Pauline Hanson’s political stable now includes two clueless newbies from WA, so fresh they still think a “budget emergency” is forgetting your wallet at the pub. This expanded squad, alongside the perpetually aggrieved Malcolm Roberts, commands fewer votes than a Sydney pub trivia night, yet they’ve stolen almost as much political oxygen as The Nationals, our Olympic-standard time-wasters. One Nation has never built a bridge, brokered peace, or passed meaningful reform. Instead, it has perfected grievance as a business model, wrapping nostalgia, anger, and anti-immigration rhetoric in a banner of “Real Australians.” Or, as it sounds in practice, “Rile Strine.”
Most forget that Hanson didn’t invent the tune she’s been singing since 1996. She just made it cruder. John Howard wrote the original score.
Long John Howard: The Architect Who Made Hanson Possible
In 1988, Opposition Leader John Howard launched “One Australia,” a policy to slash Asian immigration and end multiculturalism. The backlash was immediate and severe, contributing to his election loss. But Howard learned. When he finally won power in 1996, the same year Hanson gave her maiden speech warning Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians,” he didn’t condemn her. He co-opted her.
Howard’s genius was simple: steal the underlying anxiety of Hanson’s supporters, launder it through the language of sovereignty and security, and present it as responsible governance. By the 2001 Tampa crisis, his declaration “We will decide who comes to this country” made Hanson’s rant sound like statesmanship. He had found his political map to dominance: plunder the far right’s rhetoric while maintaining a respectable distance.
The strategy worked. One Nation voters drifted back to the Coalition, seeing their concerns reflected in mainstream policy. Labor spent a decade defending multiculturalism, while Howard made “queue jumpers” and “boat people” the defining terms of debate. Hanson lost her seat in 1998, but her ideas had colonised the mainstream.
That’s Howard’s real legacy: he didn’t defeat One Nation. He normalised it. He taught the Coalition you don’t need a dog-whistle when you can rebrand the howl as “border security.” Long John Howard sailed away with the loot, leaving Hanson with the pirate costume and none of the treasure.
Barnaby Joyce: The Pantaloon’s Final Bow
Today, Barnaby Joyce is auditioning for the same populist stage. Having announced he won’t re-contest New England, Joyce praises One Nation’s climate stance as “not barking mad” and flirts with defection. This is less about ideology than legacy and revenge.
His trajectory echoes Mark Latham’s: from power broker to protest politician, recycling old grievances for an audience that mistakes volume for substance. He’s reading from a script Howard helped write, tapping into the same well of rural disaffection. But the performance has become transparent. Joyce is the pantaloon of this political comedy; the foolish, lecherous old character who thinks he’s still the star, his baggy trousers unable to hide that he’s chasing relevance, not principle.
Pauline Hanson: The Only Face That Launched a Thousand Chips
If Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Pauline Hanson has the only face that launched a thousand chips. She is Australia’s original populist snack: crisp on the outside, hollow in the middle, and always served with a side of vinegar.
Her brand endures because it’s cheap, greasy, and instantly recognisable: a nationalist flavour profile with hints of 1950s decorum. She’s the ghost of suburban Australia’s lost lunchroom, forever warning that the dim sims are plotting to take over the fryer.
Like Dame Edna Everage, Hanson is hostage to her own caricature. Her supporters applaud her “please explains” as Ocker egalitarianism; the myth that we’re all salt-of-the-earth blokes who tell it like it is.
But the tragedy, or the farce, is that Hanson isn’t even particularly spicy anymore. In a world marinated in Trumpism and QAnon, her once-radical rhetoric tastes bland. Yet she remains a mascot for the politics of the bain-marie: warmed-over resentment, no nutritional value, best consumed before thinking sets in.
One Nation is less a democratic movement than an Amway franchise for grievance. Candidates don’t join a cause; they pay fees for the privilege of shipping out under Hanson’s brand. It’s multi-level marketing for outrage.
Her platform is a patchwork of anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigration, and anti-climate action, wrapped in “free speech” grievance. She’s against anything that generates headlines and donations. For her furious supporters, rage is the point. Hanson gives permission to blame outsiders for disappointments with far more complex causes.
The curious, meanwhile, watch her as a figure of parody. The burqa stunt, the gun lobby videos, the grammatical car crashes; the performance has become self-parody.
One Nation’s polling tells the story: at the May 2025 election, they scraped just 6.4 percent. But here’s the evergreen boost: since the election, as the Liberals shifted to the centre, One Nation’s polling has surged to 11 to 14 percent. It’s the classic pattern. Between elections, disaffected voters park their protest with Hanson. Come election day, they drift back. The support is wide but shallow, loud but fleeting.
In thirty years, Hanson has passed precisely zero significant legislation.
Please Explain: Who’s Really Running the Show?
