By Helen Reynolds
For nearly three decades, Pauline Hanson has built her political career around a simple proposition: that she stands up for the “Aussie battler.”
It is a powerful image. The struggling family trying to pay the mortgage. The pensioner choosing between heating and groceries. The young couple locked out of the housing market. The worker worried about their job and their future.
Listening to Hanson’s address to the National Press Club this week, however, it became increasingly difficult to see how many of her policies would actually help these people.
What was striking was not what Hanson wanted to give Australians, but what she wanted to take away.
The speech contained familiar themes. Immigration was blamed for housing shortages. Government spending was criticised. Foreign influences were condemned. Environmental policies were attacked. Institutions were portrayed as out of touch with ordinary people.
These are grievances. They are not solutions.
If housing is unaffordable, where is the large-scale housing program? If wages are stagnating, where is the plan to strengthen workers’ bargaining power? If families are struggling with the cost of living, where are the measures that would put more money into their pockets?
Identifying a problem is the easy part of politics. Solving it is much harder.
Throughout her political career Hanson has excelled at finding people to blame. Migrants. Bureaucrats. Environmentalists. Universities. International organisations. The media. Successive governments.
Yet blame does not build a single home. It does not lower a power bill. It does not reduce a mortgage repayment. It does not put food on the table.
The irony is that many of the Australians Hanson claims to represent are often the people who benefit most from government services and public investment. They rely on Medicare, aged care, public hospitals, schools, roads, pensions and social security. They need affordable housing, secure employment and strong public infrastructure.
But there was little in Hanson’s National Press Club address that suggested a willingness to invest in these things. Instead, there was a familiar message of opposition and resentment.
Politics should be about improving people’s lives. It should be about creating opportunities, building communities and strengthening the social fabric that holds a nation together.
Australians are entitled to be angry about housing costs, stagnant wages and declining living standards. These are real problems affecting real people.
But anger alone is not a policy.
The Aussie battler deserves more than a list of enemies.
They deserve practical solutions.
After listening to Pauline Hanson’s address, one question remains unanswered:
Who exactly is she fighting for?
Also by Helen Reynolds
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Hanson is fighting for Hanson…and the lipsticked pig working the strings.As we can see in America, there is no shortage of easily gulled fools.Simple solutions for complicated problems designed for simpletons, while major theft of public resources flows ever upwards.
I thought her contempt for those she purports to represent showed when she talked of giving more power to bosses to sack lazy workers. Pity no-one pointed out her own lazy approach to her Senatorial duties.
One should consider how well the identical slogans and critiques worked for US battlers ! Now in a deeper hole than ever , while billionnaires rake it in . Trump was a con and she is furiously copying every idiocy
It’s pretty generous to describe both her and ON as a “policy free zone”
That’s an easy question: in order, herself, Gina, and the rest of the oligarchs.
The bizarre thing is how many people look at her voting record in parliament (on the rare occasions she attends) and think “yeah, she’s on my side”.
Hanson is not working for us. Hanson is about bulldozing Australian values, culture, fairness, protections. He does not value culture, she wants us to be uncultured.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-18/gina-rinehart-gifts-pauline-hanson-orange-bulldozer/106803906
Sickening.
They would remove protections for ordinary Australians. She said we are lazy and should be sacked at the whim of managers (who are very often the lazy ones just protecting their position).
What are you voting for? You will find what you think of as Australian values are not what Hanson thinks.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BHnGMLcEs/
Pawlein has always only ”worked” for Pawlein just as her new running mate, Beetrooter Joyce has spent the past 13 years representing his own personal interests. Are they a matched pair??
Now Auntie Gina has decided that she will take charge of Australian politics and needs ”a useful idiot” to match up with her favourite (now former) NOtional$ politician whose greatest achievement during the past 13 years has been getting a Telstra mobile telephone tower on Auntie Gina’s property west of Uralla NSW, with the annual rental correctly contributing to the profitability of that property.
Oops!1 I forgot!! His other ”great achievement” was to organise access to the Armidale drinking water supply held in Malpas Dam for the benefit of a foreign owned horticultural corporation, at a price discounted to less than the price to pensioner ratepayers. These two innovations are labelled ”working for the electorate”.
How many New England graziers, tradies or retailers would employ an labourer who sat in the shade all day, staying drunk, claiming the credit for every achievement, harassing their wife and daughters while being paid about $240,000 per year for the privilege?? Yet this is exactly what New England voters have done repeatedly …..
The PHONey strategy of whingeing louder than the ZION@ZIs and blaming everybody except the causal ”policies” of the former nine (9) years of COALiiton misgovernment is designed to keep the Parliamentary income flowing and generate any publicity because presently ”noise” is described as journalism in the Murdochcracy Media Manipulation Monopoly.