Pauline Hanson has momentum. Her biggest challenge is the company she keeps

Pauline Hanson spent decades warning Australians about the social tensions she believed were being ignored by the political establishment.

Now, halfway around the world, she was walking through the multicultural streets of Britain with one of the most controversial figures in that debate.

As Tommy Robinson, a notorious far-right anti-Islam, anti-migrant thug, filmed their tour of Luton and praised Hanson as “one of the bravest ladies on the planet”, the images reverberated back in Australia.

Within days, the One Nation leader would also be photographed poolside in a five-star boutique hotel in Sicily with her billionaire benefactor Gina Rinehart, while back in Canberra her longtime lieutenant Malcolm Roberts was again under fire over conspiracy theories, antisemitic imagery and his praise for Vladimir Putin.

Political watchers are pondering, as Hanson’s poll numbers soften across the board, whether the company she kept overseas – and some of the colleagues at home – could be the undoing of the momentum she had spent decades building.

Individually, each episode might have been manageable. Together, they became a test of whether One Nation was ready for the scrutiny that comes with becoming a genuine political force.

Hanson, however, issued a familiar defence.

“Supporters are seeing straight through the lies and distortions that have been employed against One Nation over the past month by the media and political establishment,” she wrote on Facebook, adding they were “desperate tactics by a desperate establishment”.

But the images from the UK forced Hanson’s star parliamentary colleague, Barnaby Joyce, into an awkward defence.

“I don’t support so much of what Tommy Robinson does, but I think it’s incredibly important that we understand the social dynamic and how that came about,” Joyce told ABC radio.

Joyce argued Australia should understand the conditions that produced figures such as Robinson, while ensuring similar social divisions did not emerge here.

But what Joyce said on air and what he thinks appear vastly different. This masthead reported that he has told associates Hanson’s decision to appear with Robinson was ill-advised and showed a misunderstanding of voters’ attitudes, exposing tensions within the small group of large personalities within One Nation.

Hanson has been unequivocal in her support of Robinson for years, but the One Nation machine itself is trying to walk back the meeting, claiming it was a set-up by Seven’s Spotlight.

If Robinson posed questions about Hanson overseas, Malcolm Roberts raised them back home.

There is growing speculation within One Nation, noting the 71-year-old’s declining physical health, that Roberts could now fall on his sword before next election and be replaced – potentially even by Hanson’s longtime chief of staff, James Ashby.

Roberts has been one of Hanson’s closest political allies for a decade after surviving the parliamentary citizenship saga and returning to the Senate. In the past few weeks, several of his controversies have resurfaced.

He appeared on conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones’ program and described Jones as a “beacon of hope around the world” whose “credibility is very, very high”. Jones, now bankrupt, has been ordered to pay almost $US1.5 billion in damages to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre after repeatedly claiming the massacre was a hoax.

Roberts praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for standing up to “globalists” and shared a notorious antisemitic mural online, describing it as “the most powerful pic I’ve ever seen”. Roberts also suggested it was “highly likely” the US Air Force was spraying chemtrails and has promoted the work of a notorious antisemite.

The controversy prompted condemnation from Jewish community leaders and renewed questions about whether Hanson would distance herself from her senator. She did not.

Perhaps that is not surprising. Hanson herself once floated the idea the Port Arthur massacre was a false flag operation.

“Those shots, they were precision shots. I’ve read a lot and I’ve read the book on it – Port Arthur. A lot of questions there,” Hanson was filmed saying in an Al Jazeera undercover investigation.

Joyce again found himself defending the party in an interview with Sky News’ Andrew Bolt, who described Roberts as a “complete kook”.

“The mind of Malcolm Roberts … he’s an incredibly decent human being … is not the mind of me or the mind of other people,” Joyce said. “I’m not here to start carpeting Malcolm. I’m not going to do that.”