So ask not what you can do for One Nation. Ask who profits from its perpetual tantrum.
The answer? Every power broker who learned Long John Howard’s lesson: you don’t need to defeat the far right when you can steal its playbook and call it common sense. Hanson may never govern, but Howard ensured she’d never need to. Her job is to provide the noise that shifts the Overton Window.
The performance continues because it serves a purpose: it keeps everyone else dancing to her tune, while the real power brokers; media proprietors and party strategists, benefit from a debate focused on migrants and Muslims, rather than on deeper, more systemic issues.
The ultimate testament to Long John Howard’s victory isn’t the persistence of Pauline Hanson; it is the power of the cage he built. Consider the defining irony of our time: Anthony Albanese, having just secured a historic landslide re-election – the first prime minister to do so since Howard himself – governs with a mandate that should, in theory, allow him to rewrite the national script. Yet, on the very issues Hanson first weaponised, he remains trapped. The government talks tough on “border security,” defends offshore detention, and speaks in the sobered-up lexicon of Howard’s pragmatism. The Labor Party may hold the treasury bench, but it is still performing on a stage designed by its old antagonist.
This is the politics of division’s final destination: not a fiery collapse, but a quiet, relentless capture of the possible. It ensures that regardless of who wins an election, the terms of debate on core issues of identity and belonging were settled thirty years ago. The frame endures, and we are all just living in the picture Long John Howard painted.
So please explain? There’s nothing left to explain, unless we wake up to ourselves. The real and present danger is not some submarine of the Never Never, conjured to scare us into a defence contract. It’s much closer to home. It’s the slow, comfortable failure to hold our politicians to account; to demand they break the frame instead of just living in it. The menu was written thirty years ago. We don’t have to keep ordering from it.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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The article and comments say it well, and I should have warned everyone over time about old classmate Jack Howard. He was a defective, seething, unsettled, righteous, ambitious, underresourced character, seemingly hating his ordinariness and wishing to be grand. He seemed to have had a “fuhrer conversion” and after excelling to become a bland suburban solicitor, imagined more was possible. Success at debating, where lies and exaggeration are not penalised or even noticed and checked, gave him drive to use the “bold” to outstrip sense, decency, honesty, challenge. Incapable of original thought, he seems to have been propelled by donors, advisors, party strategists, cynical analysts, riggers.
The Australian right wing is a sad “story”, full of defectives, and we suffer from hollowness, insularity, reversions, false foundations.
You and Mr Lord are on fire. Great pieces to make us remember and not forget.
Phil,
Thank you for this incisive portrait. Your observations about Howard’s formative inadequacies ring true; that seething combination of ordinariness and grandiosity, the solicitor who mistook debating tricks for statesmanship. (Although, as a former debating coach, I beg to differ on the ethics, if I may quibble. The best are instructed to respect facts and to espouse logic above rhetoric.)
You’ve identified something crucial, Phil: the gap between actual substance and performative “boldness.” Howard’s career exemplifies how Australian politics rewards the appearance of conviction over genuine thought, how our system elevates those who can project certainty while remaining intellectually hollow.
Your point about him being “propelled by donors, advisors, party strategists” cuts to the heart of it. He was less a leader than a vehicle—perfectly mediocre enough not to threaten his handlers, just ambitious enough to be steered. The Liberal Party didn’t need a thinker; it needed a front man who could sell regression as progress, who could make small-mindedness seem like prudence.Tax cuts sell themselves.
What strikes me most in your assessment is that phrase “incapable of original thought.” It explains so much—the reflexive adherence to whatever Murdoch was running, the inability to imagine Australia beyond its “relaxed and comfortable” suburban prejudices, the preference for dog-whistles over difficult conversations.
And yes, we’re still paying for it. That Howard era normalized a particular kind of political dishonesty—not the flamboyant corruption of earlier generations, but something more insidious: the systematic erosion of good faith itself. (Before you get to the squandering of the minerals boom on middle-class welfare.)
Your warning about not seeing this earlier resonates. Sometimes we’re too close to recognize the pathology until the damage is done.
Think Howard coopted ON supporters and even many old ALP, with much RW media support, by a whiff of old white Australia sentiments, and the US anti-immigrant Tanton Network*; for related symptoms of influence see FoxNews, Brexit, Farage, Trump, Project 2025, Miller, Bannon et al.
*The late John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton admired the white Australia policy, visited in the ’80s and was hosted by ZPG Zero Population Growth (now SPA SusPopAus); greenwash. He was described as the ‘architect of the modern anti-immigration movement’ by human rights NGO SPLC.
Tanton claimed that white minority rule is required; see Australian politics, media and corporate elites when skips are only ~50% of population, but still most ‘hold chairs’ (Ottoman proverb).
