A few weeks ago a trans woman told me she was a big Pauline Hanson supporter.
WTF. How can a trans woman feel she is any way represented, or safe, with One Nation? The same woman who teamed up with Holly Valance to release a parody version of Valances’ previous ‘hit’ (can we even call it that?) that mocks poor people, LGBTQ+ youth, women and the trans community? It’s mean. It’s stupid. And it’s shameful. Yet, somehow this woman whose only policy is hate and division is cutting through. Newspoll this week had One Nation polling at 27%. That made me feel sad. What does that say about who we are? Or what we are becoming? I think it says one thing very clearly.
Fascism is on the rise.
Want to know the basic principles of fascism? There’s two major ones, and they’re sounding very much like One Nation’s political strategy.
1. Powerful, often exclusionary, populist nationalism centered on the cult of a redemptive, ‘infallible’ leader who never admits mistakes.
2. Political power derived from questioning reality, endorsing myth and rage, and promoting lies.
Award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and anti-globalisation author and academic Naomi Klein describes the phenomenon of the ultra-right and the capture succinctly. ‘They got the feelings right and the facts wrong’. Getting the facts wrong isn’t a mistake, they are in the business of getting the facts wrong. In uncertain times, where the voting public lose faith in government, (that’s the ‘feelings’ bit) they look towards a charismatic leader. A ‘strongman’, or in this case ‘a strong woman’. Although I’d say Hanson enacts the power in a way that fulfils all the tenets of patriarchy. In that way, it’s a kind of cognitive dissonance and confuses ‘woke’ ideology. Don’t we want more female leaders? Yes. But not women who lead like scary men. Really, really scary men.
The ideology being enacted is straight from the fascist playbook. There must be a terrifying internal and external enemy. Migrants. This demonisation of outsiders becomes the way we define ourselves as the ‘insiders’. It’s about validation and control. It’s about simple answers for complex systemic problems like the housing crisis.
Instead of sensible analysis of the Census data that had vacancy at 1 million homes – and looking at the tax breaks that make housing a sure bet for wealth creation, Hanson blames migrants. Too many migrants living in our homes. Forget they are looking after our children and elderly, and filling the roles we can’t fill without them. Let’s just blame people for what is actually well designed policy for making lots of people poor and a small amount of people rich.
When Hanson gave her maiden speech 30 years ago she said Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians.’ She has targeted Muslims, referring to Islam as a ‘disease’ in 2017, and calling for a ‘vaccination’ against it. She has called for a ban on Muslim immigration, a royal commission into Islam and a ban on the burqa.
In 2018 she proposed a motion in the Senate with the slogan ‘It’s OK to be white’.
In 2019 she was secretly filmed in meetings with the NRAA [National Rifle Association Australia] discussing softening Australia’s strict gun laws. Al Jazeera reported on One Nation’s dealings: ‘Far-right party sought up to $20m from pro-gun groups in the United States’.
In 2022 she responded to a tweet by Senator Mehreen Faruqui telling her to piss off back to Pakistan. In 2024 the Federal Court described the remarks as ‘racist’ and ‘anti-immigrant’ and ‘anti-Muslim.’
In 2025 she was formally censured and suspended from the Senate for seven sitting days after repeatedly wearing a burqa into the chamber, something deemed ‘racist’ by other senators.
Racism has always been Pauline’s centralising call to action, it is her simplistic theory of change. This bizarrely is not called hate speech. It is called political ideology. Its purpose is to exclude. Because when you ‘other’ marginalised community groups, you create a new group – forged in the furnace of hatred and fear. It’s the fascist honey pot. It’s us. And it’s them.
Don’t fall for the propaganda. Be kind. Be tolerant. Be informed. Be better than the hate.
And please, don’t become a fascist.
If you know anything about history, it never ends well for them.
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