History, once progressed, is linear and irreversible. A nation that has become multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural cannot return to what it was, however much some of its politicians might wish it could. For Australia, this transition is not a passing phase to be managed until normal service resumes. It is a foundational fact that shapes every question of governance the country will face. That reality demands a style of leadership that puts inclusion and social cohesion ahead of division and exclusion. In a diverse country, those who seek the highest office must govern for all citizens, resisting the temptation to turn ethnic or cultural difference into electoral advantage.
Pauline Hanson, the founder and leader of One Nation, represents a very different approach. Her rhetoric and policies trade long-term social harmony for short-term political gain. This essay examines her leadership in the context of Australia’s multicultural identity, focusing on her handling of three connected questions: immigration, the place of First Nations peoples in the national story, and what it means to belong to Australia. It argues that her failure to address these questions holistically makes her unsuitable for the office of Prime Minister in a diverse nation. It also considers the strongest objections to that conclusion, because an argument that cannot survive them is not worth making.
The Irreversibility of Diversity
The demographic argument is simple but often underestimated. Australia is among the most culturally diverse countries on earth. Its population includes First Nations peoples whose presence stretches back tens of thousands of years, descendants of British and Irish settlers, waves of postwar migrants from Greece, Italy and the former Yugoslavia, refugees from Vietnam and Lebanon, and more recent arrivals from India, China, the Philippines, Nepal and across Africa and the Middle East. Millions of Australians were born overseas, and millions more have a parent who was. This is not a minority condition at the margins of the national life. It is the national life.
The implications for governance follow directly. A leader of a homogeneous society can sometimes afford to treat cohesion as given, a background condition that needs no deliberate cultivation. A leader of a diverse society cannot. Cohesion in such a country is an achievement, built through institutions, symbols, policies and above all through the tone of public leadership. People who belong to different traditions will accept a shared political community only if they believe it belongs to them as much as to anyone else. When a leader signals, deliberately or carelessly, that some citizens are guests whose belonging is conditional, that belief weakens. Once weakened it is slow to rebuild, and the damage falls first on those with the least power to defend themselves.
This is why the style of governance matters as much as its content. A Prime Minister does not merely administer policy. The office carries a symbolic weight that no other position in the country shares. It speaks, in moments of crisis and celebration alike, for the whole nation. The question to ask of any aspirant is therefore not only what policies they will pursue but whom they will be understood to be speaking for.
What Multicultural Governance Requires
Before turning to Hanson’s record, it is worth saying plainly what the standard is. Multicultural governance does not require a leader to avoid contested questions. Immigration levels, integration, security, and the pace and character of social change are legitimate subjects of democratic argument, and a leader who pretended otherwise would deserve the contempt of voters. Nor does it require agreement on every cultural question. A thoughtful conservative and a thoughtful progressive can disagree strongly about the balance between shared civic norms and cultural pluralism, and both can be committed to a country in which every citizen is treated as fully belonging.
What it does require is a set of disciplines. A leader must separate policy from persons, criticising a programme or a practice without implying that entire communities are a problem. A leader must refuse to benefit from the fear of minorities, even when such fear is electorally profitable. A leader must be able to explain how a policy will affect every group it touches, including groups that do not vote for them. And a leader must show, through conduct and not only declarations, that the national story has room for everyone who is part of it, including the oldest peoples of the continent.
Measured against that standard, a leadership style that works by identifying a group as the source of national anxiety fails regardless of how the policy is dressed. The test is not whether one holds firm views, since most politicians do. The test is whether the views are advanced in a way that makes some citizens feel they are the problem.
A Record of Division
Hanson’s national profile began with a statement of exactly this kind. In her 1996 maiden speech to the House of Representatives, she declared that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians, a claim that cast an entire category of migrants and their descendants as a threat to the country’s character. One Nation was founded the following year. In its early period the party’s identity was built on opposition to Asian immigration, resistance to programs aimed at Aboriginal advancement, and economic protectionism. Observers note that the party’s programme today reads like a checklist of the global populist radical right, with its immigration positions hardened over time.
The target of the rhetoric has shifted with the decades, but the structure has not. In the 1990s the focus was Asian migration. After Hanson’s return to the Senate in 2016, a return that followed the Lindt Cafe siege, the focus turned to Muslims. In 2017 she entered the Senate chamber wearing a burqa, a piece of theatre that treated a religious garment worn by a small number of Australian women as a punchline and a threat at once. Whatever the intended point about face coverings and security, the effect was to turn a minority’s religious practice into political spectacle in the nation’s highest legislative forum. In 2018 she moved a motion in the Senate affirming that it’s okay to be white, a slogan borrowed from online white nationalist culture. The motion was rejected, though the vote was closer than it should have been, and the episode demonstrated how readily the language of grievance can be repackaged as common sense.
