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June 22, 2026 — 5:00am
The most important thing to say about Pauline Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club last week is also – or at least should be – obvious: she confirmed that she is a politician of the extreme far-right.
Hanson’s familiarity is clearly part of her appeal. She’s part of the furniture. The same goes for Barnaby Joyce. These feelings – exemplified by the widespread tendency to speak of “Pauline” and “Barnaby” – can make all the One Nation fuss seem almost humdrum: just another chapter in the dull comedy of Australian politics. But that familiarity should not be allowed to obscure the dangerous and alien nature of the situation: right now, an extreme far-right party is polling higher than any other party in Australia.
This isn’t a mere label. It is the correct description of the positions Hanson put forward last week.
And yet it is not only that Hanson wants a “monoculture”, wants severe cuts to migration, clearly detests Islam, believes global warming is a “hoax”, wants to limit the rights of transgender people and restrict access to abortion. It is that she wants such issues put at the centre of political debate. These are not idly held beliefs; they are crucial to her project.
It is possible that, in the end, these issues rebound on Hanson; that at some point, Australians decide they do not want somebody with those views representing them. But we are not there yet and we should not simply assume that point will arrive.
There were two surprising facts from last week’s speech. The first was that Hanson at times also sounded left-wing. At one point, she spoke about poverty, and about homelessness. She was clearly emotional. It was the type of impassioned rhetoric you once expected from the left – before the left became so scared of the right painting it as “bleeding heart”, not sufficiently focused on “ordinary Australians”, that it largely stopped talking about such things. She returned to the topic later, too, speaking of children who needed shoes and uniforms for school.
As one astute observer said to me, one reason rhetoric like this may resonate is that Hanson’s voters – that rapidly expanding category – can now imagine themselves sliding into poverty. That is the precarious economy and world in which people feel they live.
Nor was this the only topic on which Hanson came at the major parties from the left. Hanson expressed caution about Labor’s cuts to the NDIS – some people removed from the scheme, she said, “possibly really do need the help and assistance with NDIS”. She wanted to regulate AI, rather than mostly “leave it in the hands of corporations”, as she said Labor was doing.
There are several lessons from this. The first is that everyone’s political territory is up for grabs. The second is about directness. When Hanson spoke about poverty, she was articulating a clear problem. And for all those problems, she was willing to talk about how those problems came about. Her explanations are fantasies – renewable energy and migrants, often. Because of this false simplicity, her job is easier than that of other politicians.
And yet her speech pointed to important absences that have developed over decades in the language of other politicians. Too many have lost the ability to articulate what is wrong in society because they are afraid that if they can’t fix it, they will be blamed. And too many of them have become unwilling to articulate causes because of the fear that not everybody will agree. Very often, this means politicians come across as unwilling or unable to accurately describe the world that voters can see all around them. This erects a barrier between the political class and voters – a barrier Hanson is knocking down.
Hanson’s speech revealed a surprising weakness, too. There are many useful comparisons to be made between the rises of US President Donald Trump and Hanson. But Trump is a unique figure, driven by his own passions, whims and kooks. Hanson was at times oddly conventional – the result of decades spent pursuing political life. Pressed on policies, she said they would be revealed later. On the prospect of taking government, she stressed how much work there was still to do. These are the restrained talking points of a typical major party leader.
The appeal of Trump and Hanson is, above all, as symbols; screens onto which voters’ frustrations can be projected. Trump has maintained this potency through his volatility and his uniqueness. In contrast, Hanson’s surprising adherence to convention may, at some point, threaten her power as symbol, reducing her to the status of an ordinary politician whose policies are mundane, actual and challengeable.
At this point, though, she remains something different: a celebrity, immune to political logic. It could be she stays that way. And it could be that, while some of her positions repel some voters, those voters may nonetheless choose to overlook those policies in favour of others: after all, this happens to every party.
Or it could be that the idea Hanson will trip herself up is misguided because it will not, ultimately, be Hanson who takes the far-right to another level; that her most important contribution will be to have opened up the space for another right-wing populist.
Meanwhile, as parliament returns, Labor continues to demonstrate the advantage every government has over its opponents: the ability to do things. This budget debate has not, in the end, been so different from others: policies followed by controversy then tweaks and legislation. At the end of all this the government will be able to point to what it’s done.
Which will, rightly, be the test for Labor, against One Nation and the rest: has it done enough to make voters think it is the best option to govern the country? In the two years remaining in this term Labor will have to clearly articulate the problems it sees, the causes of those problems and their answers. That sounds simple – until you remember how rarely that happens these days.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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