Next, a Hanson-branded sandwich press and more defectors to follow Barnaby Joyce

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

December 5, 2025 — 5.00am

One Nation is so pleased with itself at the moment, the party – which is on the brink of recruiting Barnaby Joyce – is planning to sell a Pauline Hanson-branded sandwich press early next year.

And Hanson’s most important adviser, James Ashby, is so confident with how things are going that he has revealed the party has plans to unveil a second high-profile MP – not Joyce – who will join it as soon as January, with a third high-profile recruit pencilled in for March.

The party has surged in the polls, its primary vote ranging from an already record-high 12 per cent in this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor to 18 per cent in Newspoll. The key issues it champions, such as concerns over immigration, are front and centre of many voters’ minds.

Joyce is leaning towards joining One Nation but he tells me: “It’s a big decision and I haven’t made a final decision. I’m thinking about it over summer, away from Canberra.”

The sandwich press idea – which is designed to cash in on the viral moment when Hanson cooked a steak in her office for Joyce last week – might sound ridiculous but consider this recollection from Ashby, Hanson’s chief of staff, sometime pilot and political svengali for the past decade. It was nearly 10 years ago that Ashby filmed his boss hauling in a fish while on a boat off the Sunshine Coast.

“This one’s for the girls!” Hanson declared.

Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson talk over a dinner of pasta, salad and steak in Hanson’s office.

The clip turned into an ironic meme online, circulating on left-leaning social media. Eventually, however, Ashby turned the catchphrase into a pink stubby holder that was sold on the One Nation website. The party has now sold 25,000 of those stubby holders, first at $7 each, now $10.

Further editions, including “This one’s for the boys” and “This one’s for the gender neutral wankers”, sold in the thousands, too. That cash is flowing into One Nation coffers.

Under Ashby’s direction, merchandise has become a big earner for One Nation and a vehicle to help it realise the transformational ambitions of Ashby and Hanson and – now, they hope – Joyce.

“It’s getting harder to raise money,” Ashby says. “People don’t necessarily want to support political parties. They want something back for their money, too, and that’s where we get campaign funding from … For the last election we raised in excess of $7 million and claimed back about $7 million [from the Australian Electoral Commission]. We can do things other parties can’t.

“We are different in how we raise our money. We don’t lean on corporate Australia; we provide merchandise and products that our supporters are happy to buy.”

It’s not just how One Nation is funding itself that is different. Many Australians will simply never vote for the party, at least in its current form, because of Hanson’s history of racist statements, past comments about Indigenous Australians, and stunts like wearing a burqa in parliament, twice. That means it is hard to see the party ever forming government (despite Ashby’s ambitions) but it could seriously increase its influence as permanent force on the right of politics.

Which brings us back to Barnaby Joyce’s future.

A few weeks ago this masthead outlined what Joyce really wanted from One Nation. The short answer is to smooth off its rough edges, professionalise the structures, appoint office holders and set up branches. Joyce would stand and win a NSW Senate seat and, eventually, probably take over as leader from Hanson, who, at 71, is 13 years older.

Ashby knows that One Nation is going to have to do more than sell a stack of sandwich presses and stubby holders to transform the party and start winning lower house seats from the Nationals, the Liberals and Labor. Yet he is confident enough to lay out some, but not all, of those plans in detail.

Soon after Hanson was elected in 1996, interest in the party grew exponentially. By 1998 One Nation had 11 MPs elected to the Queensland state parliament. But it soon fell apart, unable to manage such rapid growth. Now, Ashby says, things are different. For the first time since it emerged in the mid-1990s, and with the right guard-rails in place, he says, One Nation is setting up branches across the country, with 70 at last count. It has office holders on the horizon and membership is growing.

This weekend the party will unveil its energy policy, creating another point of difference with the opposition. Joyce joining the party, Ashby tells me, “will add another level of credibility to our desire to take government in the future”.

“I think that more people disaffected with Liberal policies will come across in the new year,” he says. “There will be some very big announcements in the new year – a big name [not Joyce] coming across to join One Nation and no one will see it coming. January is just the start. And by March there could be another big name.”

Ashby won’t reveal the names but it’s not hard to think of a few disaffected Nationals and Liberals who could be tempted across. That’s why the party decided to remove its founder’s name from its official title.

“Pauline has said for a long time she wants the party to be about more than her,” Ashby says. “We have four senators, two MLCs in WA, one in Victoria. The time is now.”

So what Joyce would want to do to One Nation is already happening under the guidance of Ashby, a fact the former Nationals leader is well aware of – and is probably going to sign up to. Despite the chaotic appearance, this has all been in train for months.

“We are working on registering the party in Tassie, we are registered in every other state, we are also registering in the NT,” Ashby says. “And we will be targeting any seat that wants a genuine conservative approach to politics in this country.” He adds that the Nationals look most vulnerable to One Nation.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan, long one of Joyce’s closest political allies, agrees that One Nation is a serious threat. He fears that, if properly organised, it could snatch enough of the Nationals vote to create a three-cornered contest under which Labor, or One Nation, could pick up seats.

“While ever there is hope that Barnaby return to the Nationals, I’ll keep fighting for that because he’s a rare political talent and he is a giant of our party,” Canavan tells me.

And he’s not the only political observer aware of the danger of One Nation. Back in September 2006 the great political journalist Laurie Oakes wrote that the National Party’s greatest vulnerability “is to a Pauline Hanson-style attack”. Joyce tapped the same rich vein of right-wing populism that Hanson did, Oakes wrote, and his presence as a Queensland senator (as he was then) “has enabled the Nationals to keep many [members] who might otherwise have deserted. Not surprisingly, it is in his home state of Queensland where the Joyce factor has been most crucial.”

Joyce, Oakes wrote then, was the Nationals MP best-placed to fight One Nation.

There is no second Barnaby Joyce-like figure in the Nationals party room today. Which begs the question: if Barnaby and Pauline team up, who in the Nationals is going to stop them?

James Massola is chief political commentator.

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