None of these moments, taken alone, settles the matter. A single gesture can be an error of judgement. The significance lies in the pattern. Across three decades the targets have changed while the method has stayed constant: identify a visible group, associate it with national decline, and offer the electorate the comfort of someone prepared to say what others will not. This is the approach that leaders of diverse nations must renounce, because it works precisely by deepening the divisions they are charged with healing.
The First Nations Question
Nowhere is the failure to engage holistically with complexity clearer than in Hanson’s approach to First Nations peoples. Multiculturalism in Australia does not begin with the postwar migrant programs. It begins with the fact that this continent was never empty, that more than two hundred distinct language groups were here before the First Fleet, and that the legal and moral consequences of dispossession remain unresolved. Any serious account of Australian diversity must start with the fact that the nation’s relationship with its First Peoples is not one multicultural question among many but the prior and founding one.
Hanson’s platform treats it as an irritant. At a rally in regional Queensland in mid-2026, she promised that One Nation would end Welcome to Country ceremonies, insist on only one Australian flag, and create a sunset clause on Native Title claims. Each proposal deserves to be taken seriously for what it says about her understanding of the country she seeks to lead.
Welcome to Country is a small ritual with a large meaning. It is an acknowledgement, by the traditional custodians of a place, that those gathering are guests on land with a long human story. To abolish it does not make the country more united. It removes a gesture that many Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have come to regard as a courteous recognition of fact. The insistence on a single flag similarly misunderstands the situation. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags are not rivals to the national flag but expressions of identities that existed long before it, and that millions of Australians hold alongside their national loyalty without conflict.
The proposed sunset clause on Native Title is the most consequential of the three. Native Title was the product of the High Court’s Mabo decision and the legislation that followed, a hard-won attempt to reconcile Australian law with the reality of continuing Indigenous connection to country. To set an expiry date on claims would tell Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians that their rights are a temporary concession rather than a legal and moral recognition. A Prime Minister who held that position would face the first peoples of the country as an adversary rather than as citizens with a prior and continuing claim on the nation’s conscience. For a country still struggling to face its colonial history, that would be a retreat, and it would be felt as one.
Immigration: A Real Issue, a Narrow Frame
The strongest case for Hanson rests on immigration, and it deserves a fair hearing. Immigration levels are a legitimate subject of democratic debate. Housing is scarce and expensive, and many Australians, including many from migrant backgrounds, feel the pressure of competition for homes, jobs and services. Pollsters report that voters across all backgrounds are most concerned about the cost of living and housing availability, and that angry voters seeking someone who will upset the status quo are turning to One Nation in large numbers. A leader who dismissed these concerns as bigotry would be making a serious mistake, and the major parties have made it too often.
But the legitimacy of the concern does not validate every answer to it. The question is whether Hanson addresses immigration as a policy problem with trade-offs, or as a cultural threat with villains. The evidence of her rhetoric suggests the latter. Housing shortages have causes that reach well beyond migration: decades of under-building, tax settings that reward speculation, planning systems that restrict supply, and the neglect of social housing. A leader committed to solving the problem would address all of these. A leader committed to exploiting it finds it more useful to name a single cause that can be seen walking down the street.
The distinction matters for another reason. Migrant communities are not external to the national debate about immigration. They are among its participants, and many hold strong and varied views about it. A holistic approach would engage with that diversity, recognising that a second-generation Australian and a recently arrived worker may see the question differently. Some commentators have noted a generational divide, with second-generation migrants often opposing One Nation while their parents consider voting for it, and one consultant warns that normalising anti-immigration rhetoric could harm everyone in the long term. That warning is worth taking seriously. A politics that treats migration as a cultural contest does not stay confined to its intended targets. It reshapes the status of everyone whose family history includes a boat or a plane.
The same applies to the security concerns that rose after the Bondi massacre in December 2025. Grief and fear after an atrocity are real, and a leader has a duty to respond to them. But the responsible response is to make communities safer while protecting the principle that criminal responsibility is individual. Collective suspicion of a faith or an origin does not make anyone safer. It tends to alienate the very communities whose cooperation is most valuable to security agencies, and it hands propaganda to those who insist that Australia is hostile to them.
Assimilation and the Meaning of Belonging
When asked whether she could represent every Australian given the criticism of her politics, Hanson’s answer is revealing. She has said she would represent anyone who assimilates into Australia and has described herself as focused on a unified national identity. The phrasing repays close attention, because it contains the whole difference between her conception of the country and the one this essay defends.
