Fifteen thousand kilometres from the chamber in Canberra where she ought to be, Pauline Hanson takes two weeks off from her day job to finesse her selfie at Donald J Trump’s Mar-a-Lago CPAC.

Hard work? Attention doesn’t seek itself, you know.

While Queensland flood victims wait for federal support, while Cairns tourism operators struggle with staff shortages, while Central Queensland coal workers face transition without a plan, Hanson is sipping champagne under chandeliers at a far-right gala where tickets cost up to US$25,000, nearly an entire year’s Age Pension of $29,754 for a single Australian. MIA? Or openly abdicating her duty of care?

The self-styled battlers’ champion wags parliamentary sittings for what journalists call “a costume party for the rich and resentful,” where grievance politics and wealth worship collide in faux populism. Satirists mock CPAC as “a prosperity gospel for hedge fund prophets.” Political theorist Chiara Cordelli argues capitalism’s core flaw isn’t just inequality, but “a mode of investment that entrenches domination and erodes democratic agency,” a dynamic on full display at CPAC.

Naturally, Pauline takes this in her stride. She’d demand regional Queenslanders show up to their jobs, yet treats parliamentary duty like a drop-in centre. Her Senate Division attendance record wouldn’t reach sixty percent. She never misses a photo-op at an oligarch’s ballroom. The hypocrisy isn’t incidental. It’s the entire business model. She knows her supporters are low-information voters with huge appetite for the politics of resentment and moral panic.

Hanson pays for the wristband, attends the Halloween party beside Gina Rinehart, nods through the slogans, and flies home with fresh talking points and stale enemies. This isn’t representation. Not remotely. It’s a franchise operation, selling American culture war to Australian suckers.

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Howard’s Bastard Child

Before understanding Hanson’s present, we must excavate her past. When on 10 September 1996, the newly-elected independent MP for Oxley, delivered the most offensive maiden speech in Australian parliamentary history, then-PM John Winston Howard faced a choice. If he’d had the ticker for it.

He could have shut her down. Her maiden speech remains inappropriate, offensive and inflammatory. John Howard chose, instead, a crafty evasion, cruelling countless lives to play a racist card.

“I won the seat of Oxley largely on an issue that has resulted in me being called a racist,” Hanson began. “That issue related to my comment that Aboriginals received more benefits than non-Aboriginals.” In fact, the line had caused the Liberals to disendorse her. Way too late. Then came the line that would define Australian politics for decades: “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.”

Howard could have rebuked her. Opposition leader Kim Beazley wanted her censured. Howard refused. He didn’t condemn the racism; he didn’t endorse it either. Instead, he equivocated, claiming he didn’t want to alienate Australians who felt Hanson spoke for them. This calculated ambiguity was worse than silence. It was permission. Worse, it was a less than subtle wink and a nod to her racist supporters.

Political commentator Greg Barns, in Rise of the Right, argues compellingly, that Howard’s kid-glove treatment gave the racist demagogue traction and longevity, normalising her views within mainstream debate. Shamelessly. The truth is Hanson is very much as if John Howard built her in a laboratory, raised her on resentment and victimhood, then blessed her when she’d served her purpose.

Before her 1996 eruption, Hanson was a Liberal candidate, pre-selected then disendorsed after warning that Aboriginal welfare created dependence. She stayed on the ballot as a Liberal (the party couldn’t remove her name in time) and won. The Liberal broad church has always reserved a few small, pews at the back for bigots, racists and other, embittered, misanthropes.

Howard didn’t shun Hansonism. He weaponised it. When her maiden speech warned Australia was being swamped, Howard let the dog-whistle echo, knowing it would soften voters for his own pitch. He didn’t clean the wound. He left it to turn septic, then sold the antibiotics.

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Tampa: The Turning Point

The defining moment came with the 2001 Tampa fiasco. A Norwegian freighter rescued 433 Afghan refugees from a sinking boat. Howard sent SAS troops to board the vessel and refused them entry to Australian waters. Weeks later, his government falsely claimed asylum seekers on another boat had thrown their children overboard to force rescue. A Senate inquiry later confirmed no children were thrown. Photos showed people being rescued after the boat sank. The lie didn’t matter. It did its work.

Three weeks after Tampa, the September 11 attacks gave Howard his wedge. At his election launch, he delivered the line that would define two decades: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” As if our humanity or even international law allowed him.

John Winston Howard sailed home on One Nation winds, transforming asylum seekers into a permanent political weapon. The Pacific Solution (offshore detention, boat turnbacks, excised islands) became bipartisan gospel. It still bedevils our politics. It has ruined countless lives; is still a source of inconevable sorrow. And shame. And, of course, at the time it provoked international censure.

“Their widely-reported ordeal and subsequent changes in Australian refugee policy illustrated serious disregard for human dignity by governments.”  

— Amnesty International, on the Tampa affair and the Pacific Solution

Howard didn’t slay the One Nation beast. He bridled it and rode it under a flag of fear. Years later, the cynicism was complete. The same Howard who once urged Liberals to preference One Nation last blessed a Queensland LNP deal putting her ahead of Labor, calling it “sensible and pragmatic.” Hanson wasn’t an accident of history. She was Howard’s bastard child, conceived in resentment, raised on dog-whistles, groomed for distraction.

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The Betrayal Ledger

Hanson’s modern pose as anti-elite truth-teller collapses under evidence. It’s all propaganda. She rails against elites while flying business class to their banquets, warns of foreign influence while parroting Trump’s rhetoric in Florida, claims to back the battler while sipping Bollinger with Gina Rinehart.

In 2019, Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, and Queensland leader, Steve Dickson, travelled to Washington seeking support from the National Rifle Association.

