The conservative road to nowhere: Hanson’s empty populism

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The Weekly Essay<br>The conservative road to nowhere: Hanson’s empty populism<br>Pauline Hanson’s European junket, billionaire connections and endless culture wars exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of One Nation’s grievance politics, and for all the others who want to join in.

Eddy Jokovich and New Politics<br>Jul 21, 2026

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One Nation’s support has suffered a drop in opinion polls, although it is too early to tell if it’s already reached its high-water mark and will drop down even further. The latest Roy Morgan poll shows One Nation in third place behind the Coalition, and this fall is consistent with most other polls that have been recently published.<br>In a Labor–One Nation contest, Labor leads by 55-to-45 per cent after preferences, and between Labor and the Coalition, Labor leads 56-to-44 per cent. Of course, these are only opinion polls, but it suggests the Labor Party would easily win an election – if it were to be held today – and despite the ongoing clamouring and promotion of right-wing causes by the mainstream media, One Nation would be nowhere near the levers of government, and rightly so.<br>This decline coincides with Pauline Hanson’s extended European junket, during which she addressed two conservative conferences in Britain, appeared with far-right anti-Islam activist and convicted criminal, Tommy Robinson, and was later photographed poolside, lapping it up with mining billionaire Gina Rinehart at the five-star Grand Hotel San Pietro in Italy. Hanson says the trip did not cost taxpayers “one cent” – it’s money or support coming from either Rinehart or Seven West Media – but she refuses to say who, even though she’ll have to inform the Parliamentary Registry of Expenses within 28 days.<br>At CPAC Great Britain – a conference of conservative has-beens and non-entities who are unhappy that the rest of the world is not championing their collection of insane far-right ideals – Hanson told her small audience that she was “sick of hearing about white privilege”, would “not apologise for being white” (even though no-one has asked her to), and feared for England’s future. Her assessment of the “British decline” was built around those familiar themes of the international populist right: migration, multiculturalism, Muslims, transgender people, net-zero policies and the supposedly malign influence of “globalists”. And, apparently, Australia is next to travel down this same road if it doesn’t watch out.<br>Let’s leave aside for the time being that many of Britain’s current issues are the results of over 40 years of neoliberalist policies, a continuous circus-act of incompetent governments, and the Brexit decision of 2016 – but it was an odd argument for Hanson to export from a country whose multicultural cities continue to perform highly by international standards. In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2026 Global Liveability Index, from the over 4,000 recognised capital cities in the world, Melbourne was ranked third, Sydney was fourth and Adelaide was eighth.<br>This doesn’t mean that Australia doesn’t have issues that need to be dealt with – housing is increasingly unaffordable, wages have struggled to keep up with the cost of living, public services are constantly under pressure, and governments have repeatedly failed to plan adequately for population growth. But these are issues to do with government competence and economic policy, not evidence of cultural diversity causing the end of civilisation.<br>The company Hanson chose to keep when she was overseas was also problematic. Among the delegates were the former British 49-day prime minister Liz Truss, the failed Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and other desperadoes from the international right. Hanson’s separate appearance with Robinson was more even more concerning. Robinson has an extensive criminal record, including convictions for assault, fraud-related offences and ongoing contempt of court. Being interviewed by a controversial criminal might not be inherently terrible, but Hanson appeared as a sympathetic political subject in the same grievance-based world that Robinson lives in.<br>Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticised Hanson for travelling overseas to “denigrate and talk down Australia”, which is exactly what she did. That’s a justified criticism but it’s also another reminder of the wider hypocrisy within conservative politics. The politicians most likely to describe themselves as “patriots” are increasingly willing to appear in front of foreign audiences and depict Australia as a broken society that’s been captured by hostile influences, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.<br>Another one of these hypocrites is Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie, who is keen...