The Orange Wave: Australia’s Embrace of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation
Who is 'Pauline', and how has she transformed Australian politics?
It is just nigh of 30 years since Pauline Hanson’s infamous maiden speech, notorious for its warning that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’, a statement which, though vulgar, could only seem hyperbolic for its time because the country’s migration levels today utterly dwarf those of the 1990s.
It is also less than 140 days out from the Victorian election, and her party One Nation is still without a state leader. This disorganisation is exactly why no reasonable person would have bet with any semblance of confidence — even as late as mid-2025 — that in 2026 One Nation (ON) would be consistently tied in polling with the Labor government, not just in Victoria, but across the country. Even less conceivable is that its leader, Hanson, would become the de facto leader of the opposition.
With the exception of just under 9% at the 1998 federal election, national support for One Nation has generally hovered around the 3-6% mark, at least whenever the party was active and under Hanson’s leadership (during her 14-year absence from the party, support was so negligible it bordered on zero, that is, when it bothered to contest at all). These long-contained embers of single-digit support smouldered until late September last year, when what initially seemed like a cyclical and fleeting 1-3% poll boost to ~9% from June to August consolidated as a new baseline in the low teens, providing a launchpad for the party to ascend into the high teens soon after.
From that point on, Australian voters have hardly looked back, with momentum in the electorate propelling One Nation from ~17% on the eve of the Bondi Attack to as high as 31.5% in late June, and since consolidating around 27%.
This growth was so unanticipated we are still left searching for a comprehensive answer to the basic question, ‘How did we get here?’
Indeed, we can only properly account for this drastic transformation of Australian politics by first travelling back in time and then returning to the present to consider the factors that have positioned voters en masse to be suddenly receptive to the woman who has long stood as the very face of ‘racist’ politics in Australia.
I. Fish and Chips, Parliament and Prison
From Ipswich to Canberra
The political rise of Pauline (as most Australians simply refer to her) has not been exponential. At times chaotic and volatile, almost inarguably so. Though the history of One Nation equally lends itself to a certain predictability, and while some of these patterns have contributed to Pauline’s longevity, others must be defied if the party is to capitalise on the unprecedented support it currently enjoys.
Hanson was born Pauline Seccombe in Brisbane in 1954, where she went to school until dropping out at age 15. During this early period of her life, she also worked at her parents’ fish and chip shop in Ipswich, just southwest of Brisbane. At 16, she married a postwar Polish immigrant eight years her senior and had two sons with him; however they divorced after a few years. A timely article featured in the Sydney Morning Herald some weeks ago, an attempted hit piece and obvious exercise in divorcee resentment which fell flat, dragged out the ex-husband in question, who described her as “the most dishonest person [he] know[s]” and affirmed he will not be voting for One Nation.
Pauline went on to remarry Mark Hanson, whose surname she has borne since, working as a bookkeeper for the trades business they ran together. They had two children, one of whom is now involved in the party (daughter Lee), before divorcing in 1987. Whilst subsequent relationships of hers have been known to the public, Hanson has no other children and remains unmarried. Here, we form the image of Hanson as the hardened high school dropout, a dual divorcee on mutually bitter terms with her exes, a mother of four now estranged from some of her children, and an administrative worker. This is by no means an uncommon story in the collective biography of late twentieth-century lower-class Australia, where divorce rates in 1976 had increased almost fivefold from a year after Pauline’s first marriage.
We then encounter the iconic image of the pre-political Pauline Hanson: the Ipswich fish and chip shop owner. Shortly after her second divorce, Hanson ran a chippie with her romantic-turned-business partner until it was sold in 1996 in the wake of her election to federal parliament. Anna Broinowski, writing in The Conversation, credits this time in Hanson’s life with solidifying her opposition to progressive pro-Aboriginal and multicultural policies (spearheaded at the time by the Keating Labor government), and that she was “hearing all sorts of grievances about how her customers were feeling left behind by globalisation”.
Hanson then tested this growing political instinct in the Queensland local elections of 1994, where she was elected as a councillor for Ipswich City with a rather banal agenda headlined by opposition to the construction of a new library. Amusingly, this inadvertently flagged what would grow into Pauline’s sustained ‘war on woke’ and the rather lowbrow anti-intellectualism that continues to colour her unwavering anti-elitism.
