Why Pauline Hanson's rise is different from the last time

Anyone who believed that “easy going” Australia was somehow immune from the far-right tide that has swept across Europe and the US has been confounded by the rapid surge in support for One Nation, which has now overtaken the combined vote of the Liberals and Nationals in various opinion polls.

Over the last two decades the tendency on the left has been to dismiss Pauline Hanson as a “has been” and a joke. We can no longer afford that attitude. The rules of the game have decisively changed. We are in a much more volatile and threatening international political situation, with Trump in the White House and long entrenched bulwarks of the Western political establishment such as the British Tory party threatened with annihilation as much of its voter base defects to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK. There are no grounds for complacency. Politics has become much more serious and the left needs to rise to the occasion and offer a clear alternative to defend working-class interests.

Hanson first rose to prominence back in 1996, with an inflammatory maiden speech to parliament condemning Aboriginal people and proclaiming that “White Australia” was being swamped by Asian immigration.^[1] For months the petty-bourgeois fish and chip shop owner was the darling of the media, which dwelt on her every word and published her racist diatribe in full. Any protest against Hanson was condemned as an attack on “free speech”. The Liberals and the Nationals lapped it all up and Labor leader Kim Beasley refused to call Hanson a racist.

Hanson, like so many far-right and fascist figures in Australian history, had emerged out of the bowels of the Liberal Party. She was the pre-selected Liberal candidate for the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley for the 1996 elections. However her vile attacks on Aboriginal people were too embarrassing even for hard-nosed Liberal operatives. She was disendorsed at the last minute but with the help of local Liberal Party members went on to win as an independent. Hanson benefited from the economic hardship that had hit the rural middle class. With unemployment at nearly 9 percent there was widespread disillusionment with the Keating Labor government, which had turned its back on its working-class supporters.

The newly elected prime minister, John Howard, was determined to shift society sharply to the right. Howard saw Hanson as a useful ally in his campaign against “political correctness” – right-wing code for any opposition to racism or bigotry. Howard implemented many of Hanson’s policies – cutting immigration, especially family reunions, locking up refugees, extinguishing Native Title, abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and disbanding the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

It was only when One Nation began to severely erode the Liberal Party vote and cost it seats that Howard’s sympathy for Hanson began to fade. The 1998 Queensland state election was an important turning point. The Liberals directed preferences to One Nation but it backfired badly on them. One Nation won 22 percent of the vote and captured a swag of Liberal seats, and by splitting the conservative vote delivered a range of other seats to Labor.

Rising mass opposition to Hanson also worried Howard and sections of the ruling class. Initially most workers in the major urban centres were shocked and intimidated by the media barrage championing Hanson. But fear quickly turned to anger and loathing as a clearer understanding of the nature of Hanson’s right-wing agenda seeped in. With her backing from top mining bosses like Hugh Morgan and the Murdoch press, class-conscious workers saw her as a serious threat to their rights. In response to rank-and-file pressure trade union officials in Melbourne organised a 50,000-strong anti-racism rally.

In that context the confrontational protests that targeted and on a number of occasions actually shut down One Nation meetings had a real impact. They helped to cohere anti-racists and gave them confidence that they were not alone. They demonstrated to the migrant communities that were under attack that there was a reservoir of opposition to Hanson’s racism, and that something could be done to push back against it. The protests also played a key role in breaking the momentum of her movement, demoralising her supporters and preventing Hanson establishing strongholds outside rural areas.^[2] Significantly, support for One Nation was weakest in Victoria, where the protests against Hanson were most intense, collapsing to just 2 percent in mid-1998.

For over two years Australia was gripped by one of the most sustained and militant protest movements since the end of the Vietnam War. However the role of the mass protests in breaking the back of the Hanson upsurge in the 1990s has been almost totally written out of history. Our rulers and their supporters in the media and the ALP don’t want you to realise that by standing up and fighting back you can begin to change the world. They want you to calm down and “lower the temperature”, as Anthony Albanese constantly declares; leave it to those in authority, parliamentarians, judges, police and their ilk to supposedly resolve the situation.

