Pauline Hanson arrived at the National Press Club last week promising Australians some good old-fashioned common sense.
What she delivered instead was a collection of tired grievances, dubious claims and policies that would make life harder for many of the ordinary Australians she claims to represent.
After nearly thirty years in politics, Hanson is still running the same playbook: find a group to blame, find an institution to attack, take a complex problem and offer a simplistic answer. Then repeat the process.
Throughout her speech, Hanson repeatedly invoked “common sense” as though saying it often enough made it true.
But there is nothing common sense about claiming multiculturalism has failed in one of the most successful multicultural countries on Earth. There is nothing common sense about claiming Australia is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world when Australia’s overall tax burden remains below the OECD average. And there is certainly nothing common sense about proposing to slash or abolish government departments responsible for health, education and Indigenous affairs and somehow expecting outcomes to improve.
Pandemics do not manage themselves. Schools do not educate children through sheer force of optimism. Independent schools receive substantial federal funding. Is Hanson seriously suggesting the Commonwealth should walk away from that responsibility?
Nor does Indigenous disadvantage disappear because politicians decide to stop paying attention to it. For nearly three decades, Indigenous Australians and migrants have remained among Hanson’s favourite political punching bags, and little in this speech suggested that has changed.
Her treatment of climate change was equally revealing. Hanson has spent years calling climate change a hoax, dismissing climate science, attacking renewable energy and championing coal. At the Press Club she did it again.
While the rest of the developed world invests in renewable energy, emissions reduction and clean-energy industries, Hanson appears to believe Australia’s future lies in digging up more coal and pretending the problem does not exist.
As communities face worsening floods, bushfires and droughts, as insurance premiums rise and as regional communities grapple with increasingly extreme weather, Hanson is still arguing yesterday’s battles. Apparently her answer to climate change is more coal, fewer wind turbines and less action.
It is difficult to think of a position less grounded in either science or common sense.
The irony is staggering. After years spent dismissing climate change, Hanson now complains about rising costs, struggling regional communities and economic uncertainty while opposing many of the measures designed to address them.
The same lack of seriousness was evident whenever Hanson ventured into international affairs.
Australia is a trading nation. Our prosperity depends on relationships with allies, trading partners and our neighbours. Diplomacy requires judgement, trade requires negotiation and foreign policy requires an understanding that other countries have interests of their own.
Yet listening to Hanson, international relations sounded less like statecraft and more like a game of geopolitical whack-a-mole. During a single speech she managed to pick fights with China, lecture Indonesia, dismiss Pacific nations, take aim at Papua New Guinea and rail against the United Nations, which she would apparently like Australia to leave altogether.
One almost got the impression that Hanson believes Australia’s foreign policy challenges can be solved simply by telling everyone else they are wrong.
The problem is that Australia does not exist in isolation. China is our largest trading partner. Indonesia is one of our most important neighbours. The Pacific is central to Australia’s strategic interests. Papua New Guinea is one of our closest regional partners. The United Nations, for all its flaws, remains one of the principal forums through which nations cooperate on issues ranging from security to health, trade and humanitarian assistance.
Maintaining those relationships requires diplomacy, patience and judgement. It requires governments to understand that international relations are not a schoolyard argument where the loudest person wins.
Hanson appeared determined to test how many diplomatic relationships could be strained in a single speech. It was less a foreign policy than a diplomatic demolition derby.
The contradiction at the heart of the speech became even clearer when Hanson turned to workplace relations.
She presents herself as the champion of ordinary Australians, yet many of her comments sounded remarkably like a revival of the failed WorkChoices mentality. Beneath the rhetoric sat a familiar agenda: less regulation, more power for employers and fewer constraints on dismissing workers.
Listening carefully, you could be forgiven for wondering whether overtime, penalty rates, unfair dismissal protections and maternity leave are next on the chopping block.
And this is supposedly the voice of the battlers.
The nurse working night shift. The retail worker giving up weekends. The single parent trying to make ends meet. The young mother returning to work after having a baby.
These are the Australians who rely on workplace protections. These are the Australians who rely on penalty rates and maternity leave. These are the Australians Hanson claims to represent.
Yet too often her solutions seem designed to benefit employers at the expense of employees.
Then came one of the more outrageous and cruel moments of the speech: the suggestion that women are routinely obtaining abortions immediately before birth.
This is one of the oldest and most misleading talking points in the culture-war handbook. Late-term terminations are rare and almost always involve devastating medical circumstances, including severe foetal abnormalities or serious risks to a mother’s health.
These are heartbreaking situations faced by families and medical professionals. Reducing them to a political point score is not courageous. It is callous.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Hanson’s speech was what was missing. There was no serious plan to improve productivity, no credible housing strategy, no meaningful vision for strengthening public services, no roadmap for the economic opportunities emerging from the global clean-energy transition and no serious understanding of Australia’s place in a rapidly changing world.
What Australians received instead was more outrage, more scapegoats, more division and more blame.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the speech was Hanson’s continuing ability to portray herself as the victim. After nearly thirty years in Parliament, she is no longer an outsider battling the establishment. She is part of the political establishment.
Yet her answer to almost every challenge remains the same: blame migrants, blame experts, blame public institutions and blame someone else.
By the end of the National Press Club address, Hanson had managed to offend, blame or antagonise an extraordinary range of people and institutions: migrants, Indigenous Australians, women facing difficult medical decisions, workers who value penalty rates and maternity leave, climate scientists, renewable energy advocates, the ABC, universities, public servants, China, Indonesia, Pacific nations, Papua New Guinea and the United Nations.
That is quite an achievement for a single speech.
At times it was difficult to escape the conclusion that One Nation should consider a rebrand.
A rebrand from One Nation. to Many Hypocrisies.
A party that claims to stand for workers while attacking workplace protections. A party that claims to stand for common sense while rejecting evidence. A party that claims to champion ordinary Australians while proposing policies that would leave many of them worse off.
Unfortunately, the list of practical solutions was considerably shorter.
The National Press Club speech was supposed to be a vision for Australia’s future. Instead, it was a reminder of why Pauline Hanson has spent three decades complaining about problems while offering remarkably few solutions.
For someone who spent the entire speech talking about common sense, she displayed a remarkable willingness to ignore evidence whenever it got in the way of a good whinge.
She calls it common sense. The rest of us should call it what it is.
A politics of grievance dressed up as leadership.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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