Her turn to federal politics followed soon after. It didn’t take long for Hanson to be disendorsed by the party that preselected her in the Ipswich seat of Oxley. Normally, one would expect this to relegate a Liberal candidate to a position of irrelevance, especially in a Labor safe seat, but not for Pauline. Instead, the anti-Aboriginal letter she submitted to her local newspaper, which was the reason for her disendorsement by then-Opposition Leader John Howard, became a national spectacle. As Margo Kingston writes in Off the Rails, ‘Hanson was thrust onto the election campaign stage by the media to test Howard on race’.1 Pauline more than passed a test of her own, securing a 23% primary vote swing and gaining Oxley from Labor with 54.6% on a two-party-preferred basis.
If she wasn’t already worthy of the label after her election victory, Hanson indisputably went from ‘momentary public spectacle’ to ‘national figure’ in the wake of her maiden speech. Her speech, in addition to the infamous “swamped by Asians” line, included a charge that the government was “encouraging separatism” with its Aboriginal policies, a stated desire to see multiculturalism abolished, and a reference to the last major political party leader to support the White Australia Policy, Labor’s Arthur Calwell, on anti-white sentiment in Asia and Africa. To her credit, and notwithstanding any evaluation of the merit of the policies themselves, she has hardly deviated from this original populist credo: a revival of national industry and employment, state-funded national development projects, immigration restrictionism, and an opposition to internationalism.
As a product of media hyper-fixation, Hanson enjoyed the most notoriety of any politician in the 38th Parliament, perhaps other than the Prime Minister John Howard. Peter Nicholson perfectly conveyed the extent to which she shaped the political landscape at the time in a cartoon depicting Hanson, then an independent, seated at the cabinet table with a stature as prominent as any other minister depicted, and noticeably larger than ‘Little Johnny’.
Despite her newfound celebrity, it is important to understand the entrenching of a certain persecution complex born of the Liberal Party’s abandonment of Hanson. It is no stretch to consider the Liberal Party’s throwing of Pauline to the media wolves as the psychological cornerstone of her political personality.
The early days of One Nation
Pauline rode the wave of momentum through to the formation of One Nation in 1997, with the help of David Oldfield — formerly an adviser to Tony Abbott — and his friend David Ettridge. Together, Kingston writes, the three ‘owned and [ran] the party as a private fiefdom’.2 The results of her 1998 contests were impressive: 23% of the vote and eleven MPs elected to the Queensland state parliament in June that year, and ~8.5% nationwide at the federal election (making ON the third most popular party by primary vote) in October, though with only one senator elected and Hanson herself failing in a bid to be returned to parliament.
While the primary vote of One Nation at the 1998 federal election was sizeable enough, Pauline’s personal defeat precipitated a period of great tumult in the party. 1998 was also the year that former adviser and speechwriter John Pasquarelli released a damaging book that levelled harsh critiques at Hanson and primarily targeted Oldfield, the man who replaced him. However, Pasquarelli confirmed in The Australian that as of 2016, he and Pauline were once more on good terms.
In late 2000, Hanson moved to expel Oldfield from the party and drove to the head office in Sydney, locking herself inside and negotiating with Oldfield through a keyhole – he says she was motivated by nothing other than hiding a “suspect expenses claim”, and regardless of how near to the truth this might be, it is epitomises the party of quarrel and instability that was post-1998 One Nation.3 After this, Oldfield registered One Nation New South Wales, described by The Saturday Paper as an ‘engineered split’ to take control away from Hanson.
Things only deteriorated more in 2001, and by the time the next Queensland election came around in February, not one of the eleven MPs elected to the Queensland state parliament remained a One Nation member. The final blow to Hanson’s leadership was a poor showing at the November federal election. She resigned in its wake.
Amidst all the chaos and conflict, this five-year timeframe offers the clearest of insights into the Pauline Hanson who emerged post-1996: a young woman burnt by her own party and forced to run an independent campaign, a politically naïve fish and chip shop owner pursued relentlessly by a media intent on inflaming public sentiment and claiming another ‘racist’ scalp, a figure of newfound national celebrity emotionally pierced by the loss of her seat in 1998, and a leader ever-suspicious of those around her. This is the Pauline Hanson that Australia has known since — a personality equally and in many ways contradictorily distrusting, resolute, vindictive, tenacious, principled, simple-minded, psychologically complex, and crowned with a self-centredness that can still glimmer a markedly feminine compassion.
What The Guardian’s Jeff Sparrow describes as a characteristically ‘Hansonite paranoia’ persists, and not entirely without reason, for Pauline has long been the target of plots to bring about her political downfall. For one, the Australia-Israel Review doxxed a list of 2,000 One Nation members in 1998, an action that well-known progressive Jewish activist and lawyer Mark Leibler defended without reservation.
