Hanson at the National Press Club: The Necromancy of Fear

There is a particular kind of political speech that does not argue so much as conjure. It does not reason toward a conclusion; it summons an atmosphere, thick with threat and grievance, in which the conclusion arrives pre-packaged, already felt before it is spoken. Pauline Hanson’s address to the National Press Club on 17 June 2026 was such a speech. It was, in the precise sense of the word, necromantic – an act of raising the dead. The same fears she named in her 1996 maiden speech, the same spectres of cultural dissolution, demographic invasion, and civilisational betrayal, walked again through the room thirty years later, dressed in fresh statistics but animated by the same essential terror: that Australia as Hanson imagines it – white, monocultural, Christian, besieged – is slipping away.

That this speech came at a moment of genuine housing crisis, genuine energy unaffordability, and genuine institutional failure makes it more dangerous, not less. The necromancer’s art depends on real grief. Hanson did not invent the housing shortage. She did not manufacture the energy bills crushing pensioners and working families. She found real suffering and offered it an explanation that pointed away from the structural causes – decades of asset-class policy, deliberate wage suppression, privatised infrastructure, the bipartisan worship of capital – and toward the bodies of migrants, Muslims, First Nations people, and transgender Australians. This is the oldest trick in the politics of fear, and it works precisely because the suffering it exploits is not imaginary.

From a Blak and Black perspective – from the vantage point of those who have always been the designated threat to the civilisation Hanson claims to defend – this speech requires a response that goes beyond fact-checking. Facts matter, and we will deal with them. But the more fundamental task is to name what is actually happening: the construction of a political community defined by exclusion, in which belonging is granted only to those who reflect a particular image of Australia back to itself, and in which every social problem is made legible as a consequence of the presence of people who do not fit that image.

Housing: The Crisis That Capital Built

Let us begin with the housing crisis, which Hanson placed at the centre of her address. She is right that Australia faces an acute shortage. She is right that net overseas migration during the Albanese years ran at historically high levels – over 420,000 annually in the first three years of that government. She is right that rental vacancy rates in major cities have reached crisis levels, that social housing waitlists are unconscionably long, and that tens of thousands sleeping rough each night – amid hundreds of thousands more in housing stress, emergency accommodation, or homelessness services – is a national disgrace. On the facts of the crisis itself, there is no serious dispute.

The dispute is causal and therefore political. Hanson’s argument runs as follows: too many people arrived; not enough houses existed; therefore the people are the problem. But this analysis evades the prior question: why did housing supply fail so catastrophically to meet demand, including demand that predated the recent migration surge? The answer is not mysterious. For thirty years, successive federal and state governments – Labor and Liberal alike – designed housing policy to maximise the asset values of existing property owners. Negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts, the systematic underfunding of social and public housing, the privatisation of land and infrastructure: these are the structural conditions that produced the crisis. High migration accelerated a pressure that was already built into the system by deliberate political choices that benefited the wealthy and the asset-holding class.

Hanson’s proposed solution – slash immigration – would ease pressure at the margins while leaving the structural causes entirely intact. More precisely, it would ease pressure for existing property owners by reducing demand, which would slow or reverse house price growth, which is the last thing a political class whose primary constituency is asset holders wants to contemplate. The renter sleeping rough is not rescued by a smaller migration intake if the land sits idle in a developer’s portfolio, if public housing stock has been sold off and not replaced, if zoning laws in inner-ring suburbs protect the capital values of detached houses against medium-density development. Hanson knows this. Her actual constituency is not the renter sleeping rough; it is the working-class homeowner who is anxious about the culture around them and grateful for someone who names their anxiety without threatening their modest assets.

What would actually address the housing crisis? The policy toolkit is not obscure. It has been documented by housing economists, urban planners, and social policy researchers for two decades. Phase out negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount on investment properties, redirecting the fiscal dividend – currently running at over twenty billion dollars annually in foregone revenue – into a direct public and social housing construction program. Reinstate a federal government role in housing finance, modelled on the post-war Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement that built the social housing stock that was subsequently sold off. Reform land tax to shift the burden from improvements to land holdings, discouraging speculative land-banking. Release and rezone sufficient land in established urban areas to permit medium-density housing at scale, ending the system in which existing homeowners exercise effective veto power over the supply of housing near them.

On migration, calibrate intake not to a fixed ideological ceiling but to demonstrated infrastructure capacity – tying net migration numbers to verified dwelling completions and social service capacity in a rolling, transparent, independently audited framework. Even well-managed migration at scale creates genuine transitional pressure on supply, which is an argument for faster public building programs running in parallel, not for treating the arrival of people as the primary variable to be cut. This is not open borders; it is managed, evidenced migration policy that treats housing supply as a policy variable rather than a fixed constraint against which migration must be rationed. These measures do not require blaming anyone. They require taxing wealth, building houses, and planning cities. They are, for precisely that reason, absent from Hanson’s program and underdone in the programs of her opponents.

National Identity: Whose Monoculture?

