Thirty Years of Hansonism
How the politics of resentment keep finding new excuses.
This year marks 30 years of Hansonism at the heart of the Australian political landscape. Unlike Howardism, the former doesn’t only exist in legacy. It lives and breathes in the world we inhabit and it’s going from strength-to-strength.
The analysis, since last Saturday’s election result in South Australia, point to a section of the electorate disenfranchised with the two major parties, where cost of living pressures are pushing people to the brink. As a result, like MAGA, Hanson’s followers want to burn the whole way of doing traditional politics to the ground. The South Australian result matters not because of the outcome, but because the politics that delivered the outcome are now fundamentally ingrained in the way politics and public discourse is run now.
At the heart of this politics is racism. The race baiting and playing off one section of the community against another. Because below all the flailing and gnashing of teeth about affordability, changing demographics, and the politics of bereavement; is a rank form of white nationalism dressed up as patriotism, and it is the core motivating factor at the heart of everything Hanson does and has ever done in politics.
To claim it as clever politics that’s seizes on the moment, is giving her and the apparatus she has assembled around her, far too much credit.
The issues of housing affordability, sustainable development and population growth are all legitimate topics for serious policy discussion. Serious issues to be debated by serious people. But One Nation is not a serious player. They’re performers, think Hanson’s burqa stunts in the Senate when she bothers to turn up. Think the batshit crazy denial of climate change by her offsider Malcolm Roberts in the face of mountains of evidence and people’s lived experiences. It’s theatre of the destructive, and now it’s finding a larger audience.
Some in the commentariat credit Hanson as being ahead of her time, but they forget the one basic principle of humanity is that the politics of fear based on race and identity are timeless. It’s not because she is a visionary, it’s that her squalid opportunism has never been properly challenged. John Howard gave it go in the lead up to 1998 federal election when it was clear One Nation was a threat in Queensland, but the imperative there was always purely political, not a combatting of her ideology.
Hanson and Howard are kindred spirits when it comes to a loathing of multiculturalism and the Australia they think it has taken away from them. The type of opposition that is actually needed requires vigilance, the ongoing maintenance of our civil discourse and of our politics that guards against the worst of us.
In that context, One Nation’s popularity in 2026 is not her triumph, it’s our failure.
The failure to counteract the exploitation of real anxiety, economic instability, cultural change real or imagined, distrust of elites while pointing downward and outward at “others” is the hallmark of her politics and one that she has built a very successful career on.
Over the course of three decades the targets shift according to the time and subject, Aboriginal people, Asians, migrants, Muslims, the tertiary educated and of course the woke. It’s not imaginative, it isn’t thought provoking it’s just shifting blame and self-inadequacy onto generalised cohorts of the mind; easy to mark as the source of all our problems.
Increasingly, as she’s performed the same act over the years, she’s received a free pass from much of the media, which in turn has entrenched her politics into the just the way we do things now.
For those in the media and in particular the press gallery, Hanson has been treated as a mere curiosity for most of her time in parliament. A product of a hidden Australia, one they rarely see apart from when they are on a campaign bus during an election. It’s perhaps why she gets the softest of treatments from the fourth estate. There are attempts to intellectualise her appeal while forgetting the thirty years she’s been banging on about race and religion, it’s left a mark on the electorate.
Because for those of us, and we are many, thirty years is a long time to be under the spotlight, to be under scrutiny for merely being who you are.
Thirty years of self-defense. Thirty years of seeing your kin, your friends and fellow custodians vilified under the heat lamp of national scrutiny as though we are incapable of taking care of our own and that we can’t be trusted to share our own stories in our time and in our own way.
Thirty years is a long time to challenge the narrative about mythical rivers of gold that flow to Aboriginal communities as though there’s a torrent of taxpayer’s dollars flowing to First Peoples instead of instead of those who really “deserve” it.
It’s hard to relax under this relentless onslaught. Pauline might think similarly about the scrutiny places on her as she jets about in Australia’s richest person’s private jet or she cooks wagyu in a sandwich press with Barnaby; but it doesn’t equate.
Trauma effects the DNA of those that suffer it, I wonder if privilege does the same.
We often ruminate about the long shadow Howard cast on all that followed his projection of his version of the Australian story, but it’s nothing compared to the burn Hanson’s playbook instills to smother any chance of national growth through diversity, learning through real understanding or harbouring what’s special about us.
Instead, she turns it into a game of us and them and hopes the ensuing breaking through the stoking of division falls on her side of the ledger. It’s a living, I guess.
For those communities who have been the brunt of her ongoing grievance of Hanson and her followers and the apathetic approach to holding her to account, calling it out where others fail to do so is tiring. If only scrutiny was applied in equal measure and we were even serious about what sort of society we want to be, perhaps the Liberal Party wouldn’t be on the brink, perhaps Labor would be brave and Hansonism would be the mere curiosity people still think it is.