Then, future Prime Minister Tony Abbott led the campaign, both from parliament and through legal action bankrolled by the ‘Australians for Honest Politics’ slush fund, that ended in Hanson’s imprisonment in 2003. The two had seemingly resolved their personal conflict by 2018 when Abbott spoke at the launch of Hanson’s book of collected speeches, Pauline: In Her Own Words, saying that adversity had made her ‘a better, deeper person’. Elected unopposed as federal president of the Liberal Party in May this year, Abbott now appears set for deeper cooperation with the woman he once derided as the face of, in his own words, the ‘Feral Right’ as both parties share the aim of defeating Albanese’s Labor.4 Such collaboration will proceed in a largely clandestine manner, while in the public eye Liberal leader Angus Taylor continues to deride the prospect of a One Nation government, lest Australia experience an ‘eternity of pain’.
The wrongful imprisonment of Hanson stands as yet another one of those pivotal events in her political life, alongside her first election victory and subsequent loss: a three-year sentence for electoral fraud — she and Ettridge were found guilty of submitting a fraudulent member list for registration — that was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court after she spent eleven weeks in the Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre.
II. The Comeback and the Man (barely) Behind the Curtain
In the years that followed, Hanson mostly oscillated between attempted political comebacks and reality television appearances. She also planned in 2010 to permanently relocate to Britain, which she cut short as an extended European holiday after discovering that the “English are losing their way of life because they’re controlled by foreigners”. Similar to Nigel Farage with his I’m A Celebrity! appearance and subsequent launch of GB News, Hanson was a ratings driver on television, finishing runner-up on the inaugural season of Dancing With the Stars in 2004, appearing on The Celebrity Apprentice Australia in 2011, and a regular guest commentator on the morning show circuit. It is not quite accurate to describe this 2004 to 2012 period as a retreat into the political wilderness, because Pauline did unsuccessfully contest four different elections (usually as an independent) before her return and resuscitation of a dying One Nation in 2013, followed shortly thereafter by her appointment as leader in 2014.
The subsequent six-month window of late 2014 to early 2015 is as significant in the history of One Nation as perhaps any other. It is this time when Hanson narrowly lost the race for the state seat of Lockyer by 114 votes, a campaign that laid the groundwork for her eventual comeback in 2016. But most importantly, it is when James Ashby emerged on the scene.
There is no debate — other than Hanson herself, Ashby is the most controversial and powerful figure to feature in the One Nation story to date. Originally a local radio host in Queensland, in 2011 he became House Speaker Peter Slipper’s media adviser, a role that, along with Slipper’s speakership, ended after just a few months in allegations of sexual harassment by Ashby and an ensuing legal battle which was not resolved until several years later.
Whether Ashby was always destined for politics remains unclear. At face value, the expedient self-destruction of his own staffing career undermines the thought that he had long set his eyes on political power. But Ashby’s time in radio exposed and hardened him to controversy quite early — his co-host was a victim of proto-cancel culture, and he too came into trouble, fined for harassment of a rival broadcaster in 2002. One could mount an argument that he was therefore mentally, if not strategically, prepared for the media attention that would come of his allegations against Slipper less than a decade later.
The new business pivot into signwriting after his departure from Slipper’s office is also, at the very least, inadvertently convenient, for it provided Ashby the negotiating capital (an offer of at-cost printing services) to request access to Hanson in late 2014. What exactly happened in the months that followed is unclear, but he then took it upon himself to accompany Pauline at polling booths on state election day in January 2015, armed with a video camera to capture footage for the party, something that, despite his vast range of responsibilities, he still hasn’t outsourced to another staffer. Their purely political marriage (after all, Ashby is openly gay) was consummated in 2016, when Hanson made Ashby her Chief of Staff — a position he continues to hold — after a much-publicised political second coming that saw her elected to the Senate alongside three other One Nation candidates.
Together, they run the party as a formidable duo: a dynamic that some equate with King Theoden and Wormtongue, but more readily finds its analogy somewhere between that and the relationship between Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Duke of Buckingham. A few weeks ago, journalist Myriam Robin labelled Ashby an ‘apex power player’. In June, The Australian’s Geoff Chambers reported descriptions of Ashby from unnamed politicians and staffers as ‘One Nation’s Svengali and an evil, right-wing Machiavellian genius’, and credited him with taking the party to new heights. Of his political talent, we are mostly left to speculate, for Ashby is a notoriously inaccessible operator.
