Why Pauline Hanson’s small business message falls flat

The Senator, who just raised $2.7 million for “Kick Out the Liar” and has his eye on the Lodge, never had to negotiate a lease renewal he could lose, writes Wayne Hawkins.

A NATIONAL SENATOR Pauline Hanson like that Addressing the National Press Club On June 17, he positions himself—as he has for 30 years—as the true voice of the small business warrior.

This week Hanson is also celebrating a very different achievement: “Fire the Liar“online fundraising blitz raised more than: $2.7 million It attracted nearly 28,000 donors in less than two days and galvanized the Prime Minister into action Anthony Albanese questioning its legitimacy. One Nation brought in an independent auditor and disclosed the money ‘steep slope‘.

The National Press Club’s own blurb describes it this way: ‘owned several small businesses’ and therefore ‘He knows what struggle means’. The fundraising machine that operates under this claim is worth examining.

This is not the content of a minor party senator crossbench. Recently One Nation overtook the Labor Party being the country’s most popular party in the preliminary vote – 31% to Labour’s 30%, with the Coalition falling to 18%. May candidate David Farley Farrer wins by-election – One Nation has a lower house seat for the first time in its 30-year history.

Hanson has since announced that the party will now target seats in Labour’s lower house. In short, he is advancing towards the Lodge, and he is doing so on the back of combative votes.

This makes the question of what Hanson actually did for this warrior more pressing than the Senate’s curiosity.

Senator Hanson, as it were, right now under review for not declaring business interests A Super Progressive Movie – a film in which he had a financial stake through A Pauline Production Pty Ltd, a company whose name was not disclosed on parliamentary records for nearly five years.

The same undisclosed interests include: Small Batch Brewing Pty Ltda craft beer initiative. Corporate records show both companies were co-run by a party official who previously pleaded guilty to election fraud.

The “Fire the Liar” campaign, funded by 28,000 angry warriors for an average of $59 per person, is also in interesting company: Hanson accepted an offer. $2.1 million light aircraft From a company linked to the mining magnate Gina Rinehart In April.

When Albanese pointed this out, Hanson said the Prime Minister was “jealous” of One Nation’s popularity. The plane came from Australia’s richest person. The fundraiser came from people at the bottom of the income distribution. Hanson’s genius has always been to bring the latter together to serve the interests of the former.

This is Hanson’s business model in miniature: use the platform to build the brand, use the brand to make money with the audience, use the audience to amass the kind of capital and political clout no small business operator can ever match. The rest of Australia calls it fraud. Small business owners call this something they can never get away with.

Consider a typical independent cafe operating inside a large shopping mall; the kind of business that connects localities in every state. Uses milk by volume. About thirty three-litre bottles a day. In a dynamic that would surprise most people if explained clearly, the wholesale price available to this business as a commercial food business is as follows: often higher more than the retail price on the shelf of the supermarket that shares the same car park.

So the cafe buys its milk from the supermarket. As a retail customer. Because the market that exists to serve commercial operators is being structurally undermined by the same duo that are supposedly the café’s downstream rival.

The farmer is stuck at the gate of the farm. Small businesses are stuck at the wholesale counter. The duopoly captures the middle. Coles and Woolworths reported total profit 2.7 billion dollars In fiscal year 2023. Independent cafe operator offers click and collect ordering.

This is not a bureaucracy problem. This is a market power issue.

Now put that cafe next to a national franchise in the same area. The customer sees two coffee shops. They can notice a small price difference and come to a reasonable conclusion; independent charges may be higher because they are less efficient. For them, what is invisible is the underlying structural reality.

Franchise input pricing is not a one-store bargain. This is a national network negotiation. The quantity brought into this supply agreement is the sum of the price feeds supplied to each location, including next to each outlet and independent store in the country. The independent negotiates alone as a sole operator against suppliers who already know how much the franchise is paying. The difference in purchasing power is structural. Both businesses exist before they open the door.

And renting makes it even worse. Standard commercial leases in shopping centers increasingly include turnover provisions; Above an income threshold, a percentage of every dollar over that limit flows to the property owner. A business becomes successful, builds its customer base, earns more, and the reward is siphoned upwards by the homeowner who assumes no risk.

Commercial rents close to CBDs rising sharply as landlords tighten their leverage. And unlike a decade ago, leases no longer come with renewal options as standard; Now every expiration is a new negotiation between an operator whose everything depends on a location and a real estate company with lawyers and time on its side.

Institute of Public Relations’ April 2026 survey Documents the net loss of approximately 33,500 small employing businesses between June 2022 and June 2025; This represents three consecutive years of net closures attributed to red tape, energy costs and Labor government regulations. The data is real. It’s not a diagnosis.

Deregulation does not fix wholesale pricing inversion. Cutting red tape does not rebalance the sole operator’s position in rent negotiation against a billion-dollar real estate company. Lower taxes do not change the fact that a national franchise has access to input pricing through corporate supply agreements that would never be offered to any individual operator.

The IPA’s own researcher admits: Without radical change, ‘We will see a further consolidation of economic power among large corporations and multinationals’ and then orders the deregulation that would hasten exactly that outcome.

The right uses the pain of small businesses to advocate for policies that benefit big business. This is not a coincidence. This is the function.

What small businesses really need is structural intervention in the damaging mechanisms: genuine anti-monopoly enforcement that prevents wholesale price reversals from becoming a permanent feature of the food economy; commercial tenancy reform, which realigns rental options and caps turnover requirements, which transfers the upside of success to asset owners; and a cooperative purchasing framework that allows independent operators to pool the purchasing power guaranteed by national franchises.

Pauline Hanson’s platform has none of this. None of it happened. Because none of these serve the interests of the capital that finances the political ecosystem in which it operates; Whether that capital comes in the form of $2.7 million from online donors or a $2.1 million plane from a mining billionaire.

The senator knows what it means to own a fish and chip shop, which he sold in 1997. He knows what it means to own undisclosed shares in a production company. He knows all too well what it means to turn the economic concerns of ordinary Australians into fundraising momentum and then do nothing structural with it.

Now he is preparing for the biggest prize in Australian politics. “Fire the Liar” war chest, lower house thrust, vote increase This causes the Coalition to panic about seat-splitting deals: this is not the behavior of a senator. This party is a candidate for government.

Small businesses in this country deserve better than performance. It deserves someone who understands the difference between the bureaucracy argument and the market power argument and knows which one actually pays the milk bill. The Senator, who had just collected $2.7 million from the warriors he claimed to represent, had 30 years to prove he was that person. The record speaks for itself.

Wayne Hawkins owns the Crisp N Sweet bakery and cafe in Claremont, Tasmania, and is an independent candidate for the federal seat of Clark at the 2028 Election.

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