When Hanson’s supporters examine all her policies, what they find could ‘horrify’ them

July 19, 2026 — 1:53pm

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You have probably heard of “the Overton window”. It’s one of those faux-academic jargon phrases with which our language is increasingly cluttered. The eponymous window – named after the American social theorist Joseph Overton, who came up with the metaphor – defines the acceptable boundaries of public discussion. When those boundaries are exceeded, commonly by an iconoclastic politician who says something that no-one else has dared to say before, it is sometimes described as “shifting the Overton window”.

Nobody in our recent politics has shifted the Overton window more than Pauline Hanson. Her greatest impact has been in her assault on multiculturalism: what had been settled bipartisan policy for decades is now increasingly under challenge.

For 30 years, Hanson has built her reputation as the plain-spoken Aussie who dares to say the unsayable. Even when so much of what she says is appalling, she has nevertheless thrived on the disdain of the political establishment. Its response to her unfiltered prejudices only reinforced her outsider status. As respect for that establishment eroded, she became the main beneficiary. That was not so much because of her ideas as her image: we love a fighter, the person who stands up to Canberra, and Pauline seemed to fit the bill........

© Brisbane Times