In Hawthorn, with just five days notice, Socialist Alternative initiated a 3,000-strong mobilisation that shut down Hanson’s meeting. In working-class suburbs like Melbourne’s Dandenong anti-Hanson protests mobilised not just the far left but many thousands of local Asian and white workers. These militant protests helped spark a much broader anti-racist movement, with large walkouts of school students that spread to numerous regional centres and country towns. Hundreds of Aboriginal people clashed with police in Echuca during an anti-Hanson protest. Rockhampton had a sizeable demonstration and 5,000 rallied in Bendigo.

The confrontational protests were, of course, denounced in the press and by all the “respectable” forces in society, including ALP leaders. Mealy-mouthed small-l liberal types also criticised the protests. They claimed the protests were just giving Hanson more publicity and driving people into her arms. But the evidence pointed to the opposite conclusion: whenever Hanson was confronted with disruptive protests, support for her fell in the opinion polls. Those outside her hard-core base drifted away from her.

Small-l liberals looked down on Hanson as ignorant and uneducated. She had not been to the right private school and been taught a more sophisticated form of pro-capitalist politics. They feared her crude racism would embarrass Australia on the international stage. They did not attack her important role as an agent of the bosses attempting to shore up support for the capitalist system by deflecting discontent onto migrants, Aboriginal people and other scapegoats. The small-l liberals’ sneering elitism offered no strategy for defeating the far right. Indeed they were just as sneering about socialists who played a prominent role in leading the fightback against One Nation as they were about Hanson.

The mass anti-Hanson mobilisations broke the back of a genuinely threatening far-right movement and prevented the consolidation of a serious fascist organisation. The 1980s had seen substantial far-right street mobilisations, such as the “Save Australia” rally backed by the Herald Sun against the Victorian “socialist Fabian government”. Support for the reactionary “Joh [Bjelke Petersen] for Canberra” campaign peaked at 27 percent in 1987. By 1996 far-right support was surging, with over 70,000 marching in Melbourne to oppose Howard’s gun laws.

An array of fascist organisations, including National Action and its skinhead gangs, coalesced around Hanson, who they saw as their “great white hope”. Hanson herself was becoming more extreme, publishing a book, The Truth, accusing Aboriginal people of cannibalism. But in the face of the mass mobilisations and the waning of ruling-class support, One Nation was wracked with infighting and corruption scandals and tore itself apart. The eleven One Nation MPs elected in Queensland in 1998 deserted the party.

In the 1990s the mainstream media, innumerable liberal commentators and some on the left repeatedly claimed that Hanson’s support base was overwhelmingly working-class “racist rednecks”. Some conservative workers, especially in rural areas, did vote One Nation. However Hanson overwhelmingly attracted former Coalition voters, not Labor voters. Opinion polls in the 1990s showed that it was unionised workers who were most hostile to Hanson.

Like many far-right movements, her core supporters were drawn from the small town middle class of real estate agents, pharmacists, lawyers, accountants, dentists and bank managers.^[3] They in turn galvanised around them retirees, police, sections of the self-employed, long-term unemployed and non-unionised workers in small workplaces. One Nation’s highest votes were in small town rural areas, peaking at 43.5 percent in Bjelke Petersen’s old electorate of Barambah in south-east Queensland.

In the capital cities, as the commentator Phillip Adams noted, BMW and Volvo owners were prominent at Hanson’s meetings, not struggling blue-collar workers.^[4] As Australia is one of the most urbanised and proletarianised societies in the world, One Nation’s failure in the 1990s to make significant inroads into the urban working class marginalised her movement. Whether One Nation or another far-right force can seriously consolidate a presence in the capital cities this time round will be decisive.

Right up to the present day, One Nation’s leaders and candidates have overwhelmingly had a background as managers, small business owners or at times quite substantial capitalists. David Farley, One Nation’s Farrer by-election candidate, is a former CEO of the Australian Agricultural Company, one of Australia’s largest cattle producers. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts was the general manager of the Gordonstone coal mine. Western Australian One Nation Senator Tyron Whitten owns a construction business. Hanson herself is estimated to have a $20 million fortune.