On national identity, Hanson argues that Australia must be monocultural – not multiracial, she clarifies, as if this distinction is meaningful without examining who gets to define the single culture everyone must inhabit. She cites 2021 Census data showing that over half of Australian residents were born overseas or had a parent born overseas, and that nearly a quarter speak a language other than English at home, and she presents these facts as evidence of a problem. The assumption embedded in this presentation – that demographic diversity is inherently a threat to social cohesion – is not argued for; it is asserted as self-evident. It is the foundational assumption of every ethnonationalist politics: that a nation is a people defined by cultural and linguistic uniformity, and that diversity is disorder.

This is not to dismiss the finding, consistent across social trust research in several countries, that rapid demographic change in specific localities can create transitional strain on community cohesion – a real phenomenon that deserves honest policy attention in the form of settlement support, language services, and investment in shared civic infrastructure. What it cannot justify is the ethnonationalist conclusion Hanson draws from it: that the solution is cultural uniformity enforced from above, and that the communities arriving are the problem rather than the under-resourced services failing to support integration on both sides.

For Wiradjuri people, and for First Nations peoples across this continent, this argument has a particular and brutal irony. The monoculture Hanson wishes to preserve was itself installed by an act of invasion and maintained by a century of policies explicitly designed to destroy Indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples. The Australia Hanson wishes to protect from cultural dissolution is the product of the most thoroughgoing cultural dissolution this continent has ever seen – the suppression of over 250 language groups, the removal of children from families, the criminalisation of ceremony, the dispossession of land. To invoke the threat of cultural loss in this context, without acknowledging this history, is not an oversight. It is a choice. It tells us whose cultural continuity counts as precious and whose counts as a problem to be managed.

Indigenous Affairs: Equality As Erasure

Hanson’s section on Indigenous affairs confirms this. She proposes abolishing the dedicated department for Aboriginal Australians and treating First Nations people “like everyone else.” She questions the accountability and outcomes of over thirty billion dollars in annual Indigenous expenditure. Both moves are characteristic of a politics that refuses to grapple with structural disadvantage while presenting its refusal as a form of equality. “Treating everyone the same” in a society built on and continuing to reproduce racial hierarchy is not equality; it is the abandonment of any obligation to address the consequences of that hierarchy. It is the logic that says: we have finished our crime; we need not repair it; we will simply pretend it did not occur.

The “thirty billion dollars” figure, deployed with theatrical scepticism, deserves particular scrutiny. It aggregates all federal spending that touches Indigenous Australians, including mainstream health, education, and welfare spending that flows to Indigenous people as Australian residents – spending that would exist regardless of any specific Indigenous policy. The figure is designed to produce outrage, not understanding. The actual expenditure on Indigenous-specific programs is substantially lower, and the outcomes gap it partially addresses – in health, incarceration, child removal, life expectancy – is itself the product of ongoing dispossession and institutional racism, not of excessive generosity. The implication that Indigenous Australians are the recipients of some extraordinary and undeserved largesse inverts the historical and material reality: this country was built on the theft of Indigenous land and labour, and the reparative obligations that flow from that theft have never been met.

What would actually close the gap – a phrase that has become so encrusted with bureaucratic failure that it barely means anything anymore – requires honesty about causes rather than displacement of blame. It means land rights: not symbolic acknowledgement but the return of sufficient country to support genuine economic and cultural autonomy in communities where connection to country remains the foundation of wellbeing. The evidence from the Northern Territory, from remote Western Australia, and from communities across Queensland is consistent: where Indigenous communities hold secure, legally recognised rights over their land and resources, economic participation and health outcomes improve. Where those rights are insecure or absent, and where communities are administered by external agencies under compliance regimes, outcomes do not.

It means self-determined community governance – resourcing and recognising community-controlled organisations in health, housing, education, and justice, rather than cycling Indigenous program delivery through mainstream agencies that do not have the trust, the cultural competence, or the accountability to communities that self-determination requires. It means ending the overcriminalisation of Indigenous Australians – addressing the pipeline from school exclusion to youth detention to adult imprisonment that reproduces incarceration across generations, by investing in community-based diversion, by reforming police powers that criminalise poverty, and by treating the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in custody as the human rights emergency it is, not a law-and-order talking point. And it means an honest treaty process: negotiated agreements between the Australian state and First Nations peoples that establish the legal foundation for the reparative relationship this country has avoided since 1788. None of this is served by abolishing a department and redirecting the funding to consolidated revenue. That is not equality. It is abandonment dressed in the language of fairness.

Energy: Denial As Political Economy

On energy, Hanson describes climate change as a hoax and renewables as a form of ideological bribery destroying farmland and reliable power. One Nation’s solution – nuclear energy, maintained coal and gas, abolition of renewable subsidies – is presented as common sense against elite irrationality. The climate science is not a matter of political contestation among people who take evidence seriously, and we will not pretend otherwise here. What is worth noting is the political function of climate denial in Hanson’s broader project. The framing of net-zero policy as an elite imposition on ordinary Australians – driving up energy bills so that inner-city progressives can feel virtuous – serves the same function as the framing of migration as the cause of the housing crisis. It identifies a real grievance (energy unaffordability), attaches it to a cultural villain (the green-left establishment), and deflects attention from the structural causes: the privatisation of energy infrastructure, the monopolistic pricing behaviour of energy corporations, the decades-long failure to plan a coherent transition. The fossil fuel industry’s interests are served; the pensioner’s bill is weaponised; the political community of the aggrieved is strengthened.

