While the rest of us were going about everyday life, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was overseas doing a very different kind of tour that included a podcast with far-right figure and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, a seat at a Dolce & Gabbana show, and poolside hours in Italy alongside mining magnate Gina Rinehart. Days later, she and her One Nation colleagues are still cleaning up after it.
Let us start with the podcast. Robinson raised what he called “the changing face of Australia due to Islamic immigration,” and Hanson answered without flinching that once the White Australia Policy was scrapped, she said, “different migrants” started arriving.
Then came the meeting Channel Seven’s Spotlight caught on camera. Hanson sitting down with Rupert Lowe, who runs the hard-right UK outfit Restore Britain. Lowe passed her a pamphlet with the title “mass deportations.” Hanson’s response was blunt agreement; she said the two of them were “on the same page.”
Reporter Liam Bartlett pushed further, asking outright if she thought mass deportation was a good idea and Hanson doubled down, “I love it.” It lines up with what is already on One Nation’s website, which openly calls for deporting 75,000 people it labels as illegal migrants.
Barnaby Joyce, her deputy, wasn’t about to contradict any of it. He steered clear of the words “mass deportations” himself, but the message he gave Sunrise landed in the same place once it’s clear someone isn’t meant to be here, he said, “they’ll be put on a plane and sent back to where they’re supposed to be”. I do believe we currently already deport illegal migrants.
It is worth remembering what that policy actually was. The White Australia Policy existed for decades to keep migration to this country restricted to white Europeans only nothing more, nothing less. It was formally dismantled in 1973 under Gough Whitlam. And it is also worth remembering, that this entire debate about who is “allowed” to belong here takes place on land that was never ceded. Land where First Nations people were the original and rightful Australians long before the English ever arrived to colonise it.
Hanson posted videos over the weekend attacking “left-wing media and their false, clickbait stories.” Her daughter Lee, who works for One Nation Senator Sean Bell, said her mother had been “misinterpreted” and did not want the White Australia Policy back, conceding only that Hanson “may not be the most eloquent person in the world.” Joyce offered a similar defence on Sunrise, insisting One Nation does not support the policy, while still describing its abolition as the start of a “chain of events” and crediting Harold Holt’s wind-down of it as “a very good thing.”
That is the clarification. Here is the problem with it.
Pauline Hanson can walk back her statement as much as she likes. We heard her. The media isn’t twisting her words, and we can hear her loud and clear. We have watched who she chooses to sit across from, the podcasts she appears on, the conferences she headlines, the company she keeps.
So, here is a question for the far right and for Hanson’s voters. What actually is the right kind of migrant? Is it no migrants at all? Is it white, conservative, Catholic? And if that is the answer, do white conservative Catholics not commit crimes? Do they assimilate more successfully, contribute more, build a better culture than the rest of us, simply by virtue of that description? Is every other race, every other faith, every other culture, not worthy of being Australian?
I am a Lebanese Australian migrant. I came here when I was one year old, with my 21-year-old mother, my 25-year-old father, and my grandfather. We fled a civil war. We already had family in Australia, which is the only reason we made it here at all.
My parents did not speak English. A woman, a stranger, really, who did not have to help, taught my mother to read and to speak English, bless her kindness. There was not much money. There was a lot of work. Fifty-one years later, my parents and l are still here. We have paid our taxes. We have built homes and businesses. And still, all our lives, we have had to prove we were worthy of being Australian.
Do people think it is easy to migrate? To leave your home, your family, your language, your food, your faith, and start again somewhere that does not know you. Do they think it is easy to flee with almost nothing, holding onto the hope of safety? Try living two identities at once. Try never quite feeling like you fully belong to either.
What genuinely baffles me are the migrants who defend Pauline Hanson, believing they’re the exception — that they are the “right kind” of immigrant, the one she does like. You are not. You will spend your whole life saying I’m Catholic, I’m Lebanese, as if that qualifier will finally satisfy the right-wing conservatives who think they are better. It won’t. What they actually mean, underneath all of it, is: you are not the kind of people we want.
Pauline Hanson says exactly what she believes, and only afterwards does she try to walk it back. We hear her the first time. She still can’t explain what she means by “monoculture.” What she really wants is a return to the White Australia Policy, because in her own words, that is when she believes everything started to go wrong.
We cannot let her win. Not her, not her followers. I belong here. My parents belong here. Millions of people from every corner of the earth belong here.
We are all Australian.