Words That Arm: Why Pauline Hanson’s Racism Matters

I. A Screenshot, and the Crowd Behind It

Yesterday I posted, on both X and Bluesky, a report of Pauline Hanson describing Indigenous Australians as “the most primitive race on Earth.” I added no commentary. None seemed necessary. The senator’s own words carry their own weight, and I have learned, across a quarter of a century of doing this kind of work, that the most damning material is usually the material itself, presented without adornment.

Within hours, a reply appeared beneath the post on X: “What is the IQ of Australian Aboriginals?” Underneath it sat a screenshot – evidently lifted from an AI chatbot – reciting a figure of 62, sourced to Richard Lynn’s compilations of “psychometric studies,” measured against a “European/White mean of 100.” The commenter had not, I am fairly confident, gone looking for context. Ask any general-purpose AI model the question behind that screenshot and it will, in my experience, heavily qualify the answer: it will explain that these figures come from a body of work that has been comprehensively discredited by mainstream psychometricians for its sampling bias, its cultural loading, its conflation of test unfamiliarity with cognitive deficit, and its author’s documented eugenicist commitments. The commenter did not want the qualification. He wanted the number. He took the fragment that served the argument he had already decided to make, and he pushed it, stripped of everything that would have complicated it.

A crowd gathered beneath it. Other accounts, plainly sympathetic to the same view, added their endorsements. I posted a considered response – sourced, among other places, to reporting in The Guardian – and what it drew back was not counter-argument but ad hominem: attacks on me, not engagement with the material.

None of this, on its own, is remarkable. Anyone who has spent time in the reply columns of Australian political Twitter has seen this exact sequence play out a hundred times: a public figure says something contemptuous of Indigenous Australians, and within hours a small ecosystem of amateur race-scientists and their applauding chorus assembles beneath it, each fortifying the other’s confidence that what they are saying is not bigotry but simply an unfashionable truth. What makes it worth 4,000 words is not the exchange itself. It is the question the exchange forces: does it matter that the words at the top of that chain came from a senator? Or is Pauline Hanson’s contribution to that ecosystem simply one more voice among many, no more consequential than the anonymous accounts beneath her?

I want to answer that question in two ways. The first is theoretical – an account of how public speech from people with institutional standing licenses private speech that would otherwise carry social cost. The second is not theoretical at all. It is a documented case, drawn from my own family’s history, in which a public servant explicitly and repeatedly invoked Pauline Hanson’s rhetoric as his justification for a racist campaign that destroyed a man’s career and has taken more than twenty years to even begin to be reckoned with. The theory explains why it should matter. The case shows that it does.

II. The Mechanics of Permission

Social psychologists who study prejudice have long distinguished between what people privately believe and what they are willing to say aloud. Christian Crandall and Amy Eshleman’s justification-suppression model, one of the more durable frameworks in this literature, describes prejudice as something most people hold in a kind of permanent tension: an underlying attitude, and a set of social norms that suppress its outward expression because expressing it carries reputational cost. The model’s central insight is that this suppression is not stable. People are constantly searching, consciously or not, for justifications that would let them express what they already feel without paying that cost – and public figures who model contemptuous speech toward a group function, for the people already primed to think that way, as exactly such a justification.

This is not a claim that Pauline Hanson’s words cause racism to exist where it did not exist before. Nobody serious argues that. The claim is narrower and, I think, harder to dispute: her words move the boundary of what can be said in public without cost, and everyone standing near that boundary – including people who would otherwise have kept their views to themselves, or softened them, or at least felt obliged to dress them in euphemism – recalibrates accordingly. A senator with a national platform who describes Indigenous Australians as “the most primitive race on Earth” is not merely expressing a view. She is issuing a permission slip, and the size of her audience determines how many people redeem it.

There is a second mechanism at work, related but distinct: what researchers call normative influence. People do not simply calculate the personal cost of expressing a view; they read the room, and take the apparent views of high-status others as evidence about what the room’s actual norms are. A long-serving senator saying something on the floor of the parliament, or to a television camera, or – increasingly – directly to an X or Bluesky audience of hundreds of thousands, functions as an extremely strong signal about where the room’s norms sit. If she can say it, and suffer no lasting consequence, the room’s true tolerance is revealed to be much wider than the polite public conversation had suggested. The commenter reaching for a debunked IQ statistic is not inventing a new permission. He is redeeming one that has just been reissued, at scale, by someone whose job title alone confers a kind of authority his own opinions do not carry.

