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June 25, 2026 — 5:00am
It’s early 2028, and the unofficial campaign for the federal election, due in May, has well and truly begun. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is preparing a budget focusing on tax cuts, to be delivered in March. The cost of living is still the central issue but the political landscape has transformed. Things have certainly moved along for Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party since the previous election in 2025.
One Nation continues to do well in the opinion polls and Hanson’s rise in personal popularity remains a central focus. The long-standing two-sided electoral split has dissolved. Support has now solidified across three groups, with One Nation and the Labor Party vying for primacy, while the Coalition is well back in third place. This is similar to the spread established in mid-2026.
From the vantage point of early 2028, it’s clear that a big shift took place when Hanson addressed the National Press Club back in June 2026 after 30 years in public life. Her personality, her political modus operandi and her goals for society were laid bare. For the first time, Hanson presented herself, with good cause, as a contender – someone who could, arguably, directly wield power, possibly as prime minister.
But politics is a dynamic enterprise. Events and circumstances can always be relied upon to intervene. The Victorian Labor government suffered a catastrophic defeat in November 2026. The last straw for voters had come a few months earlier, in July, as they watched the Commonwealth Games beamed in from Glasgow after Labor comprehensively messed up its planning for the event to be held in Victoria and had to hand back the rights at a cost of at least $589 million. Jacinta Allan, who succeeded Daniel Andrews as premier in 2023, had been the minister in charge of delivering the games that never were.
Already wounded, Allan and her government were completely gone after that. One Nation had a good election, taking so many seats from Labor and the Coalition parties that during the counting it wasn’t clear whether it would be Hanson or Liberal leader Jess Wilson who would go to the governor seeking to form a government. In the end, the Coalition won a handful more seats but it needed One Nation’s support in the parliament to hold power and get its legislation passed. As a consequence, with One Nation having a hand on the levers of power, the business of politics in Victoria is full of drama and virtually every issue is contentious. Frankly, it’s a wild ride.
There has also been another state election, in NSW in March 2027. Chris Minns’ Labor government, far less shopworn than Jacinta Allan’s ragtag troupe, was re-elected with a slender majority, but One Nation also had a reasonable showing there too. Since then, Hanson has constantly been talking up her chances of further success, telling Anthony Albanese over and over again “we’re coming for you”.
OK, that’s enough pretending we’re in the future. Let’s get back to the present day. The fact is that the next federal election is not that far off and by the time it comes around, those among us who are One Nation-curious and even those who have decided to blow up the established political framework with its “old” parties, will have been able to form a better idea of what blowing it up might mean. Some are also likely to ask what will be in it for them after Hanson and her team have set off the explosives. A warm inner glow from taking part in the destruction of made-to-order politicians who failed to value them sufficiently? Probably. But what practical improvements in their daily lives will Hanson’s detonations deliver? That’s much less clear.
At this point, after her groundbreaking National Press Club appearance, we can see Hanson’s political prescriptions are mainly grievance-based: a list of policies and positions she will remove or prohibit. The things she will build are yet to be enunciated. This is an interesting stance for someone who has been in and around public life for 30 years.
It’s not automatically a negative for voters, obviously, given her current rise to prominence. But there are laws within politics – a version of Newton’s third law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – that shouldn’t be ignored. Many of the prognostications of Hanson’s imminent success fail to factor in the possibility that the more Hanson talks at length and allows herself to be questioned, the more she outlines her goals for the country, the more trouble she can get herself into. We’ve already seen that recently with her backtracking on defence spending and dissembling about parental leave.
Then there’s the prime minister, whose love of his role is almost a supernatural force. Albanese has many shortcomings, such as his difficulty with explaining and selling complex policies, and his misplaced belief that the public would accept incrementalism. However, it would be folly to underestimate how hard and how relentlessly Albanese will fight to hold on as prime minister. He was a static target during the debate over the Voice, but as the promotional line for the fourth instalment of the Jaws franchise went, this time it’s personal.
Underpinning this battle is another factor that offers some succour to the Labor Party. The government’s political path looks simpler and less conflicted than the Coalition’s. As Albanese’s rhetoric already suggests, Labor is fighting what he calls “the three parties of the right”: Liberals, the Nationals and One Nation. Meanwhile, the Coalition’s fight against One Nation is compromised because Hanson has always been little more than an extreme version of a Liberal, which is where she started when she was briefly an endorsed Liberal candidate in 1996.
The Liberals indulge in self-talk about the party being a broad church, but it’s not that broad: witness Angus Taylor’s contortions on multiculturalism and how much of an outlier Andrew Hastie has become. When Hastie spoke out against One Nation in the party room on Tuesday, it stood in stark contrast to Taylor’s soft-hearted approach. Many rank-and-file Liberals and Nationals would have considerable sympathy for much of what Hanson espouses. That’s what ties up the parliamentary leaders in knots: when they argue against Hanson, they’re in most instances arguing against themselves. They truly are in a wicked situation.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
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