The Hanson-Ashby era of the party has attracted as much scandal and scrutiny as it has success. From the 2017 ABC Four Corners episode depicting a party allegedly run dictatorially and as a money-making vehicle, to the 2019 Al-Jazeera secret recordings of Ashby and then-Queensland state leader Steve Dickson seeking millions in donations from the NRA. The former touches on a theme of criticism of Hanson and One Nation recurrent amongst its defectors; the latter ended in Dickson’s resignation.
More recently, ex-Labor Leader turned One Nation NSW state parliamentarian Mark Latham accused Hanson and Ashby of misusing and redirecting NSW taxpayer funds to the Brisbane head office, referring under parliamentary privilege to ‘the Ashby scam’ allegedly symptomatic of “a pattern inside PHON, under the direction of Hanson/Ashby.”
On a state and federal level, all but two of One Nation’s parliamentarians elected between 2016 and 2024 have left the party. The only two to remain from this cohort are the dutiful, regularly viral federal senator Malcolm Roberts and the insipid moderate Victorian upper house MP Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell – whose only standout mention of the party’s cardinal issue was to defy the federal executive and call for a ‘HIGH IMMIGRATION = RENTAL CRISIS’ party billboard to be removed in her electorate because the rhetoric was ‘unsuitable’.
The reasons for the repeat cycle of election and defection amongst One Nation politicians of this period are manifold, but often centre on personal criticisms of the Hanson-Ashby rule, perhaps most sensationally put in 2018 by former senator Brian Burston:
“Senator Hanson has declared herself president for life, just like the president of China. James Ashby told her to, because Jimmy controls her 24/7—the not-so-faceless man of One Nation. She is the only Australian, and One Nation the only political party in Australia, that follows the dictatorship model. There is no election for the leader or president of the party, no election for the national executive and no election for the state executive. What you see is what you get, forever, unless president for life decides otherwise. ‘Jimmy told me so.”’
Whatever the case, two things are undeniable: the self-admittedly cold Ashby is undyingly loyal to and protective of Hanson, and this contentious model of party governance is nevertheless the one that persists in the context of unprecedented popularity for One Nation.
Hanson and Ashby have weathered a decade of political storms, and in this respect their resilience and determination cannot be questioned. Given their resounding byelection victory in Farrer in May, the election of two new senators last year (bringing their total to 4 of 76), recent state seat gains in both Western and South Australia, and the defection of former Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, headlines like “‘Doomed to fail’: is this the end (again) for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation?” now seem laughable as the party approaches an almost six-month streak of outpolling the Liberals.
III. Explaining the Wave: The Great Southern Trendkill
To understand why the hitherto prevailing trends of Australian politics and its electorate — long resisting anything resembling Australo-Trumpism (see: Clive Palmer) — have been upheaved, we must look to the country’s contemporary political ecology. Yes, it is remarkable that One Nation now stands firmly in the place of the Liberal-National Coalition as Opposition-presumptive. However, the mistake both the public and One Nation can all too easily make is to think that the polling surge has been caused primarily by Hanson and Ashby themselves, as though they conducted a monthlong Thelemite ritual deep in the Gold Coast hinterland to bring about a thousand-year Hanson reign. To hold this would be to gravely misread the political landscape, and on the part of One Nation, risk committing serious campaign missteps. Hence, we turn our attention to the economic and social plight of the Australian people to more adequately account for this.
The reality is that the insurgence of populist-right anti-immigration politics in Australia is almost entirely due to factors external to One Nation itself. And while it is true that on a macro level these factors generally align with those sustaining Reform UK’s popularity, there are a multitude of differences that distinguish the Australian situation and arguably render the potential ceiling of the Australian Right higher in the medium term. However, it must be said that there remains plenty more water to flow under the bridge before any Antipodean optimism can purge itself of the intermittent wavering that accompanies regular exposure to the Auspol news cycle and One Nation’s social media.
As of this week, and taking into account their most recent dip, One Nation are polling at an average of 26.9%, Labor at 28.1%, the Liberal-National Coalition at 18.9%, and the Greens at 12.8% (per aggregator The Poll Bludger). Just like countries experiencing similar Populist Right gains, two obvious factors make for the most straightforward of causal explanations: (1) the sheer rapidity and scale of migration-facilitated demographic change; and (2) the relative economic downturn and diminishing social mobility predominantly experienced by the native (white) population. We will deal with these first before turning to factors more unique yet just as integral to the Australian experience.