One Nation has if anything moved further to the right since the 1990s, doubling down on its anti-Asian racism. A typical example was One Nation’s Victorian state secretary Bianca Colecchia posting a video of people in Melbourne’s CBD on New Year’s Eve, exclaiming: “Spot the Westerner?” Vilifying Muslims is stock-in-trade for Hanson. She has embraced every fascist-style cause: championing Donald Trump, denouncing life-saving vaccines and the World Health Organization, opposing abortion rights, backing “men’s rights” and nuclear power combined with climate denialism. One Nation’s website calls for an end to “net zero” because “it is a vehicle for creating a socialist Australia in which citizens are forced under comprehensive government control”.

Despite all this, there is nothing like the popular hostility to Hanson that was so widespread in the 1990s. She has to a considerable extent been normalised by the media and the political establishment while gaining the support of some of the wealthiest Australian capitalists, including Gina Reinhart. Official politics have moved further and further to the right. The Liberal Party preferenced One Nation in the South Australian elections, while Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently officially met up with Hanson for the first time.

Part of the reason that Hanson does not seem so extreme is that both Labor and the Liberals have implemented some of her most reactionary policies on refugees and asylum seekers and hostility to workers’ rights. Both mainstream parties have repeatedly whipped up Islamophobia, implemented a law-and-order agenda that targeted Aboriginal people and African migrants and backed the genocide in Gaza, while undermining basic health services and workers’ living standards to boost the profits of big business. In this context anti-immigration sentiment has grown, while support for action to confront climate change has fallen significantly.

International trends have also had an important impact, with the far right becoming an established force in country after country. Sections of the capitalist class have been enthused by the success of Trump and Farage. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and the Australian have played a key role in consolidating far-right talking points on a range of issues like climate change and support for Israel. They have helped develop a cadre of far-right and openly fascist influencers. They have fuelled support for the likes of Jacinta Price and Andrew Hastie on the extreme right of the Liberal Party as well as for Hanson.

In many rural areas and regional centres, especially in NSW and Queensland, support for far-right politics has been consolidated over a number of years. One Nation is now making inroads into urban areas. As well as taking votes from the Nationals and Liberals and to a lesser extent Labor, One Nation, which obtained 5.7 percent at the last Senate election, is soaking up the votes of the far-right microparties which between them polled 6.9 percent. A further worrying sign is that One Nation has gained a massive surge of followers on social media over the last six months. It will take a major political mobilisation to push back this threat.

Along with Barnaby Joyce, One Nation’s prominence has attracted a cohort of sordid bigots and reactionary wannabees from various far-right microparties and the circles around Sky News. Adam Giles, the former Country Liberal Party Northern Territory chief minister who presided over the abuse of Aboriginal children in the Don Dale detention centre, is typical of this crew. After losing office Giles became a Sky News host, notoriously running a favourable interview with Blair Cottrell, the head of the openly Nazi United Patriots Front. Today – surprise, surprise – Giles is employed by Gina Rinehart as chief executive officer of Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co.

Heading the One Nation upper house ticket for the South Australian elections is Cory Bernardi. A former Liberal senator, Bernardi has argued for tougher anti-worker industrial relations laws, denied global warming and declared that permitting same-sex marriage would lead to legalised polygamy and bestiality. After abandoning the Liberals Bernardi, an associate of the fascist Q Society and a supporter of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, formed the Australian Conservatives. When that venture flopped he naturally became a Sky News commentator.

Another recycled bigot rallying to One Nation is former Liberal MP Bernie Finn. He was expelled from the Liberals for “a series of inflammatory social media posts” including calling for abortion to be made illegal in all circumstances and comparing Labor premier Dan Andrews to Adolf Hitler. A Trump backer who rails against the “rampant socialism” that has taken over Victoria, Finn has been a member of pretty much every conceivable far-right party, from Family First to the DLP.