The answer to energy unaffordability is not a return to coal, which is no longer commercially competitive and whose construction pipeline has collapsed globally, nor is it nuclear, which in the Australian context represents at minimum a fifteen-year construction timeline at costs that have blown out in every comparable jurisdiction that has attempted it. The answer is what the evidence from comparable transitions in Germany, Denmark, and parts of the United States already demonstrates: a publicly anchored energy transition in which the state takes a direct role in ownership and price-setting, rather than leaving a renewable buildout to the same private market structures that produced the privatised coal and gas oligopoly we are now trying to escape.

Specifically: public ownership or co-ownership of transmission infrastructure, so that the natural monopoly of the grid is not extracted for private profit; community energy schemes that allow households and regional communities to capture the benefits of local renewable generation rather than selling cheap and buying expensive from corporate intermediaries; direct energy bill relief targeted at low-income households and pensioners during the transition, funded by windfall profit levies on energy corporations that have profited from the price spikes of the last four years; and an accelerated but realistically sequenced closure of coal generation tied to just transition packages for workers and coal communities that are genuine rather than performative. None of this requires denying climate science. All of it requires treating energy as essential public infrastructure rather than a market commodity. Hanson’s program serves the fossil fuel industry; it does not serve the pensioner whose bill she invokes.

Media, Accountability and the Delegitimised Press

Hanson’s media section – her call to abolish SBS, reform the ABC, and restrict journalist access to her events – completes the architecture of her political project. Every authoritarian populism requires a captured or discredited press. The function of denouncing media bias is not primarily to correct bias; it is to pre-emptively delegitimise critical coverage and to position the leader as the sole authentic communicator with the people, unmediated by institutional gatekeepers. Hanson has practised this for thirty years. It works. Her supporters do not need the ABC or The Guardian to confirm what they already feel. They need a voice that speaks their frustration back to them with confidence, and Hanson has always provided that.

The GetUp! activists who interrupted proceedings with a banner noting her votes against wage increases alongside parliamentary pay rises were quickly removed. The exchange – the banner, the removal, Hanson’s continued address – is a tableau of the entire politics: the specific material interests (wages, pay) subordinated to the emotional register (grievance, identity, us versus them). One Nation has never been a party of economic redistribution. It has been a party of cultural grievance that wears the clothes of working-class advocacy. Its supporters are often genuinely working class. Its policies reliably serve capital.

The Pharaoh’s Logic

What should concern us most about Hanson’s 2026 address is not its novelty – there is none – but its resonance. That One Nation is polling at levels that rival the major parties is not a commentary on the exotic appeal of Pauline Hanson. It is a commentary on three decades of bipartisan policy failure: the failure to maintain affordable housing, the failure to hold wages in proportion to productivity and profit, the failure to deliver reliable and affordable energy, the failure to build an institutional culture that ordinary people trust. Into that vacuum of legitimate political representation, Hanson offers belonging: a community of those who feel left behind, told that they are not left behind by the system but displaced by outsiders.

From where Blak and Black stands – on Wiradjuri country, with thirty years of our own documentation of institutional racism, police violence, deaths in custody, and the slow grinding indifference of the Australian state to Indigenous life – Hanson’s address is not simply wrong. It is a continuation of a political tradition that has always required our disposability. The monoculture she defends was built on our dispossession. The national identity she protects was constructed through our erasure. The social cohesion she mourns never included us. We are not incidental to this story. We are the ground on which it is written.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition, which informs our work at Blak and Black, has a name for the politics Hanson represents: it is the politics of Pharaoh – not the personal Pharaoh of the Exodus narrative, but the institutional Pharaoh, the system of organised forgetting and organised cruelty that presents itself as natural order. The prophets were not polite about this. They named it. They called it injustice. They said it would not stand. We do not claim prophetic authority, but we claim the obligation the tradition places on those who witness: to speak clearly about what is happening, to refuse the comfort of euphemism, and to insist that a politics built on the fear of the other is not a politics capable of delivering justice to anyone.

The question for those of us committed to a different politics is whether we can build something more compelling than grievance: a politics of genuine solidarity across the many communities Hanson’s project sets against each other, grounded in the concrete work of building houses, returning land, decarbonising energy, and taxing wealth – and in the truth that the system’s failure is not the fault of the migrant, the Muslim, the First Nations elder, or the transgender child, but of the structural arrangements that concentrate wealth, commodify housing, privatise essential services, and then, when the resulting distress becomes politically volatile, point at the most vulnerable and say: there is your enemy.

We have been told we are the enemy for two hundred and thirty-eight years. We are still here.

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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