Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club appearance cannot be judged by normal standards of evidence or logic, because her appeal lies in grievance, demagoguery and a direct rejection of the journalists and institutions trying to scrutinise her.
It is pointless to judge Pauline Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club on Wednesday by the standards we (as interest observers, journalists, or political junkies) normally apply. Why? Because she is not talking to us. We are irrelevant. Her audience is as dismissive of what we think, as she is. Which is? Totally.
That audience doesn’t care, or doesn’t appreciate, or even rejects, critiques that complain that her arguments are illogical, based on false premises and factually incorrect, and are racist. They like it that she uses a word such as ‘liar’ to describe the Prime Minister, and that she responds to media critics by following President Trump’s playbook – on this occasion damning one woman who dared question whether the Senator had a hand in the appointment of her daughter to a parliamentary advisory post as a ‘trashy journalist’.
Her captive audience now includes the growing band of ‘sovereign citizens’ who deny the legitimacy of our system of government and damn the mythical power that the United Nations is alleged to exert over all of us. Her solution, quit the UN.
She doesn’t pretend to represent working people. Her votes in the Senate make that absolutely clear. Rather her target audience is small business – and particularly people who have run a small business that has failed.
She – like many a Coalition spokesperson – likes to quote figures showing just how many small businesses are failing in Australia, using that as a measure of how badly the economy is performing. The official figures are confronting – in 2024-25 more than 370,000 small businesses closed their doors. Neither she nor the Coalition mentions another relevant figure, namely that in that same period, more than 437,000 small businesses started trading for the first time.
It is in defence of small business that she rejects improved wages and conditions for working people. Not mentioned are the even greater benefits that her policies would produce for very large enterprises, like that of her primary and extremely generous benefactor, Gina Rinehart.
Her speech persuaded the Canberra Times to label her as a ‘demagogue’ – ‘a political agitator appealing to the basest instincts of a mob’ according to my dictionary. That is probably more apt than the more common description of her policies as ‘dog-whistling’. There is nothing subtle about her denunciation of radical Islam, migration, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, Welcome to Country, transgender women, officials involved in human rights – and more.
She explores every large – or small – grievance that might excite her prospective voters.
Her solutions don’t really matter – or rather, they aren’t what makes her attractive to so many people at present. She would want to abolish a host of federal departments that she claims duplicate what the states do – education, health, and many more – or programs of which she disapproves – such as child care. The money saved this way could then be spent on building new coal-based power stations and a nuclear power plant as well.
Those power stations would take the place of the solar panels on agricultural land and wind turbines. She damned ‘the hoax of global warming’ and she called it.
There is little point arguing with Senator Hanson – she isn’t interested in facts that she can’t manipulate to back her picture of an Australia that is all gloom and doom. Her audience is not going to query or fact-check what she says nor the logic of her arguments.
Her presentation is now far more polished than it was when she first broke into the national political scene 30 years ago. And her handling of hostile questions now is far more adept and aggressive – and likely to strengthen her appeal to her supporters.
And she is even more forthright now about her racist policies – while denying ‘the lie’ that they are racist. Those are the policies she outlined at the very beginning of her speech: cut (radical) Muslim migration, end multi-culturalism and become a monocultural society (though we are multiracial).
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Memo to ABC management: Senator Hanson has reiterated that your journalists are banned from her media conferences. You shouldn’t expect any support from other media organisations – News Corp, in particular, is hostile towards you and would prefer your news organisation to be destroyed.
Nor can non-ABC journalists help. Their employers won’t allow them to boycott the Senator’s media events, even if they wanted to do so. The most you can expect is something like the press gallery committee’s assertion that the restrictions ‘undermine and weaken Australia’s political system’.
What you need to do is oblige the Senator by banning on ABC radio or television any coverage at all of what she says and does. If your journalists can’t do their jobs as journalists and question what she says, they should cease reporting anything she says, whether at press conferences or through statements issued to the gallery or interviews given to other media outlets.
This could affect (negatively) the coverage she gets in the bush and provincial areas. That would be her problem, a consequence of her own decision.
David Solomon is a former legal and political correspondent. He has degrees in Arts and Law and a Doctorate of Letters. He was Queensland Integrity Commissioner 2009-2014.