Pauline Hanson told Brisbane’s 4BC radio on July 21 that domestic violence is “wrong, but it’s also a two-way street“. She attributed it to the “pressures of living” and said “women can lose their cool as well”.

Fellow One Nation Senator Barnaby Joyce had used the same program earlier that day to advise men to “walk out of the house” before losing their temper, reaching for James Bond as a model of masculine self-control. Brittany Higgins called the framing atrocious, given at least 38 women had already died so far this year at the hands of men. Advocates point out that “just leave” ignores everything known about the danger of separation.

All that criticism is accurate but none explains why “two-way street” sounds true to people who aren’t invested in gender politics. Hanson isn’t inventing this belief. She’s surfacing one that already exists and giving it a slogan; the response to her keeps stopping at her character instead of asking why the slogan lands.

When the backlash built, Hanson posted that she’d been “taken out of context” and that rival media had “used only a few quotes” to make it look like she’d downplayed domestic violence. It’s worth checking, because a genuine misquote reads better in full. The longer version of her comments adds that women “shouldn’t put up with it” if they don’t feel safe at home, the same advice already covered, restated with softer framing rather than corrected.

There’s no context in which “two-way street” becomes something other than what it says. It’s a reflexive move, not a considered one.

Days earlier, when her comments on a podcast about the White Australia policy drew criticism, her daughter went on Sky News to say Hanson had been “taken out of context” there too. Hanson largely let others front the cameras.

Whatever the specific claim, her response is identical: not a correction, but an accusation that the record is being distorted.

Hanson’s cost-of-living framing doesn’t just shift violence onto an external stressor, it states plainly that hitting a partner is a legitimate response to stress. Nearly a quarter of the country already agrees: the 2021 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) found 23% of respondents believe domestic violence is “a normal reaction to day-to-day stress and frustration”.

This is not a new position for Hanson. In 2019, as deputy chair of a parliamentary family law inquiry, she told ABC radio that women were “nothing but liars” who fabricate abuse allegations to gain leverage in custody disputes, a claim she couldn’t substantiate beyond her own son’s case. On this one she has real company: 37% of NCAS respondents agreed that women going through custody battles often make up, or exaggerate, claims of domestic violence to gain tactical advantage.

Her “two-way street” view only holds together if domestic violence is real, but that recognition survives only in the abstract. When a specific woman describes her own experience of it, Hanson’s position flips: she becomes someone probably lying, using it, weaponising it against a father.

Domestic violence is real in the abstract, real enough to build a slogan on, and suspect every time an actual woman describes it. That isn’t a contradiction Hanson has failed to notice; it’s the anti-feminist mechanism.

That two-sidedness belief has been getting more common, not less. The same NCAS found 41% of respondents believe domestic violence is equally committed by men and women, and that only 57% recognise men as the predominant perpetrators, down from 74% in........

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