No good Muslims? Pauline Hanson has removed her racism fig leaf and mulched it

February 20, 2026 — 4:00am

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Until now, most commentary on the One Nation surge has been about the effect this would have on the Coalition. That’s fair enough given it’s overwhelmingly a story of Coalition voter flight, and it is therefore the Coalition that must respond. But we’ve thought less about the effect this might have on One Nation. It’s never been here before. And we’ve never seen how a pitched battle for conservative major party status might look.

This week, we might have had our first glimpse. It began on Monday night when Pauline Hanson asked rhetorically, incredulously, “I’m sorry, how can you tell me there are good Muslims?” She wasn’t sorry, of course. At least not until a couple of days later when – having previously dug in – she conceded she didn’t “genuinely believe” what she said. She cited at least one good Muslim: the non-practising Muslim woman who stood as a One Nation candidate. She apologised to certain kinds of good Muslims “if” they were “out there”, but somehow still did it defiantly: it’s the only apology I’ve encountered that includes the words “and I am not going to apologise”.

It’s true, this wasn’t a huge departure from what Hanson has always said. Going into the 2016 election, she’d called for a royal commission into Islam. A year later, she declared........

© Brisbane Times