One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has appeared at the National Press Club for the first time in 30 years and she used the opportunity to throw down the policy gauntlet. Green-left bootboys GetUp – including the oleaginous husband of Brittany Higgins, David Sharaz – used it for a childish stunt. A day later, no one cares, except for the fact that it shows that someone in the Press Club connived with the activists. But Hanson’s address is sending shockwaves through the hydra-headed beast of the media-political uniparty.
The stunt was pathetic even by GetUp standards. A banner dropped behind her accusing Hanson of taking a pay rise while opposing wage increases for workers. Staff yanked it down. The club apologised. The Federal Police were called. And the whole sorry episode revealed more about the institutional capture of supposedly neutral venues than it did about Hanson. She simply carried on.
What rattled the establishment was the substance. Hanson laid out a coherent, unapologetic agenda that directly challenges the failed orthodoxies of the past three decades. No hedging. No virtue-signalling. Just the issues that millions of Australians have been told are off-limits.
During her wide-ranging speech, the senator expressed her views on immigration, transgender rights, abortion and workplace relations.
She declared multiculturalism “utterly failed” and called for Australia to remain multiracial but become monocultural once more.
“Under the failed policy of multiculturalism, all cultures are allowed equivalence to ours. Surely opposing that is not racist, it’s common sense.”
High migration, she said, has created an “immigration catastrophe” that is crushing housing supply and eroding social cohesion. She singled out inflows from countries “immersed in extremism like radical Islam” and warned that Britain, Canada and France have already become places too frightened to defend their own values. Radical Islam, she said bluntly, must be destroyed. There is no place for it here.
She said Islamic hate preachers were a “social cancer”.
“It’s why my policy will restrict immigration from places immersed in extremism like radical Islam because that’s what most Australians want, especially after Bondi and the return of ISIS bride terrorists,” Senator Hanson said.
“I will not hesitate to call it out for being incompatible with Australian values and our way of life, for its hatred and its love of deadly violence. If we want a secure and peaceful world, radical Islam must be destroyed. There is no place for it in Australia and my party and I won’t tolerate it.”
On the cultural front she pledged to axe the SBS outright and turn the ABC into a subscription service in the cities. Taxpayers should not be forced to fund propaganda or identity politics.
Her industrial relations pitch was equally direct. The system has swung too far against employers. Businesses cannot sack lazy workers who sit on their phones, fail to turn up or simply refuse to do the job. There must be balance, she argued, and that includes cutting the tax gouge on overtime, and letting pensioners and students work more hours without losing benefits. The latter has long been acknowledged as a disincentive to get off welfare via part-time or casual work. When an unemployed person loses more in benefits than they earn from getting back into work, basic self-interest means staying on generational welfare.
Hanson also tore into transgender ideology as a “militant force” that has “penetrated” every regulatory authority and seeks to redefine biology itself. A One Nation government would sack the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and bar biological males from women’s sport and changing rooms.
The Aids Council of New South Wales, which the senator singled out in her speech, administers the Australian Workplace Equality Index, a benchmark for LGBTQ workplace inclusion. It is endorsed by the Human Rights Commission.
And it operates in practice as a censor on behalf of perverts. Too many organisations and businesses are terrified of losing the ‘rainbow tick’, the Mark of the Groomer Beast, without which they cannot buy or sell without being branded ‘phobes’ of some persuasion.
On indigenous spending she called the National Indigenous Australians Agency a waste and Close the Gap “complete rubbish”. The money should go into consolidated revenue, not another layer of bureaucracy and symbolism. Most importantly, she said, Australians should not be treated separately on the basis of race.
She also flagged big cuts to government spending overall, an end to foreign aid for Pacific nations taking Chinese money, and the complete dismantling of climate spending programs. Tax relief would follow, including a proper overhaul rather than the piecemeal fiddling we have seen from both major parties.
The reaction from the uniparty was predictable. Albanese called it divisive. Taylor said there was no “credible plan”. The Greens reached for the usual slurs. None of them addressed the substance, because they cannot. Hanson is saying the things the majors have spent years pretending do not exist: mass immigration without assimilation, gender ideology in schools and sport, industrial relations that punish productivity and a bloated state that taxes workers to death while delivering less and less.
Australians are not frightened of her any more: they are frightened of what will happen if the current trajectory continues.
