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Pauline Hanson’s political stable now includes two clueless newbies from WA, so fresh they still think a “budget emergency” is forgetting your wallet at the pub. This expanded squad, alongside the perpetually aggrieved Malcolm Roberts, commands fewer votes than a Sydney pub trivia night, yet they’ve stolen almost as much political oxygen as The Nationals, our Olympic-standard time-wasters. One Nation has never built a bridge, brokered peace, or passed meaningful reform. Instead, it has perfected grievance as a business model, wrapping nostalgia, anger, and anti-immigration rhetoric in a banner of “Real Australians.” Or, as it sounds in practice, “Rile Strine.”

Most forget that Hanson didn’t invent the tune she’s been singing since 1996. She just made it cruder. John Howard wrote the original score.

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Long John Howard: The Architect Who Made Hanson Possible

In 1988, Opposition Leader John Howard launched “One Australia,” a policy to slash Asian immigration and end multiculturalism. The backlash was immediate and severe, contributing to his election loss. But Howard learned. When he finally won power in 1996, the same year Hanson gave her maiden speech warning Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians,” he didn’t condemn her. He co-opted her.

Howard’s genius was simple: steal the underlying anxiety of Hanson’s supporters, launder it through the language of sovereignty and security, and present it as responsible governance. By the 2001 Tampa crisis, his declaration “We will decide who comes to this country” made Hanson’s rant sound like statesmanship. He had found his political map to dominance: plunder the far right’s rhetoric while maintaining a respectable distance.

The strategy worked. One Nation voters drifted back to the Coalition, seeing their concerns reflected in mainstream policy. Labor spent a decade defending multiculturalism, while Howard made “queue jumpers” and “boat people” the defining terms of debate. Hanson lost her seat in 1998, but her ideas had colonised the mainstream.

That’s Howard’s real legacy: he didn’t defeat One Nation. He normalised it. He taught the Coalition you don’t need a dog-whistle when you can rebrand the howl as “border security.” Long John Howard sailed away with the loot, leaving Hanson with the pirate costume and none of the treasure.

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Barnaby Joyce: The Pantaloon’s Final Bow

Today, Barnaby Joyce is auditioning for the same populist stage. Having announced he won’t re-contest New England, Joyce praises One Nation’s climate stance as “not barking mad” and flirts with defection. This is less about ideology than legacy and revenge.

His trajectory echoes Mark Latham’s: from power broker to protest politician, recycling old grievances for an audience that mistakes volume for substance. He’s reading from a script Howard helped write, tapping into the same well of rural disaffection. But the performance has become transparent. Joyce is the pantaloon of this political comedy; the foolish, lecherous old character who thinks he’s still the star, his baggy trousers unable to hide that he’s chasing relevance, not principle.

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Pauline Hanson: The Only Face That Launched a Thousand Chips

If Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Pauline Hanson has the only face that launched a thousand chips. She is Australia’s original populist snack: crisp on the outside, hollow in the middle, and always served with a side of vinegar.

Her brand endures because it’s cheap, greasy, and instantly recognisable: a nationalist flavour profile with hints of 1950s decorum. She’s the ghost of suburban Australia’s lost lunchroom, forever warning that the dim sims are plotting to take over the fryer.

Like Dame Edna Everage, Hanson is hostage to her own caricature. Her supporters applaud her “please explains” as Ocker egalitarianism; the myth that we’re all salt-of-the-earth blokes who tell it like it is.

But the tragedy, or the farce, is that Hanson isn’t even particularly spicy anymore. In a world marinated in Trumpism and QAnon, her once-radical rhetoric tastes bland. Yet she remains a mascot for the politics of the bain-marie: warmed-over resentment, no nutritional value, best consumed before thinking sets in.

One Nation is less a democratic movement than an Amway franchise for grievance. Candidates don’t join a cause; they pay fees for the privilege of shipping out under Hanson’s brand. It’s multi-level marketing for outrage.

Her platform is a patchwork of anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigration, and anti-climate action, wrapped in “free speech” grievance. She’s against anything that generates headlines and donations. For her furious supporters, rage is the point. Hanson gives permission to blame outsiders for disappointments with far more complex causes.

The curious, meanwhile, watch her as a figure of parody. The burqa stunt, the gun lobby videos, the grammatical car crashes; the performance has become self-parody.

One Nation’s polling tells the story: at the May 2025 election, they scraped just 6.4 percent. But here’s the evergreen boost: since the election, as the Liberals shifted to the centre, One Nation’s polling has surged to 11 to 14 percent. It’s the classic pattern. Between elections, disaffected voters park their protest with Hanson. Come election day, they drift back. The support is wide but shallow, loud but fleeting.

In thirty years, Hanson has passed precisely zero significant legislation.

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Please Explain: Who’s Really Running the Show?

So ask not what you can do for One Nation. Ask who profits from its perpetual tantrum.

The answer? Every power broker who learned Long John Howard’s lesson: you don’t need to defeat the far right when you can steal its playbook and call it common sense. Hanson may never govern, but Howard ensured she’d never need to. Her job is to provide the noise that shifts the Overton Window.

The performance continues because it serves a purpose: it keeps everyone else dancing to her tune, while the real power brokers; media proprietors and party strategists, benefit from a debate focused on migrants and Muslims, rather than on deeper, more systemic issues.

The ultimate testament to Long John Howard’s victory isn’t the persistence of Pauline Hanson; it is the power of the cage he built. Consider the defining irony of our time: Anthony Albanese, having just secured a historic landslide re-election—the first prime minister to do so since Howard himself—governs with a mandate that should, in theory, allow him to rewrite the national script. Yet, on the very issues Hanson first weaponised, he remains trapped. The government talks tough on “border security,” defends offshore detention, and speaks in the sobered-up lexicon of Howard’s pragmatism. The Labor Party may hold the treasury bench, but it is still performing on a stage designed by its old antagonist.

This is the politics of division’s final destination: not a fiery collapse, but a quiet, relentless capture of the possible. It ensures that regardless of who wins an election, the terms of debate on core issues of identity and belonging were settled thirty years ago. The frame endures, and we are all just living in the picture Long John Howard painted.

So please explain? There’s nothing left to explain, unless we wake up to ourselves. The real and present danger is not some submarine of the Never Never, conjured to scare us into a defence contract. It’s much closer to home. It’s the slow, comfortable failure to hold our politicians to account; to demand they break the frame instead of just living in it. The menu was written thirty years ago. We don’t have to keep ordering from it.

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