The Two-Way Street To Taormina: Hanson’s Campaign Against Women

In mid-July, Senator Pauline Hanson was in Taormina, on the Sicilian coast, in a floor-length embroidered gown, at a Dolce & Gabbana show, beside her friend and benefactor Gina Rinehart.

A week later, on Wednesday 22 July, on Brisbane radio station 4BC, Hanson was asked to condemn men who commit violence against women. She called domestic violence “a scourge” – and then, in the same breath, “a two-way street.” Women who do not feel safe in their own homes, she added, “shouldn’t put up with it.” I want to take both of these facts seriously, in the order they actually occurred.

Steelmanning The Senator

It would be dishonest to pretend Hanson’s defenders have nothing to say, and it would be worse to pretend the empirical picture is as one-sided as press coverage sometimes implies. Large population surveys using standard conflict-measurement instruments do frequently find that women report using physical aggression against a partner at rates comparable to men. One representative study of young couples found near-identical rates of any physical victimisation – 29 per cent of women, 30 per cent of men – and no difference in the prevalence of any injury at all. Some research in this tradition also finds women somewhat more likely than men to be the one who first resorts to physical aggression in an argument. None of this is fringe: it sits in peer-reviewed family-violence journals, not in partisan advocacy, and a responsible senator is entitled to know it exists.

The family-court picture Hanson gestures toward is similarly more contested than either side of this argument likes to admit. A widely cited 2019 US study found family courts frequently credited fathers’ claims that mothers were “alienating” children even after a judicial finding that the father had committed abuse – a result advocates for abuse survivors have used to argue courts systematically disbelieve women. A later attempt to replicate that finding, using coders blind to the study’s hypotheses and pre-registered statistical tests, did not reproduce it: it found parents of either gender who were found – not merely accused – of alienating a child lost custody at similar rates, regardless of whether the accusing parent had also been found abusive. Two credentialled research teams asked closely related questions and reached different answers. That is not evidence of a settled “liars” problem, of the kind Hanson has previously asserted; it is evidence that the underlying research remains genuinely unresolved.

On false allegations specifically, the honest position is that no one has a clean number. Some family-court research puts deliberate false reporting by mothers below two per cent; other reviews, depending on whether “unsubstantiated” – meaning insufficient evidence either way – is treated as synonymous with “false,” produce figures many times higher. If Hanson’s “two-way street” comment meant only this – that violence is not exclusively male-perpetrated, that some custody disputes involve genuinely contested facts, and that the research base is thinner and more contested than public debate usually allows – it would be a defensible, if clumsily compressed, entry into a real and ongoing argument among people who study this for a living.

The Severity And Lethality Gap

That is the strongest version of her case, and it still does not survive contact with what the same research literature says about severity and death. The studies that find rough symmetry in the prevalence of “any” physical aggression consistently stop finding symmetry once the measure shifts from frequency to consequence. Researchers who have pressed on this point argue that apparent symmetry is partly an artefact of methodology – convenience samples that exclude clinical populations, designs that count an incident without weighting it by severity, and survey items that miss coercive control, sexual violence, or the use of weapons. Even within the more sympathetic studies, the pattern holds: women are considerably more likely than men to report being sexually victimised by a partner, more likely to report fear of that partner, and more likely to report severe injury, even in samples where the raw rate of “any” violence looks similar across sexes.

Where the data stop being contestable at all is at the point of death. Between 1989–90 and 2024–25, of 2,299 recorded intimate-partner homicide victims in Australia, 1,750 – just over three in four – were women, and more women than men have died this way in every single one of those thirty-six years. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s most recent figures put the current toll at one woman killed by a partner roughly every eleven days, against one man roughly every twenty-six. Separation – the very act Hanson told listeners women “shouldn’t put up with” not doing – is itself one of the most consistently identified risk factors for intimate partner homicide in the research. None of this erases the genuine prevalence data in the previous section. It does mean that “two-way street”, applied to the specific question of whether a frightened woman should simply leave, borrows the language of a real academic debate about frequency and applies it to a question about lethality that the same debate does not support. The two halves of the literature answer different questions, and Hanson’s framing collapses them into one.

