Red Herring: Hanson, Corporate Capture and the Limits of Performed Insurgency

I. The Red Herring and the Real Fish

A red herring, in the oldest sense of the phrase, is a smoked fish dragged across a trail to mislead the hounds – to pull them off the scent of the real quarry. The metaphor is useful here, but only partly. Because some of what Pauline Hanson has put on the table over thirty years of political life is not herring at all. Some of it is real. Mass low-skilled migration does exert downward pressure on wages and housing in certain sectors. The pace of cultural change in outer suburbs has been rapid, disruptive, and largely managed without adequate democratic conversation. The major parties did assume for decades that the working-class vote was Labor’s by right, and Hanson’s emergence in 1996 was, among other things, a genuine rebuke of that complacency. These are not fabrications. They are real grievances, given form and voice by a politician with considerable skill.

The red herring is not that Hanson identified real problems. The red herring is what she does with them. Having named genuine economic and cultural anxieties, she redirects them – away from the structural arrangements of capital that produce casualised work, stagnant wages, and housing unaffordability, and toward a series of cultural enemies whose culpability is far more ambiguous. The fish is real. The trail it is dragged across is false.

This essay is a critique of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, but it is written in the knowledge that simple critiques are rarely honest ones. It concedes what must be conceded. It argues against what must be argued against. And it insists that a genuine alternative to Australia’s political duopoly – an alternative this country badly needs – will not be found in a movement whose economic positions, when tested against the Senate voting record, consistently serve the interests of capital over labour, even as its cultural positions exploit the anxieties of those who have been failed by both.

This essay is also not written from a position of comfort about the alternatives. I have first-hand knowledge of corruption within the Australian Labor Party – corruption involving the ACT Government and the Australian Federal Police, directed against an Indigenous man who challenged institutional power through legitimate means. I was acquitted on all charges. The story is on the record. I do not trust the Liberal Party or the Coalition. I would not vote for either. But the answer to a corrupted duopoly is not a fraudulent alternative. The answer requires something harder.

II. The Mythology and What Sustains It

Pauline Hanson has been in public life for nearly thirty years. She was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 as a Liberal candidate, disendorsed for racist comments about Aboriginal Australians and Asian immigration, then re-elected as an independent, then returned to the Senate as One Nation’s leader in 2016 after a twenty-year absence. In that time she has been convicted of electoral fraud – later overturned – imprisoned, released, and rehabilitated by a media ecosystem that finds her reliably useful.

The mythology she has constructed is one of the persecuted outsider. She claims to speak for the ordinary Australian against distant elites. She cultivates the effect of the fish-and-chip shop owner: plain-spoken, suspicious of experts, resentful of the comfortable. And she has weaponised that affect with considerable political skill. Her supporters – many of them genuinely aggrieved, many of them right to be – believe she is on their side because she sounds like someone who would be.

The mythology has a foundation. One Nation’s core constituencies – regional Queensland, the outer suburbs of Perth and Brisbane, blue-collar workers in mining communities – have experienced real disruption. The rapid expansion of labour hire models in mining, the casualisation of previously stable industries, the housing affordability crisis, the sense that established institutions have stopped listening: these are not confected grievances. They are the consequences of decades of bipartisan economic policy that prioritised flexibility and capital returns over security and wages growth.

Hanson gave those grievances a voice. That is not nothing. The question is what she did with them once she had the platform.

III. Ideological Consistency and Its Limits

Before examining the Senate voting record, it is necessary to do something the first draft of this essay failed to do: take One Nation’s stated industrial relations philosophy seriously. Their official position, consistent across the ParlInfo archive, has been this: protect minimum wages and Australian workers from competition with low-cost imported labour; oppose compulsory unionism, which they regard as coercive; and criticise unfair dismissal laws on the grounds that they perversely encourage casualisation by making employers afraid to hire permanently. Within this framework, voting against Labor’s union-friendly industrial relations (IR) bills is not inconsistency. It is the expression of a small-government, anti-collectivist, ‘Australians first’ worldview that has been coherent – if contested – for three decades.

This matters because the charge of betrayal requires evidence of deviation from stated principle, not merely disagreement with those principles. Many One Nation voters in the Bowen Basin or the Pilbara are not confused about this. They do not see the Same Job Same Pay provisions as straightforwardly in their interest. Some labour hire workers on mine sites value the flexibility of their arrangements, fear union power more than they fear the pay differential, and see large union-backed IR reforms as instruments of a labour movement that does not represent their culture or their values. You can argue – and I will – that this reading of their interests is wrong in important respects. But you cannot call it false consciousness imposed by a cynical politician without doing the very thing the essay accuses the duopoly of doing: assuming you know what is good for people better than they do.