After long moving in tandem, the formerly lawlike correlation between GDP per capita growth and GDP growth in Australia has ruptured, with per capita rates recently in recession for seven consecutive quarters from 2023 to 2024, and once more turning negative in the March 2026 quarter. Directly linked to this are the record-breaking migration rates which have seen Australia’s foreign-born population rise to 8.8 million, almost 1 in 3 residents (granted, a sizeable segment of this are British or New Zealand-born). Australia has taken in a net ~1.553 million migrants since 2022 and boasts a population growth rate roughly double that of the UK in the same period.
It is worth pausing here to emphasise the fact that the Boriswave actually lagged behind Australia’s per capita migration rate at the same time (except for 2021, when Australia was still subject to the neuroses of COVID policy). While the UK’s anti-immigration campaign centres dually on the Boriswave and illegal immigration, with many critics erring on the rhetorically safe side by making everything about illegals, the horror of the Australian situation is that this has been the natural and legal function of a system built up since the late 1990s.
This is not an exaggeration either. Martin Parkinson, one of the most senior bureaucrats in modern Australian politics, a man who served at different times as secretary of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, admitted in a podcast this year that while presiding over the 2023 Migration Review, he and the Department of Home Affairs were not able to identify any clear objectives of the migration programme from the late 1990s onwards.
Whether it be the Howard-driven mass immigration and embrace of the international student grift, Rudd’s pursuit of a ‘Big Australia’, the influx under the Liberal prime ministerial trifecta, or the recent Albowave — the truth is that Australia has been subject to 30 years of inexplicable immigration that has changed the face of the country.
At the same time, and it often strikes other countries as quite bizarre, Australia has almost no illegal boat arrivals, the result of a strict Stop the Boats policy implemented by Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013 (yes, the same Tony Abbott who sought Hanson’s political demise). While there are around 100,000 migrants who remain in the country illegally with either expired visas or rejected asylum claims, and the student/work visa to asylum seeker pipeline is inadequately impeded, illegal immigration has hardly surfaced in Australian politics since 2015.
The benefit of this, and indeed a critical difference in immigration politics between Australia and the UK, is that the case against immigration in Australia is prosecuted exclusively against legal migration. Despite having an immigration rate that would still measure up as one of the world’s highest even if halved, the qualitative difference in immigration has offset the volume of immigration. Unlike America, the UK, and continental Europe, in Australia there is no possibility for the milquetoast conservative to hide behind ‘legality’ as the test by which to judge the acceptability of migration.
Likewise, the migrant profile of Australia — heavily weighted in the last 15 years towards Indian and Chinese arrivals — constrains the potency of ‘migrant crime’ as a justification for immigration restrictionism, notwithstanding the disproportionately African string of machete-wielding robberies in Melbourne and the ongoing predominantly Middle Eastern ‘tobacco war’ fire bombings. Consequently, many of the euphemisms and niceties that often distract from the core problem with mass immigration are not at the rhetorical disposal of Australian politicians, establishing a sharper dichotomy in the debate. This, in part, is why the immigration debate in Australia is now being fought through the nexus of multiculturalism. Very quickly has a debate about ‘the numbers’ become a debate about the composition of the country itself, and both Labor and One Nation alike are bringing this confrontation more expediently to a head.
Late last month, Pauline Hanson stood in front of a packed National Press Club and declared multiculturalism a failure that was imposed on the Australian people without their consent, introducing into the local political vernacular its antithesis in ‘Monoculturalism’. Though the term is intuitively unattractive and One Nation have subsequently failed to cogently defend it in the media, causing some to interpret it as too extreme and others too shallow, it demonstrates the relative speed with which the Australian immigration debate has progressed in such a short timeframe.
Exactly how the multiculturalism debate will proceed in the public sphere over the electoral cycle is unclear, for the conceptual sword of Monoculturalism has, to a certain extent, already been blunted. First, there was Hanson’s unreflective reference to the Socceroos as a perfect example of monoculturalism and the rather embarrassing dismissal thereof by African-born Australian player Awer Mabil. More notably, there was the complete failure of One Nation to do so much as comment on the recent Narendra Modi rally in Melbourne that provoked widespread public outrage, including a now viral protest by local activist and influencer Hugo Lennon. It should go without saying that the Liberal Party offered no criticism either and instead posted an image attending the event, their faces embellished with the most shameless of grins.
One Nation’s omission to offer any timely commentary on the event is a source of great confusion. Speculation that the motive was to avoid controversy is undermined by the fact that, within days of the rally, Hanson met with Tommy Robinson in Luton and was given a tour of the town, recorded on camera, lamenting the demographic situation. Surely, hanging out with a figure of such disrepute is far more likely to generate public condemnation than a comment on what was effectively a mass foreign rally in Australia. The three possible answers, all of which indicate vast room for strategic improvement, are either (a) ON are making the same mistake as the Liberals by believing they can win the Indian vote; (b) ON are recalibrating their stance on immigration to scapegoat the Muslim population à la 2016; or (c) ON are incomprehensibly unreactive to the political news cycle.
