She’s the flame-haired 71-year-old whose views on immigrants and race-based stunts made her a pariah in Australian politics.

But three decades after first entering national parliament, public support for Pauline Hanson is surging, as the global wave of rightwing populism breaks on the country’s shores.

Hanson’s One Nation party this month won its first federal lower house seat, crushing the main conservative parties in a regional farming district they had held for more than 75 years.

The opposition leader, Angus Taylor, described it as “an “existential” moment” for the Liberal-National Coalition, whose collapse over the past 12 months has coincided with One Nation’s rise.

Deploying the same anti-immigration, anti-climate action, anti-establishment messaging as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, and backed by Australia’s richest person, Hanson now wants to target Labor-held territory and permanently reshape Australia’s increasingly fractured political landscape.

“There is a frustration, there is a malaise [in the community],” says Barnaby Joyce, the former National party leader and deputy prime minister who last year defected to One Nation.

“Overwhelming, there’s a frustration that so many people have that we [Australia] have no vision and they are going to hand to their children a lesser nation than their parents handed to them.

“That is an intolerable proposition.”

Who is Pauline Hanson?

After One Nation won 23% of the vote and four seats at the state election in South Australia in March, Hanson expressed a feeling of validation.

Ever since arriving in the national spotlight as a 41-year-old former Queensland fish-and-chip-shop owner, Hanson has cast herself as an outsider, underdog and victim of mainstream political elites.

She was originally preselected to run for the Liberal party at the 1996 federal election, before she was dumped after controversial comments about Indigenous Australians.

After winning the seat of Oxley as an independent, she used her first speech to the federal parliament to call for multiculturalism to be “abolished” and claimed – without evidence – that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”.

The target of Hanson’s xenophobia may have shifted over the three decades since but her anti-immigrant agenda has remained at the core of her political brand.

She co-founded One Nation in 1997, achieving immediate success with an 11-seat haul at the next year’s Queensland state election.

Just months later, she failed to regain a seat in national parliament, despite polling the most primary votes, after Labor and conservatives parties encouraged voters to put her in a low position on the ballot paper in Australia’s preferential voting system.

Hanson would spend the next 18 years away from Canberra, an exile that included three months in prison for electoral fraud – the Queensland court of appeal subsequently overturned all convictions and she was released and fully acquitted – several failed election campaigns, and periods apart from the scandal-plagued, dysfunctional party she had established.

One Nation was still on the fringes but Hanson frequently attracted headlines after her return in 2016, including for wearing a burqa on the Senate floor as part of a campaign to ban the garment, a stunt she repeated in 2025 and for which she was suspended from parliament.

The party polled 6.4% at the 2025 election, doubling its result from the previous ballot but well short of the support needed to win seats in the lower house, where government is formed.

‘Not the forgotten people any more’

The quiet grieving at Sydney’s Bondi beach was broken up with the sound of applause as Hanson and Joyce laid flowers for the victims of Australia’s worst terror attack in December.

The allegedly Islamic State-inspired mass shooting that killed 15 people and wounded dozens of others at a Hanukah celebration was immediately weaponised by One Nation to advance its anti-immigration agenda.

In the lead-up to the massacre, opinion polls were already showing a tripling of support for Hanson’s party as the Liberals and Nationals descended into chaos and infighting after their catastrophic 2025 election defeat.

One Nation’s popularity accelerated in the weeks after the antisemitic attack, surpassing the Coalition and positioning themselves as the de facto opposition to Anthony Albanese’s Labor government despite holding just five of the 226 lower and upper house seats.

Desperate to arrest their decline, the Liberals and Nationals installed new leaders who immediately signalled a lurch to the right, in particular on immigration.

In a major speech in Canberra this week, Taylor unveiled a policy to restrict overseas arrivals and bar non-citizens – including permanent residents – from welfare payments.

Hanson immediately claimed credit for the announcement, just as she did when the Coalition followed One Nation’s lead and abandoned a net zero emissions target.

After a historic result at the South Australian state election, a byelection in the federal seat of Farrer was the first test of One Nation on the national stage.

The sprawling electorate in south-western New South Wales had been held by the Liberals and Nationals since its creation in 1949.

The two establishment parties were annihilated in the 9 May ballot as One Nation’s candidate secured almost 40% of the vote.

The public backlash to Hanson questioning if there were “good Muslims”, her support for Donald Trump and revelations that One Nation had rehired a convicted rapist appeared not to damage the image of the party leader, who has enjoyed the same imperviousness to scandal as Trump and Farage.

The flagrant contradiction in Hanson casting herself as the battlers’ champion while accepting gifts from the mining billionaire Gina Rinehart also does not seem to have sullied her standing with many working-class voters.

“Pauline is like their aunty,” Joyce says. “She could probably put things better but she is fighting for them and she probably understands their lives vastly better than others.”

In her victory-night speech in Farrer, Hanson declared One Nation was “coming after those other seats” – including ones held by Labor.

“You are not going to be the forgotten people any more,” she said. “We are proud Australians. We want our country back and that’s what One Nation is about.”

A populist agenda

The Farrer result confirmed One Nation is a real and immediate threat to the traditional centre-right parties, particularly in seats outside Australia’s eight state and territory capitals.

But it’s not just the Liberals and Nationals at risk.

The rise of One Nation is occurring in the context of a wider, decades-long trend of diminishing support for the major political parties.

Despite the Labor party winning a historic 94 out of 150 lower seats at the 2025 election, with just 34.5% of the vote, it too is in a precarious position.

“The two major parties have left a massive void with regards to vision and policy direction and so One Nation has been able to capitalise on a majority of voters who don’t have much trust in the major parties,” says Associate Prof Jill Sheppard, an expert in politics at the Australian National University.

Labor didn’t run a candidate in Farrer but the results of the South Australian state ballot showed the party haemorrhaging support to One Nation in the working-class outer suburbs.

Just as the rightwing party has been shaping Coalition policies, there are signs Hanson is starting to influence the government’s agenda.

Labor this week reneged on an election promise not to touch property investor tax concessions in a policy designed to give younger Australians a better shot at breaking into the housing market.

It was seen as a direct and drastic attempt to combat the economic anxieties and disillusionment that the government believes is pushing voters to embrace Hanson’s populist agenda.

“We’re doing what’s necessary, not what’s convenient, at a time of extraordinary, accelerating change in the world playing out in our economy and society,” said the treasurer, Jim Chalmers.

“And when you look around the world, from Farage to Farrer – the choice this moment presents for parties of government is clear.”

“We are the last ones standing in the sensible centre of Australian politics but we aren’t standing still.”

With Hanson on the march, the major parties in Australia cannot afford to stand still.