So the critique must be more precise. It is not that One Nation’s IR positions are inconsistent with their worldview. It is that their worldview, when tested against specific votes on specific bills, produces outcomes that serve the interests of major capital – mining companies, labour hire firms, large employers – more reliably than they serve the interests of the workers those companies employ. And there are votes in the record where that tension is not merely inferential. It is explicit.

IV. The Voting Record: Where the Worldview Meets the Ledger

The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill 2024 sought, among other things, to make it easier for casual employees to convert to permanent status, to extend rights to gig economy workers denied basic protections under the fiction of independent contracting, and to strengthen union right-of-entry laws to assist in detecting wage theft. One Nation voted against all of these provisions. Malcolm Roberts described the Same Job Same Pay provisions – which require that labour hire workers receive equivalent pay to direct employees doing identical work – as a sham.

The small-government reading of this position is coherent: unions are not the answer; flexibility serves workers as well as employers; the labour hire model delivers jobs to regional communities. One can hold that view. But consider what Same Job Same Pay actually addresses: a situation where two workers do identical work on the same mine site, one employed directly and one through a labour hire company, and one is paid twenty to thirty per cent less. The pay differential does not exist because the labour hire worker values flexibility. It exists because the labour hire structure allows the mining company to pay less. Opposing Same Job Same Pay in the name of worker freedom is to mistake the instrument of suppression for the instrument of liberation.

On making industrial manslaughter a criminal offence – a provision with direct relevance to workers killed on construction sites and in mines – One Nation voted no. The small-government theory does not obviously apply here: criminalising the killing of workers through gross employer negligence is not compulsory unionism; it is basic accountability. One Nation voted against it.

On expanding safety agency functions dealing with asbestos and silica dust – with stonemasons in their thirties and forties dying of silicosis from cutting engineered stone benchtops – One Nation voted against strengthening the regulatory response. Again: the anti-union logic does not obviously reach occupational health. This is not about collective bargaining. It is about whether the state should hold employers to account for slowly killing their workers. One Nation’s answer was no.

The most clarifying single vote, however, is this: in a tied Senate division on wage theft provisions – specifically, whether to include tougher criminal penalties for employers who deliberately underpay workers – One Nation voted with the Coalition to remove the stronger criminal penalties from the bill. Wage theft is not an abstract issue. It costs Australian workers billions of dollars a year. It is systematic, frequently deliberate, and disproportionately targets the most vulnerable: young people, migrants, workers in hospitality and retail. It is, in other words, theft from the people One Nation claims to represent.

One Nation had previously made public statements supporting action on wage theft. Then, in the tied division where their vote was decisive, they sided with the employers. This is not ideological consistency. This is the vote where the gap between the rhetoric and the ledger becomes visible. And it is the vote that most clearly supports the argument not of general ideological disagreement, but of something more structural: that when One Nation’s positions serve their major financial backers, they hold them; when those positions cost something, they give way.

In 2022, they voted against banning pay secrecy clauses – contractual provisions that prevent workers from discussing their wages with colleagues, used to suppress pay and entrench gender pay gaps. In 2020, they voted against disallowing regulations that allowed employers to force workers to vote on permanent cuts to pay and conditions with as little as twenty-four hours’ notice. These votes are harder to square with any version of the ‘Australians first’ philosophy. They are easier to square with the interests of large employers.

V. Gina Rinehart and the Architecture of Alignment

Corporate capture does not require a signed agreement. It requires alignment: a politician whose substantive positions – as revealed by their actual votes, not their press releases – consistently favour the interests of their major backers. On that definition, the relationship between Pauline Hanson and Gina Rinehart deserves examination.

Rinehart, executive chairman of Hancock Prospecting and Australia’s wealthiest individual, has appeared publicly alongside Hanson, promoted her politics on social media, and aligned herself openly with One Nation’s anti-renewable energy and anti-IR-reform agenda. This is not coincidental patronage. Rinehart has invested for decades in the political and intellectual infrastructure of climate denial and regulatory minimalism. Her interests in the industrial relations space are transparent: low wages, minimal union presence, maximum flexibility in workforce composition, and a regulatory environment that treats labour as a cost to be minimised. The labour hire model that One Nation’s votes help to protect is central to how large mining operations structure their workforces.

It is also necessary here to apply the essay’s own standard of fairness. The Greens receive funding from environmental NGOs. Independents receive substantial support from climate-aligned donor networks. Labor receives union funding that shapes its IR agenda. All minor parties operate within structures of financial patronage that influence their positions. The critique of Hanson is not that she uniquely has backers. It is that her backers are inconsistent with the constituency she claims to represent. A mining magnate’s financial alignment with a politician who claims to speak for the miner – not the mine owner – is a specific contradiction that deserves specific scrutiny. When One Nation’s decisive Senate votes consistently serve Rinehart’s interests on wages, labour hire, and industrial regulation, the alignment is the argument.