Despite these tactical shortcomings, the important point is that the appearance of multiculturalism as a topic for debate in mainstream Australian political discourse demonstrates a significant shift from the words of NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns who, last year, in his typical school principal-like tone, declared that it is “not up for debate and not up for change”.
It may be puzzling that the world’s third richest nation — Australia fares better than the UK on general and youth employment, average weekly earnings, purchasing power parity, government debt to GDP, and tax burden to GDP — has been the seat of one of the most rapid polling rises of a populist political party in modern history. Reform’s growth from 6% to 30% was spread out across a period of approximately 17 months, whereas One Nation’s equivalent rise occurred in just 11. Why, then, would a wealthier country that has both a fiscal and economic advantage over the UK be home to a segment of voters who have more quickly — and on aggregate more widely — taken to a party and leader perceived as more vulgarly to the right of Reform? Moreover, why has this happened in the context of a party not yet as logistically competent as Reform (to think Reform has been criticised for a lack of professionalisation!)?
On the economic front, the cumulative effect of negative real wage growth over a period of five years and a much higher level of household debt to GDP in Australia has exacerbated the impact of interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank (RBA). While the recent monetary policies of the Bank of England and the RBA have not been too dissimilar, Australians, being much more indebted on average, are more exposed to the effects of interest rate increases. Combined with negative real wage growth that exceeds the UK, the perceived rate of decline in Australian living standards post-COVID is arguably greater than the UK. As such, even with a generally more prosperous economic backdrop, the Australian experience of economic downturn is more pronounced on a relative level, provoking a degree of political resentment disproportionate to the economic and fiscal position.
It may surprise readers who associate Australia with vast plains and ‘the outback’ that Australia is more urbanised than the UK (~87% vs ~85%). Not only that, but the concentration of the population in a narrower range of cities is much higher. For instance, Sydney and Melbourne swallow up just shy of 40% of the Australian population. Add Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide to that, and you now account for almost two-thirds of the population. In contrast, if you combine Greater London, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and Glasgow, you only account for a quarter of the UK’s population. A consequence of Australia’s urban concentration is that in states like Victoria, where ~77% of the population live in Melbourne, the experience of mass immigration is even more an ‘everyone issue’ than post-Boriswave Britain.
To put it more straightforwardly, the higher concentration of the population in a smaller number of cities means the effects of mass immigration are more widely experienced. The (not quite) universality of outer suburban life across these cities also lends itself to a certain shared experience that produces a correspondingly similar political sentiment. This is undoubtedly why a recent Fox & Hedgehog poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs showed that 60% believe that there are ‘too many migrants in Australia’, at the same time support for multiculturalism is sharply declining in other polls.
The cultural factor most unique to Australia’s political situation is, for want of a better term, the collective fatigue that many Australians suffer at the hands of the institutional promotion of Aboriginal culture at the expense of a purely Australian identity. ‘Peak Woke’ hit Australia in 2023 in the Voice referendum — which sought the approval of a constitutionally entrenched Aboriginal body attached to the parliament — and returned a decisive 60% ‘No’ vote, without a single state returning a majority ‘Yes’ vote. The Voice referendum’s place in the contemporary Australian story is far less that of a political catalyst when compared to Brexit, which of course had an immediate fallout whose consequences continue to shape UK politics today. Rather, the referendum is better understood as a plebiscite on the Aboriginalisation of Australia’s political expression, a checkpoint that marked a growing bitterness amongst the electorate that cannot be simply reduced to ‘the economy’.
This budding resentment only simmered beneath the surface in the lead-up to the 2025 election — after all, Labor increased their majority. But it now appears to be rearing its head as Australians become increasingly impatient with the political class, with now only 17% believing that Aboriginal ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies are not divisive and a string of public ‘booings’ of the ceremony heard across the country at ANZAC Day services this year. Though not a singular event, this gradual force has only fuelled the rise of One Nation, whose policies include the abolition of the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the barring of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands flags on public buildings, and an opposition to ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies at events.