Assimilation, as a policy ideal, has a history in Australia, and it is not a happy one. For much of the twentieth century it was the official approach to Aboriginal people, and it was carried out through the removal of children from their families, the suppression of languages, and the expectation that Indigenous identity should disappear into the general population. The Stolen Generations are the human cost of a government that believed unity required sameness. Australia formally abandoned assimilation as a migrant policy in the 1970s, replacing it with a model of integration that asks newcomers to accept shared laws, institutions and the English language while permitting them to retain their cultures, faiths and family traditions.
The difference between the two models is the difference between a condition and a commitment. Under integration, belonging is available to anyone who accepts the civic framework. Under assimilation as Hanson frames it, belonging depends on conformity, and the representation of a citizen by their government is contingent on how fully they resemble an imagined norm. A Prime Minister is not an employer who can set conditions for service. They are an officer of a constitutional democracy whose obligations run to every citizen equally, including those who never vote for them, those who disagree with them, and those whose way of life they find unfamiliar. To say that representation is conditional is to misunderstand the office itself.
The Office and the Temperament
The job of Prime Minister requires abilities beyond the platform. It requires the capacity to hold a coalition together, to negotiate with international partners, to manage a bureaucracy, and to respond to crises with steadiness. It also requires a temperament suited to a divided public. The most important task of a leader in a diverse society is often to persuade people who disagree that they are still part of one community.
Hanson’s political model works against that task. Her organisation has long been described as highly centralised and personality-driven, a structure that leaves little room for the institutional discipline that governing requires. One Nation’s platform includes withdrawing from the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the Paris Agreement. Whatever one thinks of those institutions, a Prime Minister who sought to remove Australia from the principal forums of international cooperation would be taking the country in a direction that a trading nation, dependent on a rules-based order and bound by human rights treaties, could not easily sustain.
Her appeal, according to the polling, rests heavily on style. Research reported by the Australian Financial Review found that Hanson’s perceived authenticity and her framing of politics as outsiders against the establishment attract voters at least as much as any policy. There is something to respect in that. Voters are right to be tired of scripted politicians. But authenticity is a virtue only when what is authentically expressed is worth expressing. Sincerity in the service of division is still division, and a person who is sincerely convinced that some of her fellow citizens belong less than others remains unsuited to represent them all.
The Strongest Objections
An argument that a political leader is unsuited to the highest office should be tested against the best case her defenders can make, not the weakest. Four objections deserve a full answer, and in two of them the critic is partly right.
The first is that the essay mistakes the cause of One Nation’s rise. On this view, Hanson’s support is driven less by cultural hostility than by material pressure and treating it as a symptom of exclusion misreads the evidence. There is a great deal to this. Interviews with voters who have moved to One Nation describe a chain in which immigration drives the housing crisis, which in turn drives the cost-of-living crisis, and many say the failures of the major parties outweigh whatever concerns they hold about her. Pollsters report much the same, with voters of every background most concerned about housing and the cost of living, and one analyst saying her position on immigration is nowhere near the most important issue. Some research goes further and suggests that her perceived authenticity, and her framing of politics as outsiders against an establishment, pull voters as strongly as any policy.
This should be conceded in full. A reader who dismisses these voters as bigots has misunderstood them, and a politics that does so hands Hanson her most useful argument. But the concession does not reach the thesis. The question here is not why people vote for her, but what she would do with the office, and a leader can be elected on legitimate grievances while holding a platform that treats a section of the population as the problem. Housing scarcity has causes well beyond migration, including decades of under-building, tax settings that reward speculation and restrictive planning systems. A leader whose answer to a multi-causal problem is a single cause that can be seen on the street is not responding to the material drivers. She is borrowing their legitimacy for something else. The right response to these voters is a serious housing and migration program from the major parties, which is exactly what the critique of Hanson should demand.
The second objection is that the pace and character of demographic change are legitimately contested, and that to call one side’s position disqualifying is to close a democratic debate. This is also largely right as a general principle. Reasonable people disagree about migration levels, about integration and about how much cultural continuity a society is entitled to seek. Voters who ask for lower migration are not thereby racists, and in many migrant communities the same view is common. Reporting from Western Sydney found residents from migrant backgrounds who support restrictions, alongside a generational divide in which second-generation Australians often oppose One Nation while their parents consider voting for it. Some voters also say they feel unable to voice these views at all, believing that objecting invites an accusation of racism.
