Against Pauline Hanson

"Australians are natural nationalists. Our offshore refugee processing and points-based immigration system are the envy of populists across the world...Why did the populist moment miss the Antipodes?"

Article originally submitted to The Spectator but turned down, written by Bob Stone

In 1998, the newly formed One Nation Party won 22% of the vote in the Queensland state election, surpassing the Liberal Party to gain 11 seats. The 2024 Queensland state election is over, and One Nation’s staggering zero seats finish will hopefully send that party into the dustbin of Australian political history. It beggars belief how, at a time when first-preference votes for the major parties are collapsing and nationalists are achieving power in Europe and New Zealanad, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has completely failed to capitalise on the nativist mood sweeping the western world. A bevy of public surveys show supermajorities in favour of immigration restriction. The problem is not with her platform. The problem is and always has been Pauline.
The party produces no projects outside of her influence. She fits in with the rest of the minor-party right, a broken fractal of personality cults, more akin to rival warlords than the generals of an organised resistance movement.

Wilfred Bion’s theory of basic assumption groups explains how dependency dynamics can inhibit a group’s ability to function as a focused, task-oriented working group. PHON’s strong dependency on Hanson as not merely the leader of the party but its proprietary owner creates a dynamic which prioritises personal loyalty over policy development. What we are left with is a personality cult fronted by an unimpressive personality.

Where Nigel Farage is charismatic, Pauline Hanson is shrill. Where Le Pen’s virile protege Jordan Bardella is young and energetic, Hanson is old. As Donald Trump wins with more radical rhetoric over time, Hanson seems afraid to gin up the nationalist sentiments that swept her to prominence in the late 1990s. She reentered politics in the 2010s to heap scorn on Australia’s relatively small population of Muslims, but in 2024 both major parties have beaten her to the punch in unveiling ambitious plans to wean Australia off of its dependence on mass immigration. She inveighs against the Woke, but has outlined no headline-grabbing policies to address it, as Governor DeSantis has in the United States. We hear nothing about offshoring international students, who now make up 42% of Sydney’s CBD population, or shutting down the visa-mill VET colleges responsible for Australia’s unsustainable population growth.

So far as I can tell, the One Nation party exists to syphon up donations for Hanson’s weekly Please Explain! Cartoon. The media paints the archetypal One Nation voter as a bigoted old man left behind by a changing world, content to laugh at the Woke without acting to arrest Australia’s decline. This is not an attack directed towards those who vote for One Nation, intelligent larrikins unshackled by the politically correct attitudes dominating the other parties. My criticism is directed at the eunuch leeches lurking in the court of Queensland’s crimson-haired queen, who fail to meaningfully articulate or act on the anxieties of her voters. As populists in America are drawing up ambitious plans to completely restructure the federal bureaucracy, Hanson can’t even comprehend governance, let alone election. As James Ashby’s embarrassing trip to the United States revealed, the provincial party isn’t even competent enough to liaise with global power-brokers like A.R.C. or NatCon or other consortiums flirting with a right wing populist internationale.

We come to the real reason for Pauline Hanson’s political longevity. Unlike in Germany and Austria, where right-wing parties that top the polls are locked out of coalition governments, One Nation is clearly preserved as a stalking horse for the Liberal Party, a satellite whether they know it or not. While Hanson languished in jail, John Howard and Tony Abbott implemented some of her ideas to popular acclaim. Howard, to his credit, recognised her supporters’ grievances as legitimate. This marked the peak of Pauline’s political influence, and provided the world with an example of public pressure being correctly applied in a democratic system. The insurgent party manoeuvre was similar to how Farage’s UKIP helped to get Brexit over the line, before that party imploded just after it gave Red Wall Labour voters the permission they needed to vote Tory, or how surrogacy for Robert Kennedy Jr’s alternative-health campaign gave American Silicon Valley billionaires the psychological permission they needed to defect from the Democratic Party to eventually support Donald Trump.

But pressure campaigns require an ideologically ironclad pressure group. To that end, it’s simply incredible that after 12 years of the Liberal Party destroying their credibility with their right-wing base that there has been no viable populist challenge to the party of the sort that we see abroad. The major parties are dying, and 70% of Australians want to rethink our present dependence on mass immigration. But while the Greens and Teals cultivate patronage networks and radical constituencies, Australia has failed to develop an alternative right.