In addition to the Voice, some might argue that the world’s worst COVID lockdowns and mandatory vaccination policy, particularly in Victoria, contributed to a growing distrust in government and radicalisation of the citizenry. However, about 80% of Australians were still possessed by political Stockholm syndrome in 2022, affirming that the government had responded ‘well or fairly well’ to the pandemic, while 60% viewed the UK’s less draconian response to the virus as ‘poor’. Yes, the anti-lockdown rump that formed about 10-15% of the vote in the 2022 elections may have had some impact from thereon via social media conspiracy theory content which has since captivated many a Gen X’er, but it is impossible to quantify. It is fair, then, to dismiss COVID as a factor in most newly orange voters’ embrace of Hanson.
So, if neither the Voice nor COVID were the singular catalysts of the One Nation surge, what was? Well, the best way to understand the rise of One Nation is to see the general material and social conditions as the trainer that led the racehorse to the gate. The trigger that sprung the gate wide open was the tragedy of the Bondi Attack in December last year, where two Islamic terrorists killed 15 people in an anti-Jewish attack — Sajid Akram and his son Naveed, the former having come to Australia on a student visa. From that point on, one can observe an almost vertical rise in early 2026, from polling numbers in the high teens all the way up to 30% in a short period. Of course, there is the shock and horror that violence of this sort — which is extraordinarily rare in Australia — aroused in the minds of Australians. But the second aspect of the Bondi Attack that prompted so many voters away from Labor and Liberal, and into the arms of Hanson was the response of the established parties themselves.
The response of the One Nation leader to the attack was to say:
“I’ll keep fighting about mass migration, it is about mass immigration that’s happening here, and it’s destroying our standard of living, our way of life and access to services that everyone Australian has a right to, but the government brings them in purely for the vote,”
“And the fools out there who keep voting for them, you’re going to suffer, you will suffer. You keep voting for these bastards who actually don’t have pride for our country and our Australian flag, then be prepared to get what we’re going to get.”
The response of Anthony Albanese was just as heavy-handed but directed instead towards (1) tightening gun laws; (2) talking about “the rise of right-wing extremist groups”; and (3) drafting new hate speech legislation. Unsurprisingly, with the support of the Liberal Party, the new hate speech and gun reform laws were passed in January this year.
Yes, in the aftermath of Australia’s worst terrorist attack, a horrifically brutal event with such widely circulated footage and the clearest of motives, the government decided to focus on hate speech laws. It is obvious how this was received as nothing short of gaslighting by much of the voting public, who questioned how exactly the doubling of ‘hate speech squads’ by the Australian Federal Police and an even harder crackdown on Australians’ already restricted freedom of expression would address the obvious root cause of the shooting. One Nation’s policy of a free speech referendum has legs for precisely this reason.
This is only one of many Labor government actions that have infuriated Australians over the last 10 months. The abysmal record of the Albanese government includes regular stories like the Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke reversing the deportation order on a Chinese migrant convicted of possessing child abuse material, the same minister’s comments on an Indian podcast that he would like to open a pathway to citizenship for the 2.9 million migrants on temporary visas, or the taxpayer-funded return of ISIS brides to Australia (who were given free pizza and hotel accommodation on arrival).
The optics are terrible for a government already losing the faith of the people, and it beggars belief that the response of the state has been to double down at every turn. It is especially reckless in the context of a social media landscape where millions have instant access to incensing stories that would otherwise go unreported. Of course, the government’s solution, just like in the UK, is to restrict social media access and foreshadow an assault on online anonymity.
In this sense, the rise of One Nation very much accords with the rise of Reform. Both have only been made possible by the actions of the state.
And while the failures of the state have created a similar opportunity for both parties, there remains a stark difference between the leaders themselves, who recently met in London after encouragement from Barnaby Joyce. Hanson, whose character has already been described at length, lacks eloquence, but this is the exact reason that so many Australians have taken to her — one will commonly hear remarked, “I like Pauline because she says it like it is”. The oratorical skill and wit of Farage, on the other hand, is much more expansive. Why, then, is Hanson’s unrefined ‘say it like it is’ manner popular in Australia, if at the same time it would be inconceivable for her to be the leader of Reform?
