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
What Happened at Bondi – and What Happened After
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site.
Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
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.
Poolean is in it both for the money and for the billionaires. She idolises fat slug Gina who gives her planes and money and stuff. Over the last few years she has also become a millionaire and I for one would love to see someone dig around and find out where the money came from. Certainly not from her parliamentary wage that’s for sure.
What a great read. Well said, Helen.
What is an interesting experiment is to see how well Labor stacks up on these criteria.
Immigration – Labor is now touting a cut to immigration in line, albeit not going as far as, but just the same in line, with the Coalition, without mounting any case for why there should be a cut that I have heard (my newsfeed and search capabilities are for the time being severely hampered, so corrections with citations are welcome) – failure, but retrievable.
Housing affordability – the changes to the CGTdiscount are good policy but 4 years late, where are the incentives for states to follow Victoria’s lead with a land tax to stop land banking? and other measures; the housing schemes it has run with for 4 years worsen affordability (but were manna from heaven for falsely demonizing the Greens with) – failure
Housing supply – where is the at scale social/affordable housing builds? the Help to Build may have been good if it were at scale, it is not; HAFF was always a confidence trick, as was the Build to Rent scheme; the 5% deposit scheme was a rehashed Coalition policy that has enormous risk of a localized GFC – failure
Government spending – the government framed this budget as cutting waste and finding savings to inhibit government spending; the same neo-liberal austerity rhetoric the Coalition used during the lost decade, that is a failed plan for the future – failure
Foreign influence – Labor can’t embed Australia further up the backside of the USA fast enough; Labor is forcing anti-Zionist Australian Jews to approach the ECAJ (rabid pro-Israel organization) for a share of the massive grants that Labor have given the ECAJ to provide security (see MWM) – dismal failure
Environmental policy – Labor’s solution was to design corporate Australia’s wetdream in the form of the EPA act draft, offer it to the Coalition (only for Ley to insanely, from a Coalition standpoint, knock it back, then agree to a couple of good things to win support from the Greens; it’s a sham and the national standards will show it to be a sham – failure.
Institutions – Labor plans a future of robo-assessments for aged-care and the NDIS; planning is to based on cost rather than service (John Howard would be proud of what he has turned Labor into); ATO complaints are increasing; Centrelink is to continue the Coalition tradition of punishing the unemployed – failure
Lowering power bills – increasing renewable energy supply to the grid – pass
Mortgages – the RBA has been given a free hand, despite a steady stream of highly dubious decisions (there is no question that interest rates had to go up from ’21 levels, but has it been done with unemployment in mind or the economy, no, instead it was focused obsessively on inflation) what measures has Labor taken to address inflation at its source, none – failure
Food on the table – 4 million Australians live in poverty and Labor has done, and promises to do nothing about them; instead Labor supporters disgracefully attempt to pretend there is no poverty in Australia – failure
Labor has been for 4 years a shit government. The only decent thing that wasn’t just tinkering at the edges was the tax changes. Anthony Albanese admitted that the surge in One Nation was motivation for making those changes. Labor promises to continue to be a shit government serving the corporate elite, whilst betraying the people as much as it thinks it can get away with.
One Nation is not the answer, but the question is appropriate – who should we replace this shit Labor government with?
Instead of just relentless carping about how bad Pauline Hanson is, we should be talking about what individual Independents in electorates that are familiar to each of us are offering, we need to be talking of what the Greens have to offer, and we need to start looking at and talking about what even smaller parties, such as Socialist alliance to name one, might have to offer if given half a chance.
It’s about time we started asking Gina Rinehart questions as she is the one giving Pauline and Barney their riding instructions.
When Pauline talks about scrapping childcare and paid maternity leave and shutting down SBS and making the ABC a subscription service and calling for Australia to be a monoculture and restricting Muslim migration we need to be interviewing the organ-grinder, not the monkey.
OK, Pauline is “fighting for the battlers”.
That said, she needs money (tax payers) to fund these needs.
So far we have heard nothing about the following issues that consume tax p[ayers funds:
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to AUKUS and its expenditure?
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to aligning with USA’s military exploits?
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to foreign nations maintaining military /intelligence bases on Australian sovereign territory?
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to political alignment with Israel and the Gaza genocide?
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to foreign nations lobbyists influencing our governance?What is PHONE Party’s attitude to the UJSA/China/Taiwan confrontation?
What is PHONE Party’s attitude to aligning with Asia nations rather than UK and EU?
PHON Party is a nothing-burger until these policies are known.
Mediocrates,
they are petinent questions, that all Australians should pay close attention to.
Given the perpensity for commentators to, quite rightly imo, point out that it is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and that her views are a matter of public record, it is not, I think, a stretch to fill in the answers to those questions.
“AUKUS and its expenditure?” – same as Labor, full steam ahead;
“aligning with USA’s military exploits?” – same as Labor, count us in;
“bases on Australian sovereign territory?” – same as Labor, the more the merrier;
“alignment with Israel and the Gaza genocide?” – same as Labor, what genocide?;
“UJSA/China/Taiwan confrontation?” – same as Labor, China bad, USA good;
“aligning with Asia nations rather than UK and EU?” – same as Labor, stick with aging empire.
“lobbyists influencing our governance?” – same as Labor, good for the country.
Have to agree with you, “PHON Party is a nothing-burger…” What does that make Labor?
The real question we should be asking is who is better to replace that shit Labor government? Independents? Greens? Socialist Alliance? Victorian Socialists?
Pauline’s supporters, in my set, have common traits. They love trump, present no evidence to support their posts and they pray for me.