Roberts, whose long history of conspiracy theories has frequently been wrapped in antisemitic tropes, accused the “mainstream media” of waging a campaign against him through “selective cherry-picking and dishonest distortions” designed to protect the political “uniparty”.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, who has stepped up his attacks on One Nation recently, suggested Hanson was “living it up” in Europe instead of dealing with the controversy.

“The question here for Pauline Hanson is: what is she going to do about it? She’s over in Italy right now,” Taylor said.

Julian Leeser, a Jewish MP and Liberal frontbencher, said Hanson should show the “moral courage to stand up and do what is right” and sack Roberts.

“Antisemitism must find no home in any part of our national life. Ms Hanson must act,” Leeser said.

Among those watching the controversy is Mark Latham, the former Labor leader who later served as a One Nation MP in NSW before his split with Hanson in 2023 over his homophobic attacks on a fellow politician.

Latham recalled Roberts travelling from Queensland to Sydney after he joined the party in 2018 and insisting every Labor decision was directed by the United Nations.

When Latham pushed back, Roberts reportedly replied: “Oh, they didn’t tell you.”

“There was simply no point in trying to reason with Roberts,” Latham wrote on Facebook this week. “I cringed every time he came south of the Tweed.”

Not everyone who supports Hanson agrees Roberts is the problem. Some think he is her strength.

George Christensen, the former Nationals MP and One Nation candidate, argues the scrutiny over recent weeks had been deliberately designed to derail the party’s rise. He described Roberts as one of One Nation’s strongest parliamentary performers.

“Damaging Roberts weakens One Nation,” Christensen wrote in his weekly newsletter Nation First.

“Forcing the party to defend him keeps it off other issues. Pressuring Pauline Hanson to distance herself from him, or even remove him, would take one of the party’s strongest parliamentary performers out of the fight. That is the wider purpose of this campaign.”

Then there was Sicily. As she was posting online about the price of groceries, photographs emerged showing Hanson poolside at the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina – home to TV hit The White Lotus – alongside billionaire Gina Rinehart.

There was no suggestion of wrongdoing. But politics has always been about optics as much as policy.

Pollsters so far believe One Nation voters, declared or potential, are not bothered by the relationship. Coalition strategists, conceding that attacking Hanson personally does not work among the electorate, have moved on to highlighting the circus that surrounds her.

Tony Barry, a director at research and polling group Redbridge, says One Nation voters are generally prepared to overlook – or are unaware of the relationship between – Hanson and Rinehart.

“Those with some awareness typically dismiss it as their outsider getting needed insider treatment,” he said.

“The risk for Pauline Hanson is that at some point her relationship with Gina Rinehart sends a signal to her supporters that she is now operating by a different set of rules, which erodes her anti-establishment credentials.”

The Rinehart holiday was again left to Joyce to mop up.

“It’s a holiday, isn’t it?” Joyce told Nine’s Today program. “A person’s allowed to have free time.”

Joyce said he did not know who was funding the trip.

“I would say it’s a fair bet that Gina’s supported it somehow … but it’s her money,” Joyce said. “I really don’t know the details of it.”

As with the Robinson video, the images from Sicily are now part of a broader conversation about Hanson’s judgment.

Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who has led his party’s charge against One Nation since its rise in the polls after the Bondi massacre, says people are starting to look more closely at the party.

“Apply scrutiny to One Nation as you apply scrutiny to the Coalition, to Labor, to the Greens, and anyone else who wants to lead this country,” he said this week.

Hastie said Hanson could no longer expect to be treated differently from other leaders.

“Pauline Hanson wants to be prime minister of this country, so her and her team deserve proper scrutiny.

“When you find out that people like Senator Malcolm Roberts are talking about chemtrails and other sorts of odd things — they’re not really focused on delivering good economic solutions for Australian people to improve our standard of living.”

Over coming days, Hanson will give two addresses at the Conservative Political Action Conference in London, where Liz Truss reportedly told attendees: “Maybe you’re going to see a future Australian prime minister.”

After three decades, Hanson has finally built the political momentum she always believed would come.

Whether she can keep it may depend less on Labor or the Coalition than on the company she keeps.

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