Though a sociological foray is far beyond the purview of this piece, it is worth remarking in brief that the historical explanation is likely found in a more thorough analysis of the differing class structures of Australia and England. England’s lower classes still possess a certain residual class deference that harkens back to a society much more stratified along said lines. The lower classes of Australia do not carry class baggage in the same way. As such, it could be argued that the ideal of the ‘polite society’ does not loom as prominently in Australia today. Historian Keith Hancock, in his 1930 work Australia, touches upon this difference:
‘Liberated from the congealed ice-forms of convention and class which are packed so tightly in a small northern island, the vigorous flow of Australian life cuts ever-changing channels for the irrigation of limitless virgin plains. Society in Australia is not yet fixed and formalised. Men do not find it difficult to change their house or town or class. There is no class except in the economic sense. In each State there are perhaps a dozen families who have possessed wealth for two generations or more; but they have no more authority than other rich. Men, and have not imposed upon the Australians standards of conducts and culture.’5
In another sense, the development of Australian English reflects a characteristic pragmatism identified by early travelling and colonial writers, and this could partly explain the Australian appreciation of Hanson’s rhetorical simplicity. This same pragmatism is perhaps an originating cause of Australian anti-intellectualism, and one may dare postulate the consequent resentment towards their own country that more ‘cultured’ or intellectual Australians carry to this day. Not being bound by the norms of a class-ordered society, it can be contended that local language conventions developed differently, creating a vernacular that was less serious and ‘rougher’ in its discourse, making possible a preference for someone with the communication style of Hanson. This is something explored further in the ethnopragmatics of linguists Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka, but again is beyond the scope of this article.6
By now, it is clear that the external factors far outweigh any party-internal factors in the rise of One Nation. It almost seems that given the party’s continually delayed response to professionalise and expand their operation beyond the Queensland core, the rise of One Nation has occurred in spite of themselves. That said, the party must be given due credit for its recent electoral successes, and the addition of the likes of Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi to the team leaves one with the hope that the party is becoming more responsive to the counsel of people with experience and better judgement.
To depict the party as a rabble without qualification is inaccurate, for their rhetoric at important points over the last year has struck a chord with a large segment of the voting public. Of course, they have benefitted from inadvertently riding the wave of Australian decline thus far, but a degree of action has always been necessary to channel the public’s discontent into support for a party. This is simply to state the basic fact that there is a certain reciprocity between voter and party in the procession of politics, and therefore One Nation is owed recognition. In that sense, no one can fairly say they have failed to set a single foot right.
One can recognise the shortcomings of One Nation while at the same time accept that it stands as the only viable option in Australian party politics. Fighting against the current of momentum that propels One Nation is a fool’s errand. No one individual can reduce a party polling in the mid-to-high 20s back down to 3-6% overnight, and to think otherwise betrays a severe lack of political tact. Moreover, when a party to the right of the Liberal Party holds such a large share of the vote, it precludes the possibility of another party making substantial inroads into the vote of either. This is why Restore Britain has been a failure and was better served remaining a non-party community advocacy group. It is also why the creation of yet another political party in Australia would be absurd, at least in the current electoral cycle. That hypothetical party’s vote ceiling would, on the most generous of estimations, sit around 4-5% (more likely <1%), and the electoral system would neutralise this accordingly.
In light of the wisdom the UK experience offers Australia, the One Nation supporter and critic alike would be best advised to approach things cautiously and pragmatically. Whether it is an attempt to participate in the party, constructive criticism through auxiliary organisations, or a period of political agnosticism waiting in the wings. In any event, the Australian Right, to the minimal extent that it is a unified political bloc, should weigh the significance of their shared political situation much more heavily than they do the petty disputes that characterise X feeds, mainstream media, and party politics. This, too, applies to One Nation themselves, for whom overcoming an endemic paranoia and inefficient centralisation ought to be non-negotiable.
History tells us it is not beyond the realms of possibility that One Nation descends into dysfunction before the 2028 federal election. Some might say it is more likely than not. After all, the party is not yet close to internally resembling Reform and cynicism has always been cheap. But the Orange Wave does not crest or break on the whim of a few individuals. The Australian political system is more complex than that, and the media and voters will cause this wave to swell for some time yet. So in the meantime, ride the wave in whatever way you can.
This article was written by William Grainger, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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Margo Kingston, Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), xx.
Kingston, Off the Rails, ix.
Kingston, Off the Rails, x.
Tony Abbott, “The Feral Right,” in Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the Rise of the One Nation Party in Australia pp. 10-19, (Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1998); Ewa Staszewska, “Former prime minister Tony Abbott elected unopposed as Liberal Party president,” ABC News, 29 May, 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/tony-abbott-elected-liberal-president-angus-taylor/106738822.
W. K. Hancock, Australia, (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1930), 270.
See Cliff Goddard, “Not taking yourself too seriously in Australian English: Semantic explications, cultural scripts, corpus evidence,” Intercultural Pragmatics 6, no. 1 (2009): 29-53. https://doi.org/10.1515/IPRG.2009.002.
Well played Bill - very good stuff.