There is a third mechanism worth naming, because it is newer than Crandall and Eshleman’s model and it was on full display in the exchange that opened this essay: the laundering of contempt through the appearance of neutral authority. The commenter did not simply assert that Aboriginal people are unintelligent. He produced a screenshot of an AI system reciting a number, sourced to a named academic, drawn from named tests. Every element of that presentation is designed to signal that this is not opinion but measurement – that the speaker has, in effect, outsourced his prejudice to a machine and a professor and is merely reporting what they found. It is worth being precise about what Richard Lynn’s work actually is, since the screenshot leans entirely on the reader not asking: Lynn was a psychologist whose “hereditarian” writings on race and intelligence have been rejected by the overwhelming mainstream of his own discipline for methodologically indefensible sampling – testing small, non-representative groups, often children, often using instruments never validated for the populations being tested, then treating the results as fixed biological fact rather than what they plainly reflect: differential access to schooling, nutrition, health care, and the test format itself. Lynn’s editorial and funding connections to explicitly eugenicist journals and foundations are a matter of public record, not a partisan characterisation. None of that complexity survives in a screenshot. What survives is a number, a European baseline of 100, and the unstated implication that everything else about the exchange – the racism, the cruelty, the intent – need not be argued because the science has already settled it. This is the twenty-first-century version of exactly the same move Angel Marina made in 2002 when he wrote that his experience “confirms” a general truth about Aboriginal dishonesty: both men are reaching for a frame that lets contempt present itself as conclusion rather than prejudice.

III. The Fair Objection

I want to take seriously the objection that will occur to a great many readers at this point, because dismissing it would be intellectually lazy and because I think a version of it is genuinely defensible.

The objection runs something like this: adults are responsible for their own conduct. The man who posted that IQ screenshot chose to do so. He was not compelled by Pauline Hanson; he was not even, most likely, thinking of her specifically in that moment. People with racist views existed long before Hanson entered federal politics in 1996, and they will exist long after she has left it. To trace his conduct back to her speech is to let him off the hook for a choice that was entirely his own, and to indulge a kind of moral accounting in which nobody is ever simply responsible for what they say and do – there is always a more powerful, more culpable figure somewhere upstream to blame instead. There is also a free-speech dimension to the objection: in a liberal democracy, elected officials are entitled to hold and express controversial views about contested social questions, including views about disadvantage, culture, and comparative outcomes between population groups, however uncomfortable those views make the rest of us. Treating a senator’s public statement as effectively equivalent to incitement collapses a distinction – between causing harm and creating conditions in which others cause harm – that a free society needs to keep intact.

This is not a strawman. It is close to the argument Hanson’s own defenders make, and elements of it track a genuine and important liberal commitment: individual moral responsibility should not be diluted by locating blame in ever more distant causes. If I accepted that this objection settled the matter, I would have no case to make and this essay would end here.

IV. Why the Objection Fails

It fails, in this instance, for a reason that does not rest on psychological theory at all. It fails because there is direct testimonial evidence – not inference, not statistical correlation, not a plausible-sounding mechanism – that this exact transmission occurred, in a documented case, over more than two decades, with consequences that have not yet finished playing out.

The distinction the objection wants to preserve – between speech that causes harm and speech that merely creates conditions in which others go on to cause harm – is a real and important one in the abstract. But it is a distinction the objection’s own proponents forfeit the moment a perpetrator tells you, in his own words, witnessed by other people, that the conditions were the cause. That is precisely what happened in the case I want to describe now. It does not prove that every racist act traces to a Hanson speech. It proves that at least one did, that the man responsible said so himself, more than once, to more than one witness – and that the institutions responsible for holding him to account chose, for twenty-four years, to treat the racism as incidental and the employment dispute as the substance.

V. Twenty-Four Years Before the Screenshot

On 9 May 2002, a man named Angel Marina – then a manager in the Rates and Land Tax section of the ACT Government’s Revenue Management Branch – wrote to Howard Ronaldson, the Chief Executive of the ACT Department of Treasury. I quote it in full, because I have found in twenty-five years of doing this work that paraphrase is always, in the end, a mercy extended to the person who wrote the original.

RE: ALLEGATIONS AGAINST MR MARK MULLINS

I respectfully request that you conduct a formal investigation into the unethical behaviour of Mr Mark Mullins.

I have investigated Mr Mullins’ background and have established that he is a compulsive liar, unethical and unsuitable to be a Senior Manager in the ACT Public Service. Mr Mullins is running a business preparing applications and work histories without the consent of the Department, in breach of Sections 8 and 9 of the Public Sector Management Act 1994.

Friends within the Australian Federal Police have advised me that Mr Mullins’ cousin Ms Isabell Coe of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy has a criminal record, as do other members of his family. This confirms my experience that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and unsuitable to hold management positions. Mr Mullins is no exception.

Ms Louise Fitzgerald, Manager Corporate Services, has given me a copy of Mr Mullins’ application for his substantive position of Manager, Policy, Legislation and Projects, Revenue Management Branch. I have attached a copy of Mr Mullins’ application for your information. Mr Mullins’ attached application clearly shows that he has limited Public Sector experience and holds unrelated qualifications, being a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma in Education. I believe that Mr Mullins is not qualified to act in the position of Director, Revenue Management Branch.