That distinction between prevalence and lethality is not academic hair-splitting; it is the difference between a defensible position badly stated and the position Hanson has actually built a record on.

The Record

Hanson’s “two-way street” comment was not a one-off. In 2019, as deputy chair of a parliamentary inquiry into family law, she told the ABC that women were “nothing but liars” in some family court proceedings, and declined, when pressed, to offer evidence beyond her own son’s custody dispute – instead directing journalists to men’s rights advocacy groups. That is not a senator grappling honestly with a complex system; it is a senator building policy from personal grievance and calling it data.

The response to the July remarks was immediate and, notably, came from people with no political incentive to attack her. Australia’s Sex Discrimination and Children’s Commissioners, Anna Cody and Deb Tsorbaris, publicly rejected the “two-way street” framing and warned that it misrepresents the barriers victim-survivors face in leaving. Tarang Chawla, whose sister Nikita was murdered by her partner after she had already left him, said plainly that Hanson’s “just leave” logic ignores that his sister tried exactly that. Anglicare’s most recent research places the average cost of leaving an abusive relationship at over seven thousand dollars – a figure that has risen more than seventy per cent in a decade. “Shouldn’t put up with it” is not counsel; it is a senator mistaking a locked door for an open one.

This matters because Hanson does not speak from the backbench. She has used parliamentary privilege and committee chairmanships to advance this framing as policy, arguing that family courts should be “wound back” toward positions that favour accused parties. Advocates who work daily with coercive control describe the family court as the last arena in which an abuser can continue to exert power over a victim after separation. A senator with formal influence over that system, telling victims the door is open when the research says it costs seven thousand dollars to walk through it, is not offering a controversial opinion. She is offering bad information with the authority of the state behind it.

Why Taormina Is Not A Distraction

It would be easy – and cheap – to simply note the contrast between Dolce & Gabbana one week and “two-way street” the next, and leave it as an irony. I want to resist that, because the irony is not the point. The point is what the Sicily trip reveals about where Hanson’s political security actually comes from, and why the sequence – patronage first, careless rhetoric second – matters more than the sequence of a punchline.

One Nation’s electoral base is built, rhetorically, on the “battler” – the plain-spoken Australian supposedly failed by elites, institutions, and imported fashions of thought. That persona requires an audience willing to believe Hanson stands apart from the class she rails against. What the Taormina photographs show is not merely a wardrobe choice; they show whose company she keeps when the cameras are, she presumably assumed, elsewhere. Gina Rinehart is not an incidental travelling companion. She is a mining billionaire with a direct financial interest in the deregulatory, anti-institutional politics One Nation sells, and her patronage – financial and social – insulates Hanson from the normal electoral consequences of remarks like the ones she made a week later on 4BC. A senator secure enough in her donor base to be photographed in couture on the Amalfi coast is a senator who can afford, the following week, to tell abused women the door was open all along – and wear the backlash as confirmation that the elites were coming for her regardless.

This is the pattern I have written about before in relation to One Nation’s donor relationships: rhetoric aimed at “ordinary” Australians, security purchased from the extraordinarily wealthy. The Sicily trip and the domestic violence comments are not two stories. They are one story about who bears the cost of a senator’s freedom to speak carelessly, and who insulates her from ever having to answer for it.

A Third Data Point: The Office Of Fair Trading

On 29 July – the same week these events are being written up – Queensland’s Office of Fair Trading confirmed it has given One Nation’s Queensland division until 18 August to lodge audited financial statements for three consecutive financial years: 2022–23, 2023–24, and 2024–25. The division had lodged annual returns for those years, but without the audited statements the Associations Incorporation Act 1981 requires. I want to be precise about which regulator this is, because the distinction matters: this is not the Electoral Commission of Queensland, which governs party registration for elections, but the Office of Fair Trading, which governs incorporated associations’ internal financial accountability. Hanson is the Queensland division’s president and is personally responsible for meeting these requirements.