Instead, Australians have intellectually repulsive “meme parties” hoovering up the right-wing minor party vote, subsisting off of the nostalgia of Hanson’s painfully old cult. Like their fellow political transvestite, Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, they wallow in pseudo-Trumpist tastelessness. They import American culture wars, without fully comprehending any of the intellectual criticisms of the postwar consensus that Donald Trump first articulated, and that vice-president-elect Vance, Robert Lighthizer and Jeremy Carl are now intellectualising.

It’s clear that Mehreen Faruqi’s case against Pauline Hanson was wrongfully decided and threatens free speech in Australia. But it perfectly encapsulates the life cycle of a One Nation media story. A performative, self-destructive stunt for donations, before Pauline plays victim to shore up the sympathy of her misguided followers and retreats into the electoral wilderness.

Despite its pretensions to being “anti-establishment,” One Nation’s internal hierarchies are even more ossified than the cursus honorum of both Australian major parties. Hanson’s proprietary party is run like a feudal estate, officially bearing the name of its queen. It is the only absolute monarchy in Australian politics, proving Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrong about the high time-preference of dictators. Young right-wingers across the country have made the decision that they’re better off creating a fiefdom within the Liberal Party or sit and wait for a new party to emerge than they are anchoring themselves to the fate of One Nation. The party is quasi-dictatorial, and too many pointless controversies to list consume members’ limited time, manpower and money. PHON’s former national executive treasurer was previously charged with fraud. From co-founder David Ettridge’s “Hanson Files,” to James Ashby’s perpetually precarious financial situation, to PHON’s recent deselection of its only Queensland MP before the state election, PHON courts controversy to little gain but its leaders’ self-preservation.

The kerfuffle over former One Nation MLC Mark Latham’s “problematic” tweets was merely a convenient pretext for Pauline to purge another outstanding personality from the party who shared her stubbornness and national name recognition. Particularly with the fractious New South Wales branch alleging that payments from the NSW Electoral Commission’s Administration Fund were being redirected to the Brisbane office.

In the final chapters of his recently released book “On Leadership,” Tony Blair advises future political leaders to create a constituency, and not a clique. A consistent base of political support within civil society, rather than temporary parliamentary allies who will backstab you once your short-term mutual goals have been achieved. The leader’s clique “provides comfort” while a tangible constituency keeps their movement alive after them.

Germany’s controversial Alternative für Deutschland grew out of a matrix of nationalistic civil society organisations predating the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was even once known as the “professor’s party” for its early support from rarified Eurosceptic academics. Its Institut für Staatspolitik think-tank can be viewed as Germany’s answer to Australia’s pugilistic Institute for Public Affairs. Has One Nation created anything like this, or even anything like the Young Liberals? Or is it merely a grift kept alive so an Ipswich fishmonger doesn’t have to get a real job? 32 MPs have quit One Nation in its relatively short lifetime; is there a reason for that?

Should you disagree with my evaluation of Hanson’s competence and sincerity, the unavoidable fact is that PHON are ineffectual as a political party and do not deserve votes. They represent a species of political antimatter hampering the successful populist victories achieved across the pond with Winston Peters’s NZ First Party.

Political figures should be judged by how well they succeeded in fulfilling their stated goals. As we approach the 30th anniversary of Pauline Hanson’s Maiden Speech, her quixotic attack on the multicultural industry has produced no results. Multiculturalism has not been “abolished.” Political correctness, “reverse racism” and mass immigration are worse than ever, and the Aussie battler continues to pay the bill. Hanson’s complete failure to create a constituency that will survive her strangled Australian nationalism in its crib. For any New Right party to emerge, and for the LNP to properly reform, PHON needs to die.

Australians are natural nationalists. Our offshore refugee processing and points-based immigration systems are the envy of populists across the world. Australians habitually scorn tall-poppy elites and their social-engineering schemes, as reflected in the results of the Voice Referendum, but these laudable cultural attributes time and again fail to find a political expression independent of the cartelised major parties. Why did the populist moment miss the Antipodes? You may point to “structural factors” if you wish. I will drink to the demise of Hansonism.