The Hanson Paradox: Popularity Despite the Racism

Introduction

In June 2026, Pauline Hanson stood at the National Press Club – an institution that spent much of the past three decades treating her as a curiosity rather than a contender – and delivered a speech that was, by any measure, saturated with racialised language. She told the room that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be mono-cultural.” Asked whether she believed the country was in danger of being “swamped by Muslims,” she replied that it would not happen “if I’ve got anything to say about it.” Four months earlier, on Sky News, she had put the same suspicion more bluntly: “You say, ‘Well, there’s good Muslims out there.’ Well, I’m sorry, how can you tell me there are good Muslims?” She later issued a hedged walk-back. The public heard the first version. This is not ambiguous rhetoric that requires generous interpretation. It is, on its face, discriminatory.

And yet, through the middle of 2026, One Nation’s primary vote sat consistently in the high-twenties to low-thirties across most published polling – at one point, in Roy Morgan’s survey, touching 31.5 percent and briefly overtaking Labor outright, with the two-party-preferred contest framed as Labor versus One Nation rather than Labor versus the Coalition. Other polls in the same window had the party a few points lower, and support proved genuinely volatile: it eased back somewhat over July and August as scrutiny of Hanson’s policy detail intensified. But even the more conservative estimates in that range represent a minor party polling within striking distance of, or ahead of, one of the two parties that has governed Australia for a century. Separately, research house The Lab found Hanson had become the most trusted political leader in the country and the one voters believed was having the most positive impact on the nation.

This is the paradox at the centre of Australian politics in 2026. A political figure whose platform is shot through with policies that target people by race, religion and country of origin is simultaneously the beneficiary of what looks like a genuine, broad-based protest movement. The temptation on one side is to conclude that this proves Australia is a fundamentally racist country that has simply stopped hiding it. The temptation on the other side is to wave away the racism entirely and treat One Nation’s rise as pure economic populism, nothing more than battlers responding to a cost-of-living crisis.

Both of these are too simple. The honest answer is that Hanson’s rise is being driven overwhelmingly by a collapse in trust in the major parties, a real and painful economic squeeze, a widely shared sense that the institutions built to hold power accountable are failing to do so, and – as one thread among several, not the central cause – a foreign policy posture that has left people on every side of the Gaza debate feeling misled. Racialised and culturally anxious sentiment is a real and non-trivial part of One Nation’s coalition – the academic evidence on this is clearer than many of Hanson’s critics or supporters would like to admit – but it does not explain a primary vote surge of this scale, because that scale of movement requires people who were never natural One Nation voters to defect from the major parties, and increasingly, to defect specifically from a collapsing Coalition. Understanding why they are defecting, and whether the party can actually convert that defection into something capable of governing, matters more than moralising about the fact that it is happening.

The trust collapse is real – but it’s two different collapses, not one

The single most important fact about Australian politics in 2026 is not Hanson’s rise – it is the collapse beneath it, and it is worth being precise about which survey says what, because two distinct research efforts are often run together in commentary and they measure different things.

The first is The Lab’s Australia Project 2026, now in its twelfth year, which surveyed 2,000 Australians and found that 79 percent believe society is “stacked against ordinary people,” up sharply from 58 percent the year before, and that 65 percent believe no matter how hard they work, they simply cannot get ahead. It was this same research house that separately found Hanson to be the most trusted political leader in the country and the one Australians believed was having the most positive impact – a finding that sat, uncomfortably for many observers, alongside record levels of despair about the fairness of the system itself.

The second is a distinct piece of research from the Centre for Policy Development, whose ongoing tracking study has shown a steady decline in political trust since March 2023. Its most recent wave found that 58 percent of Australians do not believe politicians are there for them, that around 68 to 70 percent view modern politics as more concerned with short-term political advantage than long-term problem-solving, and that only 38 percent believe elected parliaments are effective at tackling the country’s major issues. The CPD’s own report links this directly to the declining primary vote share of both major parties and the rising vote for independents and minor parties, describing voters as “losing patience with politics as it has always been done.”

Read together rather than conflated, these two research efforts tell a coherent story: a public that has concluded the system itself is rigged (The Lab), responding by systematically discounting the people who run it (CPD), and rewarding whichever alternative currently looks least like the establishment. A further DemosAU TrustWatch survey adds a sharp footnote – trust in national institutions had fallen to 48 percent, down from 55 percent less than a year earlier, and trust was lowest of all among One Nation’s own supporters, at just 28 percent. The party benefiting most from the collapse in institutional trust is itself supported by the single most distrustful cohort in the country. That is not a group of voters who have found a leader they believe in; it is a group of voters who have run out of anyone else to punish the major parties with.