There is great turmoil and reorganisation taking place in right-wing politics. The surge in support for One Nation has sharpened the crisis in the conservative parties, which shows no sign of being resolved any time soon. Exactly how things will develop over the coming months is far from clear. Despite One Nation regularly polling over 20 percent of the vote Hanson has not as yet demonstrated the capacity to build and maintain a far-right movement on anything like the scale of Farage in Britain or Le Pen in France. In the 1990s Hanson failed to develop a network of strong branches. Her new party, despite its initial electoral successes, was plagued by splits and defections. This time round One Nation is attempting to build a solid branch structure. How successful it will be it is too early to tell.

One Nation is ramping up its attempt to break through in Victoria where it has long been weakest. It has been on a recruitment drive and is establishing local branches and plans to run in every seat in the Victorian state elections this November. Given the deep unpopularity of the Allan Labor government, there is a serious danger that One Nation could obtain the balance of power in the upper house. Of course favourable opinion polls don’t guarantee strong votes for Hanson on election day. Nevertheless the threat she poses should not be discounted.

One Nation is far from being the only threat. The Liberal and National parties have also shifted well to the right, partly inspired by Trump and Farage and in response to the pressure from One Nation. New Liberal leader Angus Taylor seems set to move the party further to the right, while Andrew Hastie waits in the wings itching for full Trumpification.

At the end of last year we also saw a brief flurry of racist street protests in which the openly Nazi National Socialist Network played a leading role. However the far-right sentiment at this stage is primarily electorally focused and has not led to anything like the scale of violent attacks on migrants that have repeatedly occurred in Europe. The far-right terrorist attack on the Perth Invasion Day rally is, however, a dangerous warning sign. And in the wake of Bondi there has been an increasing number of attacks on Muslims, especially Muslim women.

The far right internationally have entrenched themselves as a serious political force – dominating the US Republican party, in government in Italy, India, Israel and Hungary and leading the polls in Britain and France. Reactionary Nazi-style attitudes are widespread among sections of the US capitalist class and key operatives in the Trump administration. Elon Musk is in no sense alone in openly championing fascists. Australia is now rapidly going down the same road.

The far right is not simply some bizarre anomaly separate from capitalism. It is an integral part of the capitalist system. Fascism is a force the capitalist class has repeatedly turned to when it has suited their needs – not necessarily to take power as in Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, but as an auxiliary force to back up bourgeois power and push politics in a harsher, more authoritarian direction. This is vital to understand. Fighting fascism can’t be separated from the broader fight against capitalism and the mainstream political parties whose racist and reactionary policies give the far right succour.

Fighting the far right doesn’t just mean combatting them on the streets. The left must also prioritise standing up for workers’ rights, opposing imperialist war, mobilising in support of Palestine, defending democratic rights, building strong socialist election campaigns. Indeed every fight in which our side stands up against the rich and powerful is essential to combatting and offering an alternative to the far right.

As long as capitalism exists there will continue to be a space for the far right to grow. As the capitalist system moves deeper into social and political crisis that space is set to expand. We can’t rely on small-l liberals or reformists to consistently oppose fascism. At best the liberals will equivocate. At worst, as they have repeatedly done in the past, they will go over to the fascists, when they feel their class interests are threatened. We are in for a long fight and it is vital to build up the forces of the revolutionary left so that we can play a decisive role in the battles to come.

Mick Armstrong is the co-author of The Labor Party: a Marxist Analysis and The Fight for Workers’ Power: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 20th Century, and has written widely on revolutionary organisation and the Australian labour movement.

References

Armstrong, Mick 1998, “Who really voted for One Nation?”, Socialist Alternative 28, July, pp.3–4.

Armstrong, Mick 2025, “The far right continues to make gains in Australia”, Red Flag, 10 June. https://redflag.org.au/article/the-far-right-continues-to-make-gains-in-australia/

Lee Ack, Tess 2016, “How we stopped Pauline Hanson last time”, Marxist Left Review, 12, Winter. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/how-we-stopped-pauline-hanson-last-time/

Sparrow, Jeff 1997, “Hanson protests work!”, Socialist Alternative 19, August, pp.3–5.

1. For an overview of the fight against Hanson last time round see Lee Ack 2016.
2. Sparrow 1997.
3. Lee Ack 2016, p.23.
4. See Armstrong 1998 for a detailed analysis of the One Nation vote in the 1998 Queensland state election, their most successful election campaign.