The essay therefore has to be precise about what it is claiming. It does not claim that wanting lower immigration is disqualifying, and it would be wrong to say so. Its claim is narrower: that the way Hanson frames the question, through a 1996 speech about Asians, a burqa worn as a stunt in the Senate, a motion borrowed from white nationalist slogans, and now a statement that she will represent those who assimilate, makes particular groups the object of the argument rather than the policy. The distinction between a restrictive policy and a hostile frame is exactly what the debate needs to protect. A reader who wants fewer migrants has a choice of spokespeople, and the case here is that Hanson is a poor one for the very cause she champions, because her style gives opponents the best evidence that restriction means exclusion.
The third objection is the most serious philosophically: that the proposals the essay criticises are, in the eyes of their supporters, expressions of equality before the law. On this reading, one flag, no ceremonial recognition at public events, and an end to Native Title claims treat all citizens identically rather than granting any group special status. The principle is a respectable one, and it has deep roots in liberal thought. A state that confers different standing on citizens by descent is, to many people, a state moving in the wrong direction, and the view is not confined to the right.
The reply is that equality before the law has never meant the abolition of every legal distinction. It means that like cases are treated alike, and the live question is whether the distinctions at issue are arbitrary or grounded in something real. Native Title is not a racial privilege handed out by preference. It is the legal recognition, by the High Court and then by Parliament, of rights that existed under Indigenous law before settlement and were never lawfully extinguished. It is a property right with a historical basis, and a sunset clause would not equalise anyone. It would single out one class of claim for expiry while leaving every other form of title untouched. The flag and ceremony proposals are different in kind, since they concern symbolism rather than legal right, and here the objection has more force. A reasonable person can believe that official events should be uniform without hostility toward Indigenous Australians. The essay’s position is that the symbolic proposals, taken together with the legal one, signal a preference for a version of the country in which First Nations recognition is a temporary concession. That is an interpretation, and honest readers can resist it. But the legal proposal is the clearest test of it, and it is the one the equality argument handles least well.
The fourth objection is that voters are entitled to choose, and the office goes to whoever can command a majority. Nothing in this essay disputes it. Fitness is a different question from eligibility, and critics are as entitled to say a choice would be a mistake as voters are to make it. The evidence also suggests that her support is softer than the headlines imply. One survey of One Nation voters found that only 52 per cent were absolutely certain they would vote for the party at the next election, and One Nation has consistently underperformed its poll ratings on election day, so whether current numbers translate into seats remains to be seen. The major parties also retain the capacity to respond. Commentators have warned that ignoring or dismissing the concerns of everyday Australians reinforces the dynamics driving voters toward One Nation. The case against Hanson becomes stronger, not weaker, when her opponents offer her voters something better, because it removes the argument that she is the only one listening.
Taken together, these objections narrow the essay’s claim without defeating it. They show that her support is not simply bigotry, that the debate about migration is legitimate, and that equality before the law is a serious principle her platform can invoke. What they do not show is that a leader who frames belonging as conditional on assimilation, and who proposes setting an expiry date on Indigenous legal rights, is equipped to govern a country that has already become plural. That is the claim that remains, and it is the one the essay stands on.
Conclusion
A Prime Minister of Australia governs a country that history has already made plural. That is not an opinion about what Australia should become but a description of what it is, and no election can reverse it. The task of national leadership in such a country is to hold together people of different origins, faiths and histories in a political community that each can regard as their own. It requires discipline in language, generosity toward those who differ, and a willingness to tell uncomfortable truths to one’s own supporters.
Hanson’s record shows a different instinct. It identifies a group, ties it to national anxiety, and offers the electorate the relief of someone willing to say what others will not. Her treatment of First Nations questions shows a leader who sees reconciliation as a concession rather than a responsibility. Her conception of representation as conditional on assimilation reveals a misunderstanding of what the office demands, which is service to every citizen on equal terms.
None of this means that immigration, housing or security should be off the table. They should be argued about, vigorously and without embarrassment, by leaders prepared to treat every Australian as a full participant in the argument. The criticism of Hanson is not that she raises these questions but that she answers them in a way that divides the country she would lead. In a nation whose future is multicultural by the plain facts of its past and present, that is a serious limitation for the office of Prime Minister.
A Note on Sources
The 2026 polling, voter research and campaign details cited here draw on reporting from the Canberra Times, Searchlight Magazine, the South Burnett Times, Hawker Britton, The Nightly, SBS, the Newcastle Herald, the Australian Financial Review and Spectator Australia. Poll figures shift quickly, so check them against the latest releases before publication.
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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, October 2026
Australia is multicultural, and nothing can reverse that. So what should we expect from anyone seeking the highest office?