GetUp is bent on exposing One Nation’s parliamentary record to voters who haven’t been paying attention
Seventeen minutes into Pauline Hanson’s first speech at the National Press Club, a yellow banner slowly unfurled behind the stage.
“I opposed a pay raise for workers while receiving a $100,000 pay raise for myself,” read the caption, next to a photo of him wearing eight-bit sunglasses that have become a staple of “thug life” memes online.
The crowd gasped. Security took action quickly. The poster was removed and Hanson continued with nothing but a wry grin and a nod.
For Paul Ferris, the banner was never the main point.
Amid the satire, blacklisting and condemnation since then, GetUp’s acting chief executive believes Australia is making the same mistake that reshaped politics in Europe and the United States: underestimating populism until it was too late.
Ferris returned to Australia last year after more than a decade working on left-wing campaigns in Sweden, including the Swedish Greens and the Reform Association, after becoming convinced that Australia was not immune to the forces reshaping Europe.
“This is not a uniquely Australian phenomenon,” says Ferris. “You only have to look at the last election in the US; you only have to look at what’s going on in the UK; you only have to spend some time, as I have, looking at what’s been going on politically in Europe for a few decades now to realize that this is real and this is not going away anytime soon.”
His diagnosis is that Australia and much of the mainstream media have treated Hanson and One Nation like a circus act rather than a serious political force.
He says it is the method and strategy of the Press Club “show”.
“Our research is quite clear that, particularly on Pauline Hanson’s record on workers’ rights and industrial relations, when some of her newest and softest supporters see that record, they really don’t like what they see,” he says. The police investigation into the incident means he is uncertain about what he can say.
“If you put aside the noise of the news and the noise of the debate, especially around GetUp, there is a powerful message there that reaches millions of people who have not tuned in and examined closely the parliamentary voting records of politicians and parties.”
This demonstration re-energized GetUp’s activist base. More than $1 million in donations have flown in since then; this was the highest monthly total since 2022, adding 1,500 new monthly donors; this was the highest increase in more than a decade. It received over 10 million views across social media channels.
This belief now underpins GetUp’s biggest strategic shift in years.
The research, commissioned after the Farrer byelection in which GetUp spent $600,000 on an anti-Hanson message to no avail, found that 48 percent of One Nation voters had already decided on their vote in the first weeks of the campaign, before GetUp ran a single ad.
For Ferris, this finding confirmed something he had already begun to believe.
“I think we have passed a period where elections are won during the election campaign itself,” he says. “This is about the groundwork that was laid in the years leading up to the election.”
Instead of concentrating spending across six-week campaigns, GetUp wants to spend the next two years tracking One Nation’s parliamentary records on wages, healthcare, cost of living and workers’ rights.
“The question at this point is not whether to engage with One Nation,” says Ferris. “This is what it looks like.”
Whether this strategy succeeds will determine more than just GetUp’s future.
One Nation’s star member, Barnaby Joyce, has ridiculed and ridiculed the organisation’s tactics and missteps for years. He haplessly targeted conservative MPs, calling them “idiots” for wasting resources. He could barely contain his joy when they announced they would oppose Farrer in the by-election.
“No one takes GetUp seriously as an insightful, balanced perspective,” Joyce said at the time. “When they hear about GetUp they say ‘there’s a bunch of bile going out’.”
Following the Press Club protest, he went further and asked what would happen if the banner was a bomb.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the disruption as “counterproductive” and added that politicians should be free to speak without demonstrations.
Former Labor campaign strategist and MP David Feeney was even more critical. In a discussion on his podcast Feeney Files, he called GetUp a “group of amateurs” who were “useless” to the progressive movement.
“These are a bunch of leftists sitting on the couch trying to justify their existence so some idiot can keep sending them $20 a month,” he said. Feeney said the show generated sympathy for Hanson. But co-host Jessie McCrone, a long-time senior aide to former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, disagreed.
She says: “There would have been a debate on GetUp about whether they should go with the ‘you’re racist, Pauline’ message, and frankly I think it’s good that they’re going for the economic message.” He says it’s “done elegantly” and that “a Trot with half his head shaved and a nose ring doesn’t jump on stage to do it.”
For much of the past two decades, GetUp has become one of Australia’s most influential progressive campaigning organisations, mobilizing supporters on issues from the Iraq war, climate policy and marriage equality to refugee rights.
GetUp’s fortunes changed after 2019, when it spent massive resources defeating Coalition MPs campaigning against the proposed Adani coal mine. Scott Morrison’s surprise election victory has triggered a reckoning.
Donations have fallen sharply, staff numbers have shrunk, leadership has changed, and organizations like Climate 200 have eclipsed its impact.
According to GetUp’s latest corporate filings, Australian Last month, donations fell to $4.1 million in 2024-25; that figure was nearly $6 million the year before and well below the $12.4 million raised before the 2019 election.
Ferris says this is a critical moment for the future of the organization and rejects the suggestion that silence is a viable alternative.
“We expect to lose as much as we win,” he says. “But… the alternative of remaining silent and not holding One Nation accountable does not seem to be an option at this point.”
Ferris, who will return to Europe next year, had no regrets. He says the organization faces one of the defining political questions facing democracies in the Western world: How do you challenge a populist movement without strengthening it?
He says progressive politics has been slow to recognize that campaigns have changed.
When One Nation announced it had raised millions of dollars, some, including Albanians, questioned whether the figures were credible.
“I never doubted for a second that these fundraising numbers were real when they started coming in,” he says. “I think the people who question this and who don’t believe the momentum is real, including the Prime Minister, are short-sighted, plain short-sighted.”
According to Ferris, ignoring the momentum of One Nation is the mistake many European political parties have made with populist movements.
“People are having a hard time,” he says. “People are fed up. People are losing trust in the big parties because their living standards are declining because they can’t afford to buy a house.”
GetUp’s strategy is built on the belief that these disappointments are real, he says, but most One Nation supporters have only a limited understanding of the party’s parliamentary record.
He says factual contrasts, rather than ideological attacks, are the most persuasive messages.
Ferris hired new campaign staff, launched a “Challenge Fund” targeting One Nation, expanded its digital operation and hired former journalist David Sharaz, partner of Brittany Higgins, to help reshape the campaign and media strategy.
The appointment came under media criticism and Sharaz was permanently banned from the Press Club after the incident, but Ferris rejects the idea that he has to defend his hire.
“David is just one of about 10 people who have joined the GetUp team in the last six to nine months,” he says. “I hired him because I think he is good at what he does and, from my perspective, his values align with GetUp.”
Ferris also said the organization would target the “disappointing” Labor government and continue to campaign on issues such as freedom of information reform, gambling reform and media regulation.
Its critics say GetUp’s methods risk becoming the perfect foil for the movements they’re trying to stop. Tony Barry, a former Liberal strategist and director of the RedBridge Group, says that in the attention economy, it has never been more important for campaigners to accurately understand why voters with opposing views hold those positions.
“If you can diagnose the problem correctly, you will almost have a solution,” he says. “In past campaigns, GetUp has made the mistake of framing ‘insider and outsider,’ often failing to build a larger coalition of voters.” The Press Club demonstration, he says, helps reinforce the insider bias that One Nation voters often share.
Ferris says the Victorian elections, where GetUp plans to run a strong campaign, could put this theory to the test.
“There’s a scenario where the party that wins the most seats in the Victorian state election will be One Nation,” he says, “like the progressive bastion of this country.”
“I think anyone who hasn’t yet connected the dots at that point and doesn’t realize it’s real will suddenly be able to maintain that illusion no longer.”
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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.
