Pauline Hanson: Why I Would Never Vote for One Nation

I have been voting in Australian elections for decades. Over that time I have supported a range of parties and individuals –  Liberal when I thought they had the right approach to the economy, Labor when workers’ rights and social welfare were the priority, Teal independents when I felt fresh voices were needed on issues like climate and political integrity, and various independents who seemed genuinely connected to their communities. No vote has been cast carelessly. Each one has reflected a belief that politics should make things better for people, not worse.

There is one party I have never supported and never will: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. That is not a snap judgement. It comes from watching this country closely over many years, and from direct experience working alongside and advocating for the very people Hanson claims to represent. My opposition to One Nation is rooted in what I have seen it do to public life – the division it encourages, the fear it traffics in, and the complete absence of anything constructive underneath the noise.

To explain that view properly, I need to say something about the experiences that have shaped how I see Australia and what I think politics is for.

A Life Spent with Ordinary Australians

Most of my adult life has been spent in close contact with people who are struggling – not as a distant observer, but as someone working alongside them. I was a member of several Australian trade unions, including the Builders Labourers Federation, which in the 1970s and 1980s fought hard for workers’ safety and fair wages in an industry that treated both as optional. But union membership was just one thread in a much longer story.

For years I have done volunteer work with people experiencing homelessness. I’ve have spent time in shelters, food banks, and support programs. The people I met there were not failures or statistics. They were individuals caught by rising rents, job losses, mental illness without adequate support, relationship breakdowns – the ordinary catastrophes of a life without much of a safety net. What always struck me in those spaces was not the suffering, though that was real, but the resourcefulness of the people running these programs and the genuine community that formed among volunteers. People from completely different backgrounds, with nothing obvious in common, showing up for strangers. That is not nothing. That is something worth protecting.

I have also spent significant time working with refugees and asylum seekers – helping with language classes, cultural orientation, and advocacy for people navigating an immigration system that can be confusing and punishing even for those with a legitimate claim to protection. Every person I worked with had a story that put my own problems in perspective. They had left everything behind, often in genuinely dangerous circumstances, and arrived in a country where they were regularly treated as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be welcomed. The ones I got to know went on to build lives here, contribute to their communities, raise children who are now as Australian as anyone. The idea that they represented a threat to this country was always absurd to me and still is.

Time at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy

One of the most significant experiences of my life has been time spent at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, alongside my cousin, Aunty Isobel Coe. Aunty Isobel is a Wiradjuri elder and one of the founders of the Embassy, which was established in 1972 in direct response to the federal government’s refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights. She spent her life advocating for Aboriginal sovereignty, health, and education – not as an abstract cause but as a practical commitment to the wellbeing of her people.

Spending time there changed how I understood Australia. Not because I was ignorant of the history before – I was not – but because there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and being in a place where the weight of it is present in every conversation. The Embassy is a protest site, but it is also a cultural hub, a community meeting place, and a space for education. The conversations I witnessed and participated in were not about grievance for its own sake. They were about what a genuine reconciliation might look like, what it would mean for all Australians to understand and reckon with the full history of this continent, and how to move forward in a way that respects the rights and dignity of First Nations peoples.

That experience reinforced something I had been learning throughout my life: that the hardest and most important work in any society is the work of inclusion – making space for people whose histories and circumstances are different from the majority, and treating that diversity as a strength rather than a problem.

What One Nation Actually Does

Pauline Hanson entered federal parliament in 1996 with a speech warning that Australia was being swamped by Asians. In the years since, the target has changed – Muslims, refugees, Indigenous Australians – but the approach has stayed exactly the same. Take a group of people who can be framed as foreign, threatening, or receiving unfair advantages. Amplify anxiety about them. Offer nothing concrete in response, just more alarm.

Hanson presents herself as a voice for ordinary Australians who have been ignored by the political establishment. There is a kernel of truth in that framing – many Australians do feel that major parties have lost touch with their daily concerns. Cost of living, job security, housing affordability, the sense that the system is set up for people at the top: these are real issues that deserve serious attention. But One Nation does not provide serious attention. It provides a distraction. Blaming immigrants for housing costs, or refugees for unemployment, or Indigenous programs for inequality, does not address any of the structural causes of those problems. It just gives people something to be angry at while those causes go unexamined.