Al Jazeera’s three-year undercover investigation captured them asking for ten million dollars to “pick up eight Senate seats,” which, Dickson explained, would mean having the government “by the balls.” They discussed softening Australia’s post-Port Arthur gun laws. Two months later, Hanson backed legislation to ban foreign political donations. The grift would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable.

Pauline Hanson’s Senate votes read like a mining executive’s wish list. In 2018, she voted with the Coalition eighty-six percent of the time when it mattered, when Labor opposed and her vote was decisive. She backed sixty-five billion dollars in corporate tax cuts after receiving a letter from the Business Council of Australia. The price for delivering billionaires their windfall? One thousand apprenticeships. One thousand jobs to trade away sixty-five billion.

She opposed climate action that could protect regional towns from fire and drought. Repeatedly sided with big business against workers. Cut penalty rates for hospitality workers (many of them her own voters) then walked it back after the backlash. Loud against elites, loyal to them in division votes.

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The War on Women

Hanson’s politics draw blood in quieter ways, and women bear the deepest scars. For years, she waged a campaign painting the Family Court as systemically biased against men. In her 2016 Senate speech, she claimed fathers were being “murdered” by a system that favoured mothers. The rhetoric was incendiary. The consequences were institutional and proved cruelly unjust to vulnerable women.

Hanson’s campaign helped soften ground for the Coalition’s 2021 merger of the specialist Family Court with the overburdened Federal Circuit Court. Despite fierce opposition from 155 stakeholders (including two former Family Court Chief Justices, the Law Council, Women’s Legal Services Australia, and every credible family law body) Hanson and crossbencher Rex Patrick voted with the government. The bill passed thirty to twenty-eight. Hanson’s vote was decisive.

The warnings were explicit. Former Chief Justice Elizabeth Evatt called the merger “undesirable for children and families.” Women’s Legal Services spokesperson Angela Lynch warned that up to eighty-five percent of Family Court matters involve family violence, and that specialisation, not efficiency, was essential for safety. They were ignored.

The result has been chaos for survivors of violence. The specialist Family Court, with expert judges trained in family violence dynamics and integrated counselling services, was collapsed into the Federal Circuit Court, already struggling with crushing migration caseloads and lacking specialisation in domestic abuse. Research from ANROWS found that eighty-two percent of family law files examined raised allegations of family violence. These cases require specialist judges who understand coercive control, trauma responses, and the tactics abusers use in court. The merged system doesn’t provide that.

Safety measures that existed in specialist Family Court buildings (separate entrances, safe rooms, video links, screens in courtrooms) were inconsistent in Federal Circuit Court facilities. Run-down buildings in regional areas offered almost no protection. Self-represented litigants, often women fleeing violence who couldn’t afford lawyers, frequently didn’t know these basic safety measures existed.

The government promised efficiencies. Women got longer wait times, less experienced judges hearing complex abuse cases, and a system that treats family violence as just another administrative matter.

This is institutional cruelty, the slow violence of policy choices that make the vulnerable less safe, disguised as reform.

Hanson moved on to her next grievance, her next photo-op, leaving wreckage in her wake. The pattern, learned from Howard’s playbook, never varies: aim the rage downward, never upward. Blame immigrants for housing shortages born of policy failure. Blame single mothers for rorting welfare. Blame ex-wives for men’s economic insecurity. It’s politics’ oldest con, and Hanson has turned it into an industry.

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Cruelling the Voice

When the nation was asked to listen, Hanson shouted it down. Her campaign against the Voice wasn’t just divisive. It was cruel. She helped sink a modest proposal to recognise and empower the nation’s most vulnerable and dispossessed people. Her rhetoric painted Indigenous Australians as a threat to unity when they were asking for inclusion. Not equality. Not supremacy. Just a voice.

This wasn’t dissent. It was sabotage. Hanson didn’t just oppose the Voice. She poisoned the well, spreading conspiracy theories and stoking fear among communities who’d never met an Aboriginal person but were certain they knew what was best for them.

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Populism as Decoy

Hanson is not anti-establishment. She is its decoy, a pressure valve for working-class rage, ensuring frustration vents sideways rather than upward. The media oblige because outrage rates and distraction sells. Commercial networks give her oxygen because conflict pays better than context. The ABC invites her onto panels in the name of “balance,” as if bigotry and decency occupy equal moral ground.

Hate is now a franchise. Hanson is one of its longest-serving licensees.

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The Surge

Recent polling showed One Nation reaching fifteen percent in October 2025, a record high. That’s not organic growth. It’s a protest surge amid Coalition collapse. Sussan Ley’s net approval sits at minus thirty-three. The Liberal Party is eating itself over climate targets and whether to preference Nationals or One Nation. And whatever it may choose, it will prove a shit sandwich.

Hanson’s rise is less groundswell than vacuum effect. Rage needs a home, and she offers discount rental.

Phil Coorey calls her “practically mainstream,” as if the bar has been lowered to ankle height.

But Hanson is not mainstream. She is the product of deliberate accommodation. Her presence in the chamber is not a glitch. It is a feature built by Howard, maintained by Turnbull, tolerated by Morrison, exploited by Dutton, and now by Ley.

Instead of being feted as a political celebrity, Hanson needs accountability. A few basic questions for starters. Which votes did she miss while at Mar-a-Lago? Which Senate committees went unattended? Which Queensland communities were left without representation?

The Senate sat. Hanson’s chair stayed empty. That’s not representation. That’s a rort.

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The Final Lesson

Queenslanders deserve a senator who attends. Women deserve a system that protects them. Indigenous Australians deserve a Voice. Workers deserve penalty rates. Regional communities deserve climate action that protects them from fire and flood.

Instead, we get Ms Hanson, absent in the chamber, present for applause, loud for cameras, silent for the vulnerable. She does not speak truth to power. She speaks for it, exactly as John Howard taught her to.

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