If the deadline passes unmet, the Office has said it may issue an infringement notice or begin a show-cause process toward cancelling the division’s legal status – a different and more serious consequence than a fine. The Act’s offence provisions attach statutory penalty units to failures of this kind, which are prosecuted summarily and are, technically, criminal matters, even though the conduct at issue is a paperwork failure rather than fraud or dishonesty. I raise that distinction because precision matters here: nothing reported so far amounts to a criminal charge against Hanson or the party, and I won’t claim otherwise. What is confirmed is three years of unaudited accounts, a hard deadline, and a regulator prepared to escalate. A One Nation spokesman told The Australian in June that the delay reflected an oversight amid high staff turnover – an explanation for missing one year’s paperwork, but a strained one for missing three.

The timing compounds the difficulty. The same week the Office of Fair Trading’s warning became public, Hanson updated her register of interests to confirm Gina Rinehart had funded her flights to London, Sicily, and Rome, and had gifted the Dolce & Gabbana show invitation, while insisting accommodation, meals, and daily expenses were paid personally. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said it was a matter for One Nation to explain; Nationals Leader Matt Canavan said, more pointedly, that he would have declined a benefactor’s holiday and asked the money go toward changing the government instead. Whatever one makes of the political point-scoring, Canavan’s formulation names the actual issue: the question is not whether a donor may fund a senator’s travel, but what it costs a party’s credibility when the same fortnight produces an unresolved compliance failure spanning three years of accounts.

This is why I have called the domestic violence remarks and the Sicily trip a matter of character rather than simply hypocrisy, and why the same word applies here. A senator can hold a defensible position on family law reform badly, and a party can fall behind on paperwork through genuine administrative failure. But the pattern across all three – careless rhetoric on a subject with life-and-death stakes, a benefactor’s largesse accepted then only partially disclosed, and three years of financial accounts unaudited under a president’s own name – describes a consistent relationship to accountability, not three unrelated events. Character, in the classical sense Marcus Aurelius meant it, is what a person does when the audit is due and no one is required to be watching.

A Closing Word

Marcus Aurelius wrote that a person’s worth is measured by what they give their attention to. A week before she minimised the fear of women in their own homes, Hanson’s attention – and her patron’s – was on Sicily. In the same fortnight, three years of her party’s financial accounts sat unaudited under her own name as its president. Between those facts sits every woman who has done the arithmetic on seven thousand dollars and stayed, because the door Hanson calls open is, for most of them, bolted from the outside by circumstance – and beside them sits every member and donor of an incorporated association entitled to know their books are kept honestly. That is the two-way street worth naming: not the one between victim and abuser, but the one between careless power and the people, institutions, and processes asked to absorb its cost.

Appendix – The Senator’S Sojourn
A patter song, sung with a fan fluttering ostentatiously

I am the plainest woman that this nation ever nurtured,
I speak for battlers, battlers all, in language quite unfractured,
But first, a little holiday, before I do my duty –
To Sicily, in Dolce’s gown, in couture-clad beauty!
I’ve never trusted foreign silks nor continental couture –
Except when Rinehart’s jet is fuelled and Taormina’s sure,
For principles are portable, and outrage travels light,
As long as there’s a photographer to catch the gown just right!

Oh, she’s gone from Taormina to a “two-way street”! (Taormina!)
From gowns beside the richest miner to a callous, cheap retreat!
Democracy’s a runway, and her patron paid the fee –
The Senator went first to Sicily, then spoke so carelessly!

A week back home, and look – she’s found her battler’s voice once more,
To tell the wounded woman that the violence has two sides, and more –
That the door was always open, though she’ll never say who paid
The premium that bought her leave to speak so unafraid.
(reprise – quieter, no mandolins this time)

Oh, she’s gone from Taormina to a “two-way street”!
The gown came first, then came the cruelty at her guest’s own feet –
For courage costs so little when a billionaire has bought
The room in which to say the thing that shouldn’t have been thought.

– – –

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, July 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010