‘Please explain’ Pauline Hanson and One Nation’s longevity

Alongside Labor’s thumping victory, the 2025 election delivered a surprise win to One Nation, which doubled its Senate seats and increased its share of the national vote to 6.2%. Senator Pauline Hanson cited Coalition policy fence-sitting for her party’s resurgence. But contributing factors were also the escalation of right-wing populism globally, Hanson’s effective use of alternative media, and her enduring brand as an anti-establishment politician who — love or hate her — “tells it like it is”.

Social media algorithms had yet to fracture democratic processes in 2016 when Hanson, newly elected to the Senate after 18 years in the political wilderness, posed with champagne outside parliament to toast fellow outsider Donald Trump’s shock US presidential win. Pundits who’d dismissed Hanson as an out-of-touch bigot and ignored her seventh federal “Fed Up” campaign derided her as the Australian Trump. She bridled, insisting Trump “is like me”.

Hanson had a point. Since 1997, One Nation has stirred up racist and nationalist divisions to attract rural and working-class voters angered by the impact of globalisation, neoliberalism and “political correctness” on traditional jobs and values. As the “people’s politician”, Hanson was fighting the major parties on behalf of her underdog battlers long before Trump left reality TV to drain the Washington swamp.

Like Trump, Hanson also consistently weaponises her rejection by the status quo to attract more followers. Pilloried as a racist demagogue by the legacy media, she uses online platforms to reach her people directly.

In 1998, One Nation was the first Australian party to own a website, building a digital army of Hanson loyalists that is still active today. Hanson’s playful, impassioned YouTube interactions with Far North Queensland’s “forgotten people” were a key tool of One Nation’s 2016 campaign.

For the 2025 election, the party turbocharged its politics-as-entertainment strategy with South Park-style animations, whose satirical slap downs of bird-killing wind turbines, hysterical nonbinary lefties and evil Greens edgelords racked up 100,000-485,000 views per clip — with one penalised by the AEC for promoting false election claims.

One Nation’s “politainment” is anathema to the post-World War II, fact-based, expertise-led journalistic project. But in a commercialised 24/7 info-economy, where more voters access media through social than professional news channels, it’s here to stay.

Trump won the 2016 presidency in the first “social media election”, where people voted based on feelings rather than facts. Unlike his spin-doctored opponents, the Apprentice star was refreshingly unfiltered, trusted by viewers because — like the proverbial drunk uncle at the wedding — they recognised his faults. Hanson’s similarly out-of-the-box 2016 victory and continuing political cut-through have generated the grudging adage that there’s a closet Hanson in every family.

In the decade since Trump and Hanson gate-crashed the wedding, One Nation and MAGA’s vitriolic brand of left-baiting hate-speak has become normalised. The Coalition preferenced One Nation across the board in 2025 with minimal pushback. With no legal sanctions against untruthful political advertising in most Australian states, fake news, astroturfing and video falsehoods flourished on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, spreading across social media in real time.

One Nation’s once subversive digital communication tactics may now be mainstream, but has the party changed? Hanson claims One Nation is not extreme right but “centrist”. As global political discourses swing hard right, this seems almost plausible. One Nation’s 2025 policies display the same unorthodox mix of ultra-conservative and old-school Labor values that have defined Hanson since her incendiary, anti-immigration “swamped by Asians” maiden speech in 1996.

One Nation supports increased Medicare rebates, medical cannabis, multinational taxes, foreign land ownership bans and purportedly sustainable water, forestry and farming practices. It is also aggressively anti-abortion, pro-mining, anti-climate science and — in a move straight from Trump’s Project 2025 — intent on cutting government health, Indigenous and environment programs to the tune of $90 billion. The party wants Australia out of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord, labelling C02 targets “economic suicide”.

In Australia’s “post-major party” new normal, it’s unsurprising that One Nation’s policy smorgasbord, coupled with Hanson’s brand longevity and social media outreach, attracted disaffected Labor and LNP voters reluctant to back the teals, Greens, or Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots. But the destabilisation of democracy globally is also a factor. As wealth inequality rises under authoritarian leaders, voters are increasingly moving to the fringes. Civic distrust enables shadowy “world order” conspiracies to thrive: in the alt-right version, we’re being controlled by a secret global state; on the left, amoral corporations are to blame.

When filming Hanson’s 2016 election campaign, I was struck by how often conservatives and progressives agreed about Australia’s problems, but disagreed about solutions. Some viewers cancelled my film — Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! —because they found Hanson “triggering”. But censoring others from the safety of our digital silos solves nothing. If Australians are to meet the challenges of our complex, multicultural democracy, we must reject the reductive algorithms of social media and engage in nuanced, respectful, in-person debates.