queensland since 2022.
It quoted a professor of financial accounting at the University of Melbourne, Matthew Pinnuck, calling it “sloppy and unprofessional”. No kidding. Consequences, again, are nil.
One Nation has a long history of flawed and failed regulatory filings. And this crowd wants control of the national Treasury and its annual $800 billion in revenue.
All of these outrages, blunders and failures are part of a years-long One Nation continuum. In the same week, Newspoll reports that One Nation’s support has risen to eclipse not only the Coalition’s but also Labor’s. Hanson’s party has a record primary vote of 31 per cent, according to the poll, against Labor’s 30.
And, also this week, One Nation cleverly takes advantage of a Labor fundraising campaign to “stop One Nation” by launching its own fundraiser aimed at Anthony Albanese – “Fire the liar”. By Friday afternoon, One Nation claimed to have raised $2.9 million in two days.
This claim might be dubious, and One Nation’s published “audit” of the fundraising was nothing of the sort, but it doesn’t much matter.
Why not?
Because it’s been successful in its chief aim of generating publicity for the party. Media coverage has been intense. The prime minister himself fed the beast by casting doubt on the claimed value of donations. The attention adds to One Nation’s prominence. Its sense of momentum runs for another week.
Hanson announced that a “Fire the liar” billboard, posted onto a truck, had been parked outside Albanese’s electoral office. Making good use of funds raised.
All the noise created something of a carnival atmosphere. This moved a Murdoch commentator, Andrew Bolt, to observe: “Suddenly, supporting Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has become fun. For many Australians, it’s a joy to watch for once those damn Canberra politicians panic.”
And, if the fundraiser turns out to be dodgy, Hanson will simply repeat her time-tested tactic of playing the victim. Just as she did this week when asked about her experience of being jailed for electoral fraud in 2003. Her conviction was overturned, but only after she’d spent 11 weeks in prison.
“It was a political witch-hunt,” she told a Perth forum, putting chief blame on Tony Abbott. Growing teary, she added: “It was a very hard time for my children.”
And fair enough, too. It was indeed a miscarriage of justice and her children did suffer. But she’s a career politician of 30 years’ standing, ascendant in the polls and now generously funded.
Even before this week’s online fundraiser, Gina Rinehart had given her $2 million and a bonus light aircraft valued at $1 million or more. Yet Hanson portrays herself as the victim.
“She’s very good at using scandals and victim identity – ‘It’s the elites, kicking down to repress me, when all I want to do is speak for the real people’ – to re-energise her supporters,” Jordan McSwiney says.
He points out that she’s adroit in playing the suffering outsider while she’s also reaping the benefits of being an insider. She’s a senator, party leader and career politician who poses as being the battler’s friend, outside the Canberra bubble and anti-elite.
Yet she’s also an insider now saying that she could be prime minister, and promising to cement her daughter, Lee Hanson, in parliament to continue her work. Establishing a family dynasty, in other words, the ultimate in entrenched insider privilege. Gina might need to get her a bigger plane.
Does this sound like a cult of personality? One Nation always has been. Hanson herself transcended politics to become a figure in pop culture long ago. What’s changed is that almost one-third of Australians are now in a mood to embrace her as an avenue for rejecting everything else.
And, as this week showed, she’s taking votes from all parties except for the Greens. She polled 6 per cent of the primary national vote at the last federal election. In the past year she took about 15 per cent from the Coalition, half its vote share. She’s taken another 4 per cent from Clive Palmer and other right-wing minor parties. Labor’s best estimate is that she’s now taken about 5 per cent from its vote share, accounting for her total of 30 per cent of the electorate.
The big question is whether Hanson now owns these votes or whether they’re just on loan until the election in two years’ time.
Says a One Nation operative: “The other parties call us a fringe party. Well, if we’re a party of the fringe, you must be parties of solutions. So go ahead – show us your solutions.”
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. His world column appears on Tuesdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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