I have discussed Mr Mullins’ background with Ms Tanya Taylor, Recruitment Consultant of Ernst & Young, who has confirmed my assessment that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and that Mr Mullins’ teaching qualifications made him unsuitable to work at either Ernst & Young or ACT Treasury.

I request that Mr Mullins be dismissed from the ACT Public Service due to his unethical behaviour and the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of his family.

I deny the Alan Wylucki allegations that I have defrauded the land tax system, or have any involvement in the theft of $130 million that Mr Mullins has identified as missing from Treasury.

Yours sincerely,

Angel Marina
Manager, Rates and Land Tax Section
Revenue Management Branch

Read that letter twice. The first time, it presents itself as a workplace grievance: allegations of dishonesty, an unauthorised side business, a qualifications dispute, a denial of financial wrongdoing. The second time, the actual structure of the argument becomes visible. Mr Mullins is untrustworthy because he is Aboriginal, and connected to Aboriginal people, and “this confirms” – Marina’s own words – a generalised belief that “Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals.” The workplace complaint is the vehicle. The racial theory is the engine. Note, too, the detail that will matter later: Ms Isabell Coe of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is invoked here as evidence of Mullins’ unsuitability by association – a woman with her own long public record of Indigenous rights advocacy, reduced in Marina’s account to a criminal record used to indict her cousin.

VI. The Campaign Widens

Marina did not stop at Treasury. In July 2003, letters bearing near-identical text went out to a number of institutions Marina believed had once employed or educated Mr Mullins: the ANZ Bank, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, the chartered accounting firm then known as Bird Cameron, and the University of Sydney. I reproduce the ANZ letter, since the wording is materially identical across all of them:

Dear Sir,

I have been authorised by the Chief Executive of the ACT Department of Treasury to conduct an investigation into the academic qualifications and employment history of the Acting Commissioner for ACT Revenue, Mr Mark Mullins.

As part of my investigation, I have been reviewing documents stored on computers in Mr Mullins’ office and home, as well as other documentation. During this review I found documents suggesting that Mr Mullins had worked for the ANZ Bank.

As part of my investigation, I request that you provide me with all information you hold on Mr Mullins, specifically any details that you might have or know about Mr Mullins’ enrolment at the University of London or City International College of Business Management (Sydney) during the 1980s. I have formed the view that Mr Mullins would not have the ability to gain any qualifications and that his qualifications are fraudulent. Mr Mullins has demonstrated that he is a compulsive liar and is quite prepared to intentionally lie to promote himself.

This information is needed urgently as it is likely that Mr Mullins has lied to gain his appointment as Acting Commissioner for ACT Revenue and that he is consorting with known criminals at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to the potential detriment of the ACT Government.

Yours sincerely,

Angel Marina
Manager, Rates and Land Tax Section
Revenue Management Branch

Notice what has changed and what has not. Gone, this time, is the explicit sentence about “the general disposition of Aborigines to lie” – perhaps Marina judged it too exposed for an external audience. What survives is the substance: “consorting with known criminals at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy” doing the same work the deleted sentence did, more obliquely. A senior public servant was, by his own signature, using the institutional letterhead of the ACT Department of Treasury to conduct an unauthorised campaign against a colleague’s reputation and livelihood, sent to a bank, a university, an accounting firm and the nation’s own Attorney-General’s Department, grounded explicitly in a claim about the untrustworthiness of Aboriginal people as a category.

VII. The Institutional Reflex

When this was brought to the attention of Meredith Whitten, then Director of Corporate Services for ACT Treasury, a contemporaneous written report went first to Mike Harris, then Chief Executive of ACT Treasury, who forwarded the material to Whitten. What followed, on my information, was not investigation but containment. Whitten buried the responses to the letters Marina had sent, under a pile of bureaucratic paperwork which set in motion further internal handling – but the substance of what followed was suppression, not accountability.

This is the pattern that recurs, in my experience, whenever institutions are confronted with racism committed by one of their own: it is reclassified. It stops being a racism matter and becomes, in the language the ACT Government and the Australian Federal Police have used to me directly across a quarter of a century, “an employee issue.” That reclassification is doing real work. An employee issue is a matter of performance management, mediation, perhaps a confidential settlement – resolvable, containable, and above all private. A racism issue is a matter of public accountability, potential findings against named individuals, and reputational exposure for the institution that failed to act. Every incentive in a large bureaucracy points toward the first label and away from the second, regardless of which one the facts actually support. What began as a letter written in 2002 has, as a direct consequence of that reclassification, still not been resolved. It has now stretched across close to a quarter of a century, through changes of government, changes of Commissioner, and – as I have documented elsewhere in this outlet – through Ombudsman investigations and Supreme Court proceedings that have chipped away at the edifice without yet bringing down its centre.