VI. The Scarf, the Burqa, and the Politics of Costume

On 17 August 2017, Pauline Hanson entered the Australian Senate chamber wearing a full-face burqa. It was a stunt: a performance designed to shock, to generate media coverage, and to signal her opposition to what she regards as the incompatibility of Islam with Australian values. Attorney-General George Brandis’s response – measured, dignified, and unusually direct – condemned the stunt as appalling. The nation largely agreed that it was a calculated act of denigration directed at Muslim Australians.

Years later, Hanson entered the Senate wearing an Israeli flag scarf. The contrast is instructive not because the two items of clothing are equivalent in meaning, but because the logic of their deployment is identical: costuming as politics, the Senate chamber as theatre, the body as a billboard for factional allegiance. The burqa was a signal to her base that she was willing to demean Muslim Australians publicly and without apology. The Israeli scarf was a signal to a different audience – the pro-Israel political networks that have become significant sources of funding and organisational support within the Australian right – that she was willing to make her allegiance visible.

Hanson’s earlier political history included episodes that drew accusations of antisemitism, whether through association with conspiracy-adjacent rhetoric or through the company she kept in One Nation’s early years. The shift to visible, performative pro-Israel alignment represents a political repositioning that tracks the broader realignment of parts of the Australian right around pro-Israel politics as a marker of acceptable conservative credentials. Christian evangelical networks and right-wing Jewish political organisations have become significant sources of support for parties willing to demonstrate that alignment publicly.

The point is not that support for Israel is inherently problematic or that wearing a flag scarf is equivalent to a financial transaction. The point is that the scarf, like the burqa before it, is a performance of alignment. It says: I am with you. It is the same gesture Hanson makes toward mining capital when she votes against Same Job Same Pay, and the same gesture she makes toward her working-class base when she rails against immigration on Sky News. She is a politician who has mastered the grammar of signalling, and who has learned to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously – provided those audiences never compare notes.

The Israeli lobby capture, like the Rinehart alignment, is not primarily about ideology. One Nation does not have a coherent foreign policy. It has a series of positions adopted because they serve the interests of those whose support Hanson needs. This is the client mode of politics: not principle, but performance calibrated to the donor and the base.

VII. The Safety Valve Function

Australia’s political duopoly has produced, over several decades, a convergence of economic policy that has left large parts of the working class without effective representation. Both major parties have embraced the logic of economic liberalism: privatisation, deregulation, labour market flexibility, and wages growth managed as an instrument of macroeconomic policy rather than a matter of social justice. The differences between them are real but marginal. The interests they serve overlap substantially.

This convergence creates a genuine political vacuum. There are millions of Australians – particularly in outer suburbs and in regional Queensland and Western Australia – who have no effective voice in the system. They have legitimate grievances. They are right to distrust both major parties. And they need somewhere to put their anger.

What Hanson provides is not a structural alternative. It is a directional redirect. The anger that might produce demands for Same Job Same Pay, for stronger wage theft penalties, for casualisation reform – that anger is channelled instead toward immigration levels, toward ‘woke’ institutions, toward cultural enemies whose relationship to the economic precarity is ambiguous at best. This is the safety valve function: bleeding off the pressure that might otherwise produce structural demands, ensuring that working-class anger does not threaten the fundamental arrangements of political economy.

But the safety valve argument needs to be stated carefully, because the first draft of this essay overstated it. Hanson is not purely a manufactured release mechanism. She genuinely disrupted the duopoly’s assumption that the working-class vote was Labor’s by birthright. She identified real anxieties that the major parties had systematically ignored. Her cultural insurgency – whatever one thinks of its content – was a real disruption, not merely a fake one. The duopoly was genuinely discomfited by her emergence in 1996, and the political system has never quite recovered its previous configuration.

The problem is that the cultural insurgency is real while the economic insurgency is largely illusory. Hanson has changed the terms of debate on immigration and multiculturalism – not always for the better, but genuinely. She has changed almost nothing about the underlying economic arrangements that produce the precarity her supporters experience. And her Senate voting record suggests that on the occasions when she had the power to change those arrangements – when her vote was decisive on wage theft penalties, on casual conversion, on industrial manslaughter – she used that power in the interests of capital rather than labour.