Necessary conditions: a collapsing Coalition, and a housing crisis that outlasts its own causes

Trust collapse on its own does not explain why the beneficiary was One Nation specifically rather than, say, a resurgent centre-right Coalition or a wave of new independents. Two more specific conditions had to be present as well.

The first is the state of the Coalition itself. The damage was sequential, not simultaneous. Sussan Ley lost the Liberal leadership to Angus Taylor on 13 February 2026 and then resigned her seat; David Littleproud left the Nationals leadership on 10 March and was succeeded by Matt Canavan. That reset arrived only after a year of splits, poor polling and open disarray. The clearest evidence of the wreckage came in the Farrer by-election on 9 May, triggered by Ley’s resignation: the Liberal primary vote in a seat the party had held for decades collapsed by 31 percentage points, while One Nation’s candidate surged by almost 33 points and won the seat outright – the party’s first-ever lower-house win at the ballot box, rather than by defection. Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who had defected from the Nationals to One Nation only months earlier, was widely credited with providing what one analysis called a “permission structure” that made it psychologically easier for lifelong conservative voters to cross over. Without a Coalition in visible disarray, offering its own disaffected base somewhere else to land, it is far from clear One Nation’s numbers would have moved as far as they did.

The second is a housing crisis that has continued to feel acute even as its most commonly cited driver has begun to ease. Net overseas migration actually fell to 301,000 in 2025, down slightly from 306,000 the year before – modest evidence against the claim that immigration is spiralling out of control. But housing supply responds to migration and population pressure with a multi-year lag: dwellings approved and built today reflect demand signals from years ago, not this year’s intake figures. That lag means voters experiencing acute rental and mortgage stress right now are reacting to the cumulative pressure of the high-migration years that preceded the recent moderation, not to current settings – which makes the political argument that “immigration is causing the housing crisis” durable and intuitively persuasive even as the underlying data becomes less supportive of it. Experts have explicitly warned that immigration is being used as a scapegoat for a housing problem with much deeper structural causes, including construction costs, zoning and interest rates. That warning has had limited political traction, because a multi-year lag is an awkward thing to explain in a soundbite, and Hanson has never needed one.

How Australia’s voting system makes protest cheap – until it isn’t

It also helps to remember that Australia’s voting system makes this kind of defection unusually cheap. Compulsory, preferential voting with a proportional Senate means a voter can place One Nation first without the vote being “wasted” the way a minor-party vote typically is under first-past-the-post systems like those used for the US House or the UK Commons. Preferences simply flow on. For most of One Nation’s history, that made a protest vote low-risk: enough to elect senators, never enough to threaten government formation.

What is different in 2026 is that several polls have put a two-party-preferred race close enough – Roy Morgan had Labor versus One Nation as tight as 51–49 at one point – that the calculation is starting to change on both sides of the ledger. Some voters recoil once the protest stops looking cost-free. Others lean in precisely because it now feels consequential. Farrer is the local version of that shift: Labor did not run, the contest resolved as One Nation versus a Climate 200–aligned independent, and Coalition preferences were no longer a harmless gesture. Nationals how-to-vote cards, and Nationals preference flows of about 69 percent, did more of the work than Liberal flows of about 59 percent; on the published flow data, Farley cleared 50 percent on National preferences without needing the Liberal pile. A system built to make minor-party protest cheap had, in one seat, made it decisive.

An accountability body that cannot quite deliver accountability

Australians were promised, in the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Commission in 2023, that a federal integrity body would finally close the credibility gap that state-based commissions had exposed for years. In practice, its record so far has reinforced cynicism as often as it has relieved it. Its investigation into the Robodebt scandal – a scheme a royal commission had already described in scathing terms – cleared former prime minister Scott Morrison of corrupt conduct entirely. It did find that two public servants had engaged in serious corrupt conduct, but concluded there was insufficient admissible evidence to refer them for prosecution. The Commission’s own inaugural commissioner, Paul Brereton, resigned in mid-2026 after an inquiry found he had failed to declare a conflict of interest linked to that same referral; the follow-up investigation into his conduct was then abandoned by the NACC’s own inspector, who said she could not justify the cost of pursuing it once he had already left the role. A Greens senator’s response – that resigning let him skirt accountability rather than face it – captured a sentiment that extends well beyond the Greens’ own voter base.

None of this means the NACC is not doing serious work; as of September 2026 it had dozens of preliminary and full corruption investigations underway, spanning current and former parliamentarians, senior public servants, contractors and at least one grants scheme, and it has secured convictions. But an institution created specifically to restore public confidence does not get credit for the investigations the public never hears the outcome of. It gets judged on the high-profile cases where the result looks, to an already sceptical public, like the system protecting its own. That perception feeds directly into Hanson’s core pitch: that there is a political “uniparty” or establishment that looks after itself first, and that only an outsider untainted by decades in the major-party machine can be trusted to break that pattern. It barely matters, for the purposes of that pitch, that Hanson herself has been a fixture of the Senate for years. She has successfully positioned herself as permanently outside the club, and the club’s own conduct keeps supplying her with evidence.