VIII. The Line Marina Drew Himself

Here is the passage that turns this from a story about one bigoted public servant into a story about why Pauline Hanson’s public rhetoric matters, and it is not my inference. It is testimony I hold from more than one person who worked at ACT Treasury at the time.

Comments made by those involved, at the time, recorded that Marina pointed to Pauline Hanson as his justification for what he was doing – because, in his account, Hanson had normalised racism in the community and empowered him to act on his own sentiments. I hold statements from former ACT Treasury employees who heard Marina say, in terms, that what he had done was acceptable because Pauline Hanson was saying exactly the same thing, so it was not racist. He was, in his own account, following the lead of the government.

I want to be precise about what this evidence does and does not establish, because the editorial standard I hold myself to at this outlet is to distinguish documented fact from inference, and it would be a betrayal of that standard to overstate this. It does not establish that Hanson caused Marina’s racism to exist; people do not require a senator’s permission to hold contemptuous views, and Marina’s letters read as the product of a settled conviction, not a sudden conversion. What it does establish, directly and without need for inference, is that Marina himself – the man who wrote these letters – identified Hanson’s public rhetoric as the thing that let him act on that conviction without believing himself to be doing anything wrong. He did not cite a psychology textbook’s account of the justification-suppression model. He cited the actual politician, by name, as his actual justification, to actual witnesses, at the actual time he was running the campaign. The theory in Part II of this essay is not a hypothesis about what public racism from elected officials probably does. In this case, it is a description of what a named perpetrator said it did, for him, in his own words.

IX. Twenty-Four Years Later, the Same Sentence

Which brings the argument back to where it started: a screenshot, an IQ statistic sourced to Richard Lynn, and a crowd of strangers cheering it on beneath a post reporting that a sitting senator had called Indigenous Australians “the most primitive race on Earth.”

I do not know the name of the man who posted that screenshot, and I make no claim that he has read Angel Marina’s letters or ever heard of Mark Mullins. That is not the point, and it does not need to be. What connects 2002 to 2026 is not a personal chain of influence between two individuals; it is the same permission structure operating on two different men separated by a quarter of a century, each finding in Hanson’s public standing the same thing: licence to say, in a workplace letter or in a public reply, what they had already privately decided about Aboriginal people, and to believe – as Marina explicitly did, and as the commenter’s confidence in a debunked statistic strongly suggests he also does – that saying it aloud no longer carries the cost it should. This is also why the argument that Hanson “isn’t making policy” misses the point entirely.

Notably, the Australian Human Rights Commission has drawn a line under Hanson’s comments, condemning her racist statements, underscoring the value of Indigenous people in that Australian community and calling for action to address racism. In the words of the Commission, “Public officials have a responsibility to lead with integrity and uphold the dignity of all Australians. The standard must be clear – racism has no place in Australia, least of all in our halls of power.”

Marina’s letters were not policy either. They were one man, using institutional letterhead, to try to destroy another man’s career. The damage a senator’s rhetoric does is rarely legislative. It is granular, individual, and largely invisible from Canberra: a manager deciding an Aboriginal colleague is a liar because “this confirms” what he already believed; a screenshot posted with confidence instead of shame; a chief executive’s office that reaches for “employee issue” instead of “racism” because the first phrase is so much safer to write in a file note than the second.

X. Why It Matters

It matters because Pauline Hanson has been a member of the Australian Parliament, on and off, since 1996 – thirty years in which her public standing has never depended on the accuracy of her claims about Indigenous Australians, only on their capacity to find an audience. It matters because what she says is heard not only by the public gallery and the press but by people already looking for permission, and her office supplies it more efficiently than almost any other voice in the country could, precisely because it comes stamped with institutional legitimacy that an anonymous X account can never carry on its own.

And it matters to me, specifically, because I have spent close to half of my working life watching the ACT Government and the Australian Federal Police try to file a documented, self-confessed act of institutional racism under the heading of an employee dispute, in the hope that a long enough delay will do the work that an honest finding never will. Mark Mullins did not choose to have his qualifications, his family, and his character impugned to a bank, a university, an accounting firm and his own Attorney-General’s Department on the stated grounds that “Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals.” Angel Marina chose to write that. But he told witnesses, in his own words, where he found the confidence to believe it was not racist. He did not point to his own conscience. He pointed to a politician, and to a government he believed was, in substance, saying the same thing he was.

That is why it matters. Not as an abstraction about tone and public discourse, but as a documented, twenty-four-year case file in which a real person’s real career was destroyed by a man who told the truth, at least once, about where he got his justification.

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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, September 2026

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