Can Pauline Hanson keep One Nation’s political momentum despite Malcolm Roberts, Gina Rinehart associations?
For decades, Pauline Hanson has warned Australians about social tensions she believes are being ignored by the political establishment.
Now, on the other side of the world, he was walking the multicultural streets of Britain with one of the most controversial figures in the debate.
The footage was also reflected in Australia, with far-right, anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant thug Tommy Robinson filming the trip to Luton and praising Hanson as “one of the bravest women on the planet”.
Within days, the One Nation leader was photographed poolside at a five-star boutique hotel in Sicily with billionaire philanthropist Gina Rinehart, while his long-time lieutenant in Canberra, Malcolm Roberts, was under fire again for conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic imagery and praise for Vladimir Putin.
As Hanson’s poll numbers soften across the board, political observers wonder whether the company he keeps overseas and some of the colleagues waiting for him at home could unravel the momentum he’s been trying to build for decades.
Individually each episode would have been manageable. Together, they became a test of whether One Nation was ready for the scrutiny that came with being a genuine political force.
But Hanson made a familiar defense.
“Supporters clearly see the full range of lies and distortions used against One Nation by the media and political establishment over the past month.” he wrote on FacebookHe added that these were “desperate tactics from a desperate institution.”
But the footage from England forced Hanson’s star parliamentary colleague, Barnaby Joyce, into a bizarre defence.
“I don’t really support what Tommy Robinson did, but I think it’s incredibly important that we understand the social dynamic and how that came about,” Joyce told ABC radio.
Joyce argued that Australia needed to understand the circumstances that gave rise to figures like Robinson and ensure similar social divisions did not emerge here.
However, what Joyce said on air and what he thought seem quite different. This imprint reported that Hanson told associates that the decision to appear with Robinson was ill-advised, showing a misunderstanding of voters’ attitudes, revealing tensions within the small group of big personalities within One Nation. Joyce said the claim was false.
While Hanson has been publicly voicing his support for Robinson for years, the One Nation machine itself is trying to cancel the meeting, claiming it was staged by Seven’s. Agenda.
When Robinson inquired about Hanson abroad, Malcolm Roberts was training them at home.
Noting the 71-year-old’s declining physical health, there is growing speculation on One Nation that Roberts may fall on the sword before the next election and be replaced by Hanson’s long-time chief of staff, James Ashby.
Roberts has been one of Hanson’s closest political allies for a decade after recovering from the parliamentary citizenship saga and returning to the Senate. Over the past few weeks, many of his controversies have resurfaced.
He appeared on conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones’ show and described Jones as a “beacon of hope around the world” whose “credibility is very, very high”. Jones, now bankrupt, was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to the Sandy Hook families after repeatedly claiming the massacre was a hoax.
Roberts praised Vladimir Putin for standing up to “globalists” and shared a notorious anti-Semitic mural online, describing it as “the most powerful photo I’ve ever seen.” Roberts also suggested it was “highly likely” that the US Air Force had sprayed chemical tracers and supported the work of a notorious anti-Semite.
The controversy drew condemnation from Jewish community leaders and led to renewed questions about whether Hanson would distance himself from his senator. He didn’t.
But perhaps this is not surprising. Hanson once floated the idea that the Port Arthur massacre was a false flag operation.
“Those shots were precision shots. I read a lot and I read the book about it called Port Arthur. There are a lot of questions there,” Hanson said. Al Jazeera undercover investigation.
Instead Joyce found himself defending the party once again in an interview with Sky News’ Andrew Bolt, who described Roberts as a “complete lunatic”.
“Malcolm Roberts’ mind… he’s an incredibly decent human being… it’s not my mind or other people’s mind,” Joyce said. “I’m not here to start carpeting Malcolm. I’m not going to do that.”
Roberts, whose long history of conspiracy theories is often wrapped in anti-Semitic tropes, accused the “mainstream media” of waging a campaign against him through “selective haphazardness and dishonest distortions” designed to protect the political “one party.”
