One Nation is feeding on real pressure from population growth, housing, health and infrastructure strain, but its politics offers no serious systemic reform – only the familiar scapegoating of outsiders.
The message was clear. It was from a recent migrant from South Africa who was married to a recent migrant from Bosnia.
At a roundtable birthday party discussion, the subject of Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech came up. The migrant said she did not feel qualified to comment but mentioned a hospital visit with her child which cost nothing; the lack of violence; the abundance of good food at a reasonable price; and how she and her husband were on track to buy a house. In short, she wondered: “What are you whingeing about?”
It was a good question to ask Australia’s Whinger-in-Chief, Pauline Hanson.
We know what she is whingeing about, or more correctly what she is identifying as the main whinges of the people she hopes will vote for her.
That whinge is fairly straightforward: outsiders will come and take away the good things we have and make things worse for us. The fear goes back as far as when homo sapiens first came out of Africa. Bands of humans came together for the purpose of ensuring outsiders did not come and take the things that made life good for them, especially habitat or land.
As human societies became more sophisticated, the things that made life good became more than just land. They included infrastructure and services. So even in a fairly non-violent society the threat of the loss of good things in life remained real.
And the Whinger-in-Chief preys brilliantly upon this powerful human concern. It works because it has some basis in reality. Population pressure has long been a cause of environmental and economic degradation and even extinction.
Every slight inconvenience or woe in what is generally a pretty good society and economy is sheeted home to the outsiders coming in and taking what we have got. And it is not just material things but also spiritual and emotional things like a sense of belonging and a sense of permanence.
And if the Whinger-in-Chief can blow these things out of proportion and present herself as the only person with the wherewithal to prevent this potential economic and emotional loss to enough voters, her party will win a lot of seats at the next election – enough to end the 80-year, two-party dominance of Australian politics.
There are two important elements to this voter trend. The first is that One Nation does not offer any real let alone detailed solutions or prescriptions to fix the things that they are whingeing about. The second is that the voters, and indeed the media, are not demanding that One Nation set out some detailed proposals as to how these things might be fixed – particularly housing and health.
The only “solution” offered is the panacea of removing the outsiders, or not letting them in in the first place. The cruelty and illegality of that solution make it a non-solution. It is similar to the Brexit solution. That was based on the lie that the European Union and its outside bureaucrats were source of Britain’s woes. Just leave Europe and all will be well.
Not so. Brexit was catastrophic and made things worse.
Importantly, much as One Nation whinges that “the system” is not working, One Nation does not propose one systemic change that might help Australia. The system of government, which supposedly does not work, is categorised as a two-party system so the two major parties can be blamed because they are the system, when in fact they are the creatures of the system, not the system itself.
What about parts of the system that make its working dysfunctional, such as the weak laws about political donations? What about disclosure and regulation of lobbyists’ activities? What about parliamentary scrutiny of the Executive through committees – an important part of the system that can make it function better, but which One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson choses to play virtually no part?
One Nation is also silent on freedom of information laws which are critical to “the system” working in an accountable way. What about One Nation whingeing about media scrutiny and banning some journalists from access?
If One Nation is taking votes away from Labor, as the polls suggest, then that is partially the fault of Labor, not of One Nation. Labor has arguably failed on the systemic part of open, accountable, democratic government. And Labor allowed immigration numbers to blow out to such an extent that polling suggested that the great majority of people were concerned about absolute numbers. That gave fuel to One Nation’s divisive, racist, and culturally exclusivist policies.
It was obvious and pointed out by some, including me, that any post-Covid catch up in immigration numbers would play in to the hands of those who would opportunistically seize on the issue, and this is precisely what has happened. But those who called for caution and restraint in immigration numbers were branded racist when it had nothing to do with race. It was just a sane argument about population growth. High population growth puts strain on economies and people’s incomes and access to infrastructure and services. That causes resentment and sets up a platform for the likes of One Nation.
One Nation has been able to use the stresses caused by high population growth on infrastructure and health, education and child and aged care to blame outsiders for those stresses. One Nation does not have a population policy, only an immigration policy, so that it can hit emotional buttons with the tried and tested method of blaming outsiders.
But if you think of the economy and society as a bus with, say, 15 too many people on it to get up a hill, the bus will only get up the hill if 15 people get off and it would not not matter what their religion or skin colour.
The important thing for the government is whether it can get population growth down enough to relieve the pressure on infrastructure and services that is causing the discontent upon which One Nation feeds. Compared to that, few voters, other than captains of industry who want cheap labour and more customers, care about rising overall national income. Only per-capita income matters when looking at voter satisfaction.
Better to live in a country with higher per-capita income more evenly spread than a country with higher overall income less evenly spread.
In any event, Australia is doing pretty well, thank you very much. As the recent migrants from South Africa and Bosnia (nations scarred by racial and religious violence) said: “What are you whinging about?”
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 23 June 2026.
Republished from Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull has written for The Canberra Times for 30 years on a huge range of topics, but mainly legal and constitutional. He was Editor for seven years. He taught journalism at the University of Canberra, and is the author of ‘The High Court of Australia 1903-2003’ and ‘Canberra – Australia’s National Capital’. He is also a marine rescue skipper on the Great Barrier Reef with Marine Rescue Queensland.