VIII. The Class Lens and Its Limits

An honest essay must acknowledge what the first draft did not: the argument made here operates from a particular analytical perspective. The claim that economic interests are more fundamental than cultural ones, that corporate capture is a more important explanatory variable than genuine cultural conservatism, that union-backed IR reform is more reliably in workers’ interests than small-government flexibility – these are contested propositions, not self-evident truths.

Many One Nation voters are not confused about the economics. They understand that Same Job Same Pay might cost some labour hire jobs if the pay differential narrows and mine operators restructure their workforce. They prefer that risk to the risk of what they experience as union capture of workplace relations. They are not wrong to note that unions have their own institutional interests, that compulsory unionism can feel coercive, and that the relationship between union power and worker wellbeing is not as simple as Labor’s narrative suggests.

Where I part from this worldview is not on the diagnosis of union imperfection but on the prescription. The alternative to flawed unions is not unorganised labour at the mercy of large employers. The evidence from labour markets across the developed world is fairly consistent: where unions are weak, wages are more easily suppressed, casualisation expands, and the labour share of national income falls. The small-government IR framework has been tried in Australia since the 1980s. What it produced, in combination with labour hire expansion and casual employment growth, is the precarity that One Nation’s voters are angry about. The cure being offered is the disease.

But I acknowledge that this argument must be made, not assumed. And I acknowledge that the class lens, however useful, does not explain everything. Mass immigration at the volumes Australia has experienced does affect housing costs and wage competition in some sectors. Rapid cultural change without adequate democratic deliberation produces legitimate anxiety. These are not mere distractions from economic reality. They are part of economic and social reality. A politics that dismisses them as false consciousness will continue to lose the people it claims to represent.

IX. On the Red Hair

There is something almost allegorical about Pauline Hanson’s famously dyed red hair. It is not her natural colour. It is a choice, a construction, a cultivated marker of distinctiveness in a landscape of grey suits and careful language. It signals difference. It says: I am not like them.

But the red hair, like the burqa stunt, like the Israeli scarf, is a performance. And the performance conceals something more important than it reveals. What it conceals is a political career that has built its brand on working-class grievance while producing, on the specific votes where it mattered most, outcomes that serve the interests of capital over labour. That has presented itself as the voice of the battler while voting to leave wage thieves with reduced criminal exposure. That has cultivated the mythology of the outsider while aligning itself with Australia’s wealthiest individual.

The red hair is a performance of authenticity. The Israeli scarf is a performance of allegiance. The burqa was a performance of contempt. The voting record is where the performances end and the consequences begin.

To be fair once more: the performances have also done real things. The cultural disruption is real. The breaking of the duopoly’s complacency about its working-class base is real. Hanson is not nothing. She is something – just not what she claims to be, and not what her voters most need her to be.

X. What Comes After: The Harder Question

If Australia’s duopoly is to be genuinely broken – and it must be, because the interests it serves are incompatible with a just and functional democracy – the instrument will not be a political franchise built on racial resentment and corporate alignment. But it will also not emerge automatically from structural reforms whose benefits are invisible to the people most in need of them.

Electoral reform – genuine proportional representation – would allow diverse political voices into the parliament without the structural advantages the majors have entrenched. Public funding of elections and strict limits on private political donations would dismantle the architecture of corporate capture rather than merely shift it between parties. These are necessary reforms. But they are not sufficient, and the essay’s first draft was dishonest in implying they were.

The harder question is this: if a significant portion of One Nation’s base prefers cultural signalling to union power, prefers immigration restriction to wage theft enforcement, prefers the mythology of the mining boom to the reality of labour hire margins – what does structural reform do about that? The answer is: structural reform changes the incentive architecture, but it cannot by itself change the preferences that have been formed by thirty years of bipartisan neglect, cultural disruption, and the absence of institutions that give working people genuine power over their economic lives.

That means the real work is slower and less glamorous than electoral reform. It means rebuilding the institutions – unions, community organisations, local democratic structures – through which working people develop collective analysis of their interests rather than individual resentment. It means First Nations sovereignty: not symbolic gestures but genuine treaty, genuine land rights, genuine control. It means a political culture willing to engage with cultural anxieties rather than dismiss them, while refusing to let those anxieties be weaponised in the service of capital.

None of this is Pauline Hanson’s project. Her project – as the voting record demonstrates, as the Rinehart relationship demonstrates, as the scarf and the burqa and the dyed hair demonstrate – is the perpetuation of a performance. And the performance’s function, whatever its performer’s intentions, is to ensure that the anger of the people who have been left behind does not threaten the arrangements that left them behind.

The red herring works because the hunger is genuine. The fish are real enough to follow. It is only when you arrive at the end of the trail that you find there is nothing there.

– – –

Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, June 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010