Hanson’s actual policy positions make this clear. One Nation wants to slash immigration numbers, withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention, and reject the scientific consensus on climate change. None of these positions would improve the lives of the working Australians she claims to champion. Reducing immigration would not make housing more affordable – that requires building more homes and reforming investment incentives. Withdrawing from refugee conventions would not create a single job. Denying climate change would not lower power bills; it would simply leave Australia unprepared for the consequences of a changing climate that are already arriving.

What One Nation offers is not a policy platform. It is permission to stop thinking about hard problems and direct your frustration at a convenient target instead. I have seen too much of what that kind of politics does to communities to have any patience for it.

The Damage Done

The harm One Nation causes is not only in its specific policy positions. It is in what its presence in public life normalises. When a senator stands in parliament and declares that a particular religious group is a threat to the nation, or implies that Indigenous Australians receive privileges they have not earned, that does not stay contained to parliament. It filters through media, through social media, through everyday conversations. It gives cover to people who want to express hostility toward minorities and call it politics. I have seen the effect of this in the volunteer work I have done with refugees and with unhoused people, many of whom come from minority backgrounds – the way the climate of public discourse affects how they are treated, the barriers they face, the fear they carry.

Hanson has claimed that a Voice to Parliament would amount to apartheid – an assertion that inverts history so completely it would be funny if it were not so damaging. She has argued that Indigenous Australians receive undue privileges, ignoring the straightforward fact that the policies she objects to exist because of profound and documented disadvantage created by over two centuries of dispossession, exclusion, and deliberate harm. These are not controversial historical claims. They are what happened. Pretending otherwise does not make things better for anyone; it simply makes an honest conversation about how to address the consequences impossible.

I think about Aunty Isobel, and the decades she spent working for outcomes that would benefit her community. I think about the asylum seekers I helped with language classes, and where their families are now. I think about the people I met in shelters who rebuilt their lives with the help of programs that One Nation would characterise as waste or political correctness. And I find it genuinely difficult to be polite about a politics that treats all of that as either irrelevant or suspicious.

What I Believe

I am a humanist who also holds a personal faith in God. Those two things are compatible to me because both point in the same direction: toward the dignity of every person, toward a responsibility to care for those who are struggling, and toward the understanding that we are all in this together whether we like it or not. I do not always live up to that. Nobody does. But it is the standard I try to hold myself to, and it is the standard I apply when I look at what politicians and parties actually do.

By that standard, One Nation fails completely. Not because it speaks for people who feel left behind – those people deserve to be heard. But because what it tells them is a lie. It tells them that their problems are caused by outsiders, that generosity toward others comes at their expense, that the complexity of the modern world can be resolved by closing doors and pointing fingers. None of that is true, and acting on it makes nothing better.

I have spent most of my life around people who understood, without necessarily putting it in these terms, that the only way to make things genuinely better is to work together – across backgrounds, across differences, in the unglamorous, incremental way that real progress actually happens. That is what I saw in union organising, in volunteer work, at the Tent Embassy, in the lives of refugees who became Australians. It is the opposite of everything One Nation represents.

The Choice in Front of Us

Australia is not a perfect country. Its history includes serious injustices, some of which are still being felt and still need to be addressed. Its political institutions have real failures. Its economy does not distribute its benefits as fairly as it should. These are genuine problems, and voters are right to want them taken seriously.

But they will not be taken seriously by a party whose entire strategy depends on keeping people frightened and divided. One Nation’s political survival requires ongoing grievance, ongoing othering, ongoing conflict between groups of Australians who would, in most other contexts, recognise they have far more in common with each other than with the people who actually hold economic and political power in this country. That is not representation. It is manipulation.

I will keep voting for parties and individuals who, whatever their imperfections, are genuinely trying to address the problems Australians face – housing, healthcare, climate, economic inequality – rather than using those problems as raw material for a politics of blame. And I will keep doing the volunteer work and community engagement that has taught me, more than any political theory, what it looks like when people actually help each other.

That is what Australia is capable of. It is not what One Nation offers. The difference matters, and I think it is worth saying clearly.