Pauline Hanson demands the same scrutiny as other party leaders

June 19, 2026 — 7:30pm

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Ever since she made a video in 1997 to be released if she was assassinated, Pauline Hanson has been as much a media outlet as she is a politician.

Her appearance at the National Press Club this week may have had the conventional format of an aspiring leader facing those whose job it is to scrutinise them, but from the outset it also saw conventions broken.

To be fair, the first of these transgressions came not from the senator herself but from GetUp’s banner stunt as she stood to speak. Hanson described it as “disgusting”; a word that might equally be used for her repeated appearances in an Afghan burqa on the floor of federal parliament.

From there on, the One Nation leader played chief disruptor, portraying Australia as a dystopia in the grip of “energy poverty”, social breakdown and financial mismanagement, but also taking time out to attack individual journalists in the room and blacklist those media she regards as irretrievably left wing. She looked forward to closing down SBS and transforming the national broadcaster.

In a recent column for The Age on Hanson’s election prospects, Waleed Aly noted: “The problem for........

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