Who exactly is Pauline Hanson fighting for?

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?