Gaza: one thread among several, not the load-bearing wall

Foreign policy on Gaza deserves mention here, but it should not be overstated as a driver of One Nation’s own polling specifically – there is no clear evidence tying movements in One Nation’s numbers to particular moments in the Gaza debate, and the effect is better understood as diffuse rather than targeted. What the issue has done is add one more entry to the ledger of major-party incoherence. The government moved over 2025 and into 2026 from measured criticism of Israeli conduct to condemning the Gaza blockade as “outrageous,” and ultimately to formally recognising a Palestinian state alongside France, the UK and Canada – while Australian firms continued receiving government grants tied to the F-35 supply chain, and while sections of the Jewish community blamed the government’s rhetoric, and its slowness to confront antisemitism, for contributing to the climate in which the Bondi attack occurred in December 2025. The point is not that Gaza built One Nation’s vote. It is that an issue capable of making both the pro-Palestinian left and parts of the Jewish community feel simultaneously betrayed by the same government is a useful illustration of exactly the kind of institutional incoherence that a “none of them mean what they say” narrative feeds on – Hanson’s included.

An economy that is genuinely hurting, made worse by bad luck

The economic backdrop does not require any exaggeration. Real wages remain roughly 4.7 to 5 percent below where they stood at the start of 2021 – one of the steepest sustained declines in the OECD, behind only New Zealand on some measures. Award-reliant workers, in particular, have not recovered mid-2021 purchasing power even now. There was a genuine recovery phase, with real wages growing in most quarters through into mid-2026, but that recovery was undercut by a fresh inflationary shock with nothing to do with domestic policy at all: the 2026 Iran war. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered the largest disruption to global oil supply in the International Energy Agency’s history, sending Brent crude above $110 a barrel – at one point close to $118 – and prompting budget papers to openly canvass a “nightmare scenario” of oil reaching $200 a barrel and the domestic economy tipping into recession. None of that is the Albanese government’s doing in any meaningful causal sense, but incumbents are rarely judged on causation. They are judged on whether life is getting harder on their watch, and for much of 2026 it plainly was.

Can protest become power? The Farrer test

Every account of a protest surge eventually has to answer a harder question than “why are people angry”: can the beneficiary actually govern? One Nation’s Farrer win is the most useful evidence available so far, and it cuts both ways. On one hand, it is a genuine organisational milestone – the party’s first lower-house seat won outright at the ballot box rather than inherited by defection. Barnaby Joyce, who brought decades of experience at senior levels of a major party into One Nation’s ranks, has spoken candidly about the party needing “more structure” as it grows, and the new member for Farrer, David Farley, declared on election night that the party was now “at the end of its beginning.”

On the other hand, the campaign also exposed exactly the organisational thinness that scepticism about One Nation’s readiness to govern is built on. Farley’s own political history is a small case study in the volatility of the current moment: a National Party member from 2015 to 2020, he unsuccessfully applied to fill a casual Legislative Council vacancy in 2019, then applied for Labor Party membership in 2020 and lodged an expression of interest in standing as a NSW Labor candidate – an application the ALP rejected – before donating to Labor’s Aston campaign in 2023, backing the community-independent Voices for Farrer movement ahead of the 2025 election, and finally winning Farrer for One Nation in 2026. None of that surfaced in any organised way before his preselection; it emerged piecemeal during the campaign itself, raising real questions about how thoroughly the party vets the people it sends into Parliament. A movement can win a by-election on protest energy and a well-known name at the top of the ticket. Whether it can build the deeper bench, the costings capacity, and the candidate-vetting discipline needed to run a government is a separate and much less settled question. The trillion-dollar costing gap in Hanson’s headline policies is arguably the same organisational immaturity showing up in fiscal rather than personnel terms.