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, who has recently stepped up his attacks on One Nation, suggested Hanson was “living it out” in Europe rather than dealing with the controversy.
“The question here for Pauline Hanson is: What is she going to do about it? She’s in Italy right now,” Taylor said.
Julian Leeser, a Jewish MP and Liberal leader, said Hanson should show “the moral courage to stand up and do the right thing” and sack Roberts.
“Anti-Semitism should not find a place anywhere in our national life. Ms. Hanson must take action,” Leeser said.
Among those watching the debate is former Labor leader Mark Latham, who served as a One Nation MP in NSW before leaving Hanson in 2023 over homophobic attacks on a fellow politician.
Latham recalled that Roberts traveled from Queensland to Sydney after joining the party in 2018 and insisted that every Labor Party decision was guided by the United Nations.
When Latham backed down, Roberts reportedly replied: “Oh, they didn’t tell you.”
“There was no point in trying to reason with Roberts,” Latham wrote on Facebook this week. “I cringed every time he came south of the Tweed.”
Not everyone who supports Hanson agrees that Roberts is the problem. Some think it’s his strength.
Former Nationals MP and One Nation candidate George Christensen argues the scrutiny in recent weeks has been deliberately designed to derail the party’s rise. He described Roberts as one of One Nation’s strongest players in parliament.
“Harming Roberts would weaken One Nation” Christensen wrote in his weekly newsletter: Nation First.
“Forcing the party to defend itself keeps it away from other issues. Pressuring Pauline Hanson to distance herself from him, or even sack him, leaves one of the party’s strongest parliamentary performers out of the fray. That is the wider aim of this campaign.”
Then there was Sicily. While posting about shopping prices online, photos emerged showing Hanson poolside at the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina (TV’s popular hub). White Lotus – with billionaire Gina Rinehart.
There was no suggestion of anything wrong. But politics has always been as much about optics as politics.
So far, pollsters believe One Nation voters are unbothered by the relationship, even those who have flirted with the idea. Coalition strategists have also acknowledged that attacking Hanson hasn’t worked with voters, turning to highlighting the circus surrounding him.
Tony Barry, director of research and polling group Redbridge, says One Nation voters are often prepared to overlook the relationship between Hanson and Rinehart or simply don’t know about their relationship.
“Those with some awareness often ignore this, thinking outsiders need insider intervention,” he said.
“The risk for Pauline Hanson is that at some point her relationship with Gina Rinehart will send a signal to her supporters that she now operates by different rules, which will erode her anti-establishment credentials.”
It was once again up to Joyce to clean up the Rinehart holiday.
“Isn’t it a holiday?” Joyce told Nine’s Today program. “A person is allowed to have free time.”
However, Joyce said he did not know who financed the trip.
“It’s a fair bet Gina supported this in some way, but it’s her money,” Joyce said. “I really don’t know the details of this.”
Like the Robinson video, the Sicilian footage is now part of a broader debate about Hanson’s judgment.
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who has led his party’s charge against One Nation since its rise in the polls following the Bondi massacre, says people are starting to look more closely at the party.
“Scrutinize One Nation in the same way you scrutinize the Coalition, Labor, the Greens and anyone else who wants to govern this country,” he said this week.
Hanson can no longer expect to be treated differently than other leaders, Hastie said.
“Pauline Hanson wants to be prime minister of this country, so she and her team deserve proper scrutiny.
“When you get people like Senator Malcolm Roberts talking about chemtrails and other weird things, they’re not actually focused on providing good economic solutions to improve the living standards of the Australian people.”
Hanson will give two addresses in the coming days Conservative Political Action Conference In London, where Liz Truss told attendees: “Maybe you’ll see a future Australian prime minister.”
Three decades later, Hanson finally has the political momentum he always believed would come.
Whether he can keep this up may depend more on the company he owns than on Labor or the Coalition.
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Rob Harris is a national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Canberra. He is a former European correspondent.Connect via email.