Yes Thommo; I agree with your comparisons re: PHONP and Labor. And I would add the Coalition does no better in the comparison. As to who do we vote for ? I really don’t know at this stage – I feel politically abandoned and marooned. The light on the hill is flickering. Hopefully the choices will become clearer before the next federal election. I am certain that Rupert will grace us with his sage advice!
@ Mediocrates: Do not dismay, there are alternatives to being taken for granted by unelected political hacks who control pre-selection in major political parties for the benefit of ”political donors” best interests.
In the forth-coming NSW elections watch the progress of INDEPENDENT candidates west of the Range where presently 4/8 electorates have hard working Independent MPs getting things done for their communities.
In the metro centres, we have seen the Teals sweep away the rubbish candidates promoted by the LIARBRAL$ so that THERE IS NOW ONLY ONE LIARBRALS$ MP REPRESENTING A SYDNEY ELECTORATE.
Doubtless the unthinking, ill-educated voters residing in regional & remote electorates will look at the PHONeys because they have dominated regional media, but country voters are impressed by achievements rather than rhetoric, and having an INDCEPENDENT MP achieve hospital renovations after 12 years of neglect by COALition misgovernments, improved water policy that protects their crops from drought and police resources to maintain social order are valued achievements rarely found when the NOtional$ do the representation.
Mediocrates,
I believe you’re right to feel politically abandoned, I too felt that, only much earlier, but would question whether you are marooned.
What was One Nation’s polling at the last election? what is it now mainly due to Coalition supporters shifting away from the party they felt had abandoned them? What if Labor supporters shifted to a more progressive alternative to Labor instead of hanging on to bad governance in fear of a Morrison, or a Dutton, or at Hanson?
We obviously agree that One Nation is not the answer.
Labor was always going to throw the public a couple of bones in this budget. Labor exceeded my expectations; the tax changes are good policy, I hope they don’t water them down much further.
What of the rest of the ‘finding waste and savings’ budget? What of smashing the NDIS? What of the failure to tax gas corporations? Who is being made to carry the burden of the ‘austerity we need at this time’? Do we need austerity at this time or is it more of the same neo-liberal rhetoric that the Coalition fed us for decades?
It would be good if the tax changes are a flickering of the light on the hill. However, Albanese claims the surge in One Nation support was, at least in part, motivation for the tax changes.
If it takes One Nation support surging past Labor to get Labor to do the right thing, is it really a flickering of the light on the hill? Did Labor know what was the right thing to do for the past 4 years and not do them until they believed that their chances of re-election started to diminish?
Are there really no alternatives to Labor that are more progressive? I think there are more progressive alternatives to Labor, that’s why I don’t feel marooned.
As Eric Rolls recounted in his seminal work on the impact of feral animals in Australia, They All Ran Wild, dog-fence inspectors in 1938 were using a pair of camels as the haulers of their buggy as they tracked along the fence line in their role of maintaining the fence’s integrity against the passage of dingoes and rabbits. At one point the camels flopped into a water soak and nothing could induce them to get up and on the move again. One of the team found some paddy-melons, and picking one, he lit a fire and put the melon on until the juices were starting to run.
The other bloke got one of the camels up, but the second refused to budge. The first fellow then stuck the melon on a stick, carefully lifted the camel’s tail – noting that these animals can kick in any direction even when lying down – and whacked the red-hot melon fair on the camel’s arse. That recalcitrant beast leapt to his feet and took off like a rocket.
Perhaps that’s what it’ll take for Labor to wake up and take things a bit more seriously. I don’t believe this country has what it takes to form a serious contender for leadership per a third political movement aside from the now relic-LNP and the current government, and Hansonism will continue to act as a significant spoiler simply because of the neglect of the majors outside the major population centres.
From today’s ABC web: The town that turned orange. A good analysis of ON’s attraction for rural communities, likely repeated across the nation.
Is that a rhetorical question? “Who exactly is Pauline Hanson fighting for?”
Obvious as the following article shows….
https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/trash-talking-pauline-at-the-press-club/
The fact that the Press Club hosted her at all is very telling as well, in addition to the spooked horses that follow.
Thanks heather, for linking the illuminating essay from RonniSalt. ‘Tis a great pity indeed that these sorts of analyses don’t receive much wider readership.
Heather,
I second Canguro’s (long may he live) exhaltation of the link, it is an entertaining as well as pertinent read that takes a slightly different perspective on Hanson’s manipulation of the media and her supporters to that of most commentators.
I wish RonniSalt had explored the connections behind her rise (other than her Gina Rinehart connection which has been covered to the nth degree) more, as in expanding on:
” Nobody at the Press Club bothered to interrogate why that suddenly was or whether these figures were truly organic in nature, or influenced by the tens of thousands of social media ghosts being pumped into Australian forums from overseas. Or even connections like the totally coincidental podcast of Karl Stefanovic who has suddenly emerged after 30 years in the media as Karl the Kooker King. But why bother digging below the surface to analyse, when you can listen to Pauline tell you how much she hates you?”
I’d love to see more on the symbiotic relationship between Pauline Hanson and the media, RonniSalt goes on to touch on or hint at that between The National Press Club and Hanson.
That Hanson would refuse a ‘Welcome to country’ was a gimme. That the NPC still booked her, despite this, is surely a breach of its supposed values – rendering its ‘Welcome to country’ as meaningless windowdressing.
No doubt Heather, you’d be aware of The Sunday Shot podcast, but for the benefit of others it is highly recommendable.