The rise of One Nation is all about ‘middle-finger voters’

February 26, 2026 — 5:00am

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We should be grateful to Pauline Hanson for again reminding us who she is. Whenever you order a serve from One Nation, you don’t get a little dollop of racism on the side. Hateful bigotry has always been her main fare, reheated over and over, with little effort to mask its bitterness.

The only surprising thing about Hanson declaring there are no good Muslims is that anyone is surprised. She could not have been more emphatic in her “swamped by Muslims” speech to federal parliament 10 years ago, when she claimed Islam was incompatible with Australian values and warned that unless we closed our borders to Muslim immigrants, we’d end up governed by Sharia law.

“Islam cannot have a significant presence in Australia if we are to live in an open, secular and cohesive society,” she told her fellow senators. “We have seen the destruction it is causing around the world. If we don’t make changes now there will be no hope in the future.”

It was a ludicrous speech, lifted from the talking points of Geert Wilders and other Euro-bigots, in which special bathing times at public pools for Muslim women and halal meat certification were cited not as practical examples of cultural accommodation, but evidence of a Muslim patch-over.

A decade later, Hanson is older, more politically savvy and no less obsessed by this phantom menace, with residents of Sydney’s Lakemba last week bemused to read they........

© The Age