Liberals can’t lay a finger on Labor. Now there’s someone who can – Pauline Hanson

March 19, 2026 — 5:00am

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Inside every newspaper journalist lurks a pathological hoarder. We are also, for the most part, slobs. To walk into a newsroom is to revisit yesterday’s headline, last week’s coffee dregs and ancient budget papers and AFL guides that speak to a time when the government still balanced its books and Essendon won finals matches.

Once in a while, amid the dust and detritus of forgotten reports, yellowing editions and unopened mail addressed to a former scribe who took a redundancy three rounds ago, newspaper offices can also yield a gem.

So it was a week ago when, in the immortal worlds of Prince, I was busy doing something close to nothing and came across the half-buried, tea-stained cover of a Quarterly Essay journalist David Marr wrote nearly a decade ago about the second coming of Pauline Hanson – ranga redux, as Marr dubbed it.

Towards the end of Marr’s opening stanza, this quote by Melbourne businessman and philanthropist Peter Scanlon leapt off the page. “The sad part about our current democracy is that the two major parties can’t work out they will die if they don’t work together. What they’re doing is allowing the fringe to take control.”

Scanlon over the past 20 years has through his eponymous foundation invested a significant chunk of personal wealth into researching and documenting........

© The Age