To rein in Hanson, her political foes must stop making One Nation’s case

August 10, 2026 — 5:00am

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A column in two halves. Let’s start with the Liberals. In 2019, then prime minister Scott Morrison spoke of “a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community. And worse still an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”. Only an Australian government could defend its national interest: “We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia.”

So my ears pricked up when I read about Pauline Hanson announcing that Warren Pickering would lead One Nation in Victoria. Here – as reported in this masthead – is what Pickering was saying last year: Australia is “in the grips of a bunch of unelected foreign bureaucrats … Let’s tell those globalists … what it means to be Australian.”

More recently – about a month ago – Tony Abbott spoke of “sustained mass migration” being implemented with the aim to “dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture”. “To green-left, cultural-Marxist governments, mass migration from the ‘global south’ is not a problem; it’s the plan.”

Here, it seems, Pickering got there first, talking in 2024 of migration being deployed by globalists as a tool to change Australia’s population in order “to get away with all the other things they’re trying to do”. Mass migration as a Trojan horse to deliver a shadowy left-wing agenda.

Except that Abbott has been dabbling in this area for years. In 2019, he was guest of honour at a conference on demography in Hungary, opened by Viktor Orban, then prime minister, who spoke of “political forces........

© The Sydney Morning Herald