Lest we forget: Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country was published in 1964, and contained the immortal observation that “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”
The LNP seems not to have taken notice of Mr Horne’s prescient analysis, given the raft of successive leaders they’ve offered the Australian body politic, and the ALP isn’t much better.
Spot on, Canguro. And the bitter irony is that Horne’s warning—intended as a wake-up call—has been co-opted into a complacent boast. “The Lucky Country” now gets trotted out as self-congratulation, stripped of its sting.
Sixty years on, and we’re still proving Horne right. The LNP’s leadership parade; from Howard through Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, reads like a case study in mediocrity rewarded. Each one seemingly selected for their willingness to maintain the status quo rather than challenge it, to manage rather than lead, to react rather than imagine.
But you’re right to include Labor in the indictment. While they occasionally stumble toward vision; Whitlam, Keating at his best—they’ve too often settled for being the marginally less awful managers of our decline. The party’s abandonment of its working-class base, its embrace of the same corporate donors and focus-group cowardice, suggests they’ve learned the wrong lessons.
The tragedy is that our luck has been running out for decades; climate inaction, housing crisis, casualised workforce, gutted manufacturing; yet we keep rewarding politicians who promise us we can have it all without changing anything fundamental.
Second-rate leadership might have sufficed when the ore was flowing and the terms of trade were kind. But as the bills come due, second-rate becomes catastrophic.
Horne saw us clearly. We still haven’t looked in the mirror.
The idea that Australia was “…run by mediocre people” would have been absolutely against the sort of stuff politicians and press would have been dishing up like the plague.
Horne is the ancestor of much thinking today, but back in the 60’s, any thing alluding to less than perfect was treated with horror.
One Nation speaks for many ordinary Aussies. The media is silent about so many things that affect us. Then there is the elitist media mocking fellow citizens.
I’m just wondering that if The Beetroot jumps from the current pile of excrement he’s currently part of to the mountain of reeking ordure that is Putrid Horribilus Obnoxious Noxious, will Hanson make him pay for his own campaign (every cent in the party coffers belongs to her and that parasite Ashby after all) at the next election like she does with anybody dumb enough to run? Or will he get special treatment because of who he is?
@Bev Poulos, re. “One Nation speaks for many ordinary Aussies”… that’s really such a low bar, when the intention behind the statement is considered. You may disagree, as is your right, but seriously… what has Hansen ever said or done that’s led to improvement for Australians… whether your ‘ordinary’ kind or whatever other grouping you might be contrasting those with?
Hansen has never had any other agenda apart from divisiveness, negativity, fear-mongering, race-baiting, all delivered in that whiny tremulous fingernail on blackboard screechy manner that manages to combine pig-ignorance with nasty inhumane rejection of the ‘other’.
You come here to these pages proclaiming your Christian beliefs as if they give you some kind of privileged shield against the ills & evils of the world and here you are again, this time acting as a shill for the most utterly awful person in Australian politics by a wide margin. God help us, if this is what it’s come to.
“It’s the slow, comfortable failure to hold our politicians to account; to demand they break the frame instead of just living in it. The menu was written thirty years ago. We don’t have to keep ordering from it.”
Exactly, and as David Tyler said, a great many have yet to look in the mirror, we’d rather settle for complacency.
The Hanson theory exposes two things. 1) The cowardice of our federal politicians. and 2) The gullibility of the Australian electorate. It’s time to take a serious look at Independant and alternativer party candidates, the two party system is no longer (if ever) about governing the country, rather there only aim is to maintain power.
Interesting the disconnect between Canguro and Bev Poulos…illustrates a divide set up a generation ago.
Poulos’ argument is not without merit, but Cang is not taking the it lying down.
I am afraid politics here has been divisive for a long time. The real offenders have been the likes of Packer and Murdoch dividing the country to facilitate their own own often short sighted goals.
Interesting comment from heather, that we are complicit in our own downfall and I wonder at that…
I think Hanson would have at least known how to do a good hamburger.
Underlying trend, harking back through rose coloured glasses to sunnier days.
The duopoly decisions on Gaza, FTA’s, aukus and rare earths (just the latest decisions) in an obnoxious trend this century, betrays the fear that we have lost out on self determination this century…these decsions follow a pattern. Globalisation, msm “messaging” and neolib churn end up just alienating people when they can no longer have things dealt with rationally, over the counter…things never heal under the current way things are.
Canguro,
“…what has Hansen ever said or done that’s led to improvement for Australians…” She’s used (abused?) a lot of Australian’s to keep her bank accounts well and truly topped up with loads of cash and that’s about all.
Pawleen & ON certainly remind us that there are some truly awful, ignoramus, hostile, destroyers out there in Oz. They are not thinkers, just hateful blamers and screechers.
And it reminds us there’s gutless, unimaginative, devious politicians that pay them and use them to hijack the febrile and to perpetuate bogan myths.