The uncosted policy problem

Angus Taylor, hardly a disinterested source but working from Treasury-style modelling, argued that just four of One Nation’s headline commitments – lifting defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP, introducing income splitting for families, indexing income tax brackets to inflation, and pursuing zero (and, per Hanson’s later announcement, briefly negative) net migration – could cost the budget in the order of a trillion dollars over a decade. Independent policy analysis of the migration package specifically notes that while a 130,000 visa cap might ease housing demand at the margin, the trade-offs include materially lower government revenue, slower productivity growth and a smaller economy overall. Even a Coalition MP sympathetic to lower migration numbers, Andrew Hastie, publicly conceded that nobody outside One Nation actually knows the fiscal, economic or human modelling behind Hanson’s numbers, because none has been published. A policy platform that proposes to withdraw Australia from the UN Refugee Convention, deport tens of thousands of people, cut net migration by hundreds of thousands, and abolish net zero targets, without publishing costings for any of it, is asking the electorate to trust the messenger rather than evaluate the message. The softening in Hanson’s support after the Press Club speech, once journalists and opponents began actually interrogating the numbers, is itself evidence that a meaningful slice of that support is soft and vulnerable to scrutiny rather than a settled commitment to the full program.

Where the racism argument does, and does not, hold up

It would be intellectually dishonest to defend the proposition that most Australians are not racist without engaging the academic literature on what actually drives One Nation’s support, because that literature complicates the picture rather than simplifying it. Glenn Kefford, Benjamin Moffitt, John Collins and Joshua Marsh, writing in the Australian Journal of Political Science (vol. 58, no. 1, 2023), found that populist attitudes in Australia are strongly associated with negative attitudes toward Indigenous Australians and dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, but are not strongly associated with economic anxiety. A more recent study by Emily Foley and Josh Sunman, also in the Australian Journal of Political Science (2026), examined how Hanson and fellow senator Malcolm Roberts performatively construct a “working-class” identity for electoral purposes, and concluded that these performances are thin and largely contradictory – an electoral tool rather than evidence of a substantive pro-worker agenda underneath the populist branding. Political scientist Carol Johnson has argued that Hanson’s rhetoric appeals in part to Australians who feel their previous racial, religious or cultural position of comfort is under threat, even as other Labor figures, such as former treasurer Wayne Swan, locate the roots of that resentment in rising economic inequality rather than prejudice as such.

The honest synthesis of this evidence is that it is not an either/or question, however much both sides of Australia’s political debate would prefer it to be. Some meaningful share of One Nation’s support is bound up with genuine hostility toward multiculturalism, Islam and Indigenous Australians specifically – Hanson’s own rhetoric is not incidental to her appeal, it is central to it for a hard core of her base, and pretending otherwise does that literature a disservice. But a party moving from a low-teens Senate niche to briefly leading national primary vote polls is, by definition, picking up large numbers of voters who were not previously drawn to that message at all. Those marginal converts are disproportionately people responding to institutional distrust, cost-of-living pain, a collapsing Coalition alternative and a housing crisis that outlasts its own headline causes – grievances that are real, and not themselves racial in character.

Calling that “overlooking” the racialised elements of the platform is only partly right. Some of the new vote really is a shrug: anger at the majors first, Hanson as the available instrument. Some of it is probably cultural-status voting that would reject the word racist while still responding to a story about lost comfort, cohesion and place. Hanson has not made that material easy to miss. The Press Club speech put monoculture near the top. The willingness to live with that message in order to register a protest is still worth examining and worth criticising. But it is a different phenomenon to the electorate itself becoming more racist, and conflating the two risks the same mistake the original framing was trying to avoid: assuming that because Hanson’s rise correlates with racist rhetoric, the underlying cause must be racism, when the more parsimonious explanation is that a uniquely bad run of institutional failures made a very large number of otherwise unlikely voters willing to tolerate a messenger they would ordinarily have rejected.

Conclusion

Australia is, on the available evidence, in a genuine mess: real wages still below their 2021 level, a fuel and inflation shock imported from a war on the other side of the world, an anti-corruption body whose highest-profile outcomes have reinforced rather than dispelled suspicion of elite protection, a Coalition that spent much of 2026 in open disarray, and a housing crisis whose political salience is outrunning its own statistical causes. The Albanese government did not create most of this, but it has presided over it, and incumbency carries that weight regardless of fault. None of that, however, makes Pauline Hanson’s platform a serious answer to any of it. A trillion dollars in uncosted commitments, a candidate-vetting process thin enough that Farley’s political history surfaced only after preselection, and a cultural vision that explicitly excludes people on the basis of religion and background, is not a program for national renewal – it is a protest vote acquiring its first parliamentary seats, and protest votes are not the same thing as a governing party.

The increment that produced this surge is not best understood as a national conversion to bigotry. It is better understood as a hard core for whom the racialised message is the point, wrapped in a much larger layer of voters who will live with that message – some by looking past it, some by sharing the cultural anxiety while refusing the label – because they have run out of patience with everyone else, and Hanson is the loudest, longest-serving alternative on offer. That is a genuine crisis of legitimacy for Australia’s major parties and its integrity institutions. Until that crisis is addressed on its own terms, it will keep producing insurgent beneficiaries, whether her name is Hanson or someone else’s.

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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

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010