16/09/2026
Pauline Hanson speaking about Aboriginal people on a white Christian podcast last year said "they're the most primitive race on Earth and we're supposed to be holding them up and saying what they've achieved?
They've achieved nothing." She resurrected the old shibboleth, "they didn't invent the wheel" and claimed that the entire achievement of 65,000 years of our ancestral peoples was "A few, you know, rock paintings."
The ABC and another media outlets claim that she gave a qualified apology but no apology is better than her incoherent nonsense about wanting to "unite" Australians.
She claimed she was not talking "now," which we are supposed to intuit means this was not directed towards present-day Indigenous Australians. A truckie could drive a haul truck right through that. Her record tells us otherwise.
The response to Pauline Hanson's latest attack on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been extremely muted. Only a handful of politicians refuted her vile comments, and none convincingly.
Following the Steve Bannon textbook handed to Trump before his first election to the presidency of the USA, she has done her best in just one week to "flood the zone with s**t". This is the distraction strategy.
First, after her social media animations calling the SAS veteran and member for Canning in WA a "traitor" and a "maggot" had been up for weeks, she refused to remove it or apologise.
Then she attacked the Prime Minister's late mother, who was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, for living in public housing. There has been far more outrage about these comments than her racism towards us.
Pauline Hanson built a thirty-year political career on a single, durable proposition: that Australia is being changed for the worse by people who don't look or worship like the imagined national "us".
Her 1996 maiden speech warned that "mainstream Australians" were the victims of "reverse racism" by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded 'industries' that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups."
She said, "Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals". These are not just lies, but clever racist deceptions that cast whites as the victim of "them." The last statement is especially false, as the Closing the Gap Reports to Parliament tell us year after year.
She said Australians are "in danger of being swamped by Asians"; two decades later she swapped the target to Muslims, and more recently to African migrants and "boat people". The vocabulary shifts; the mechanism doesn't. One Nation's electoral support has fluctuated over the decades — sometimes single digits, sometimes into double figures in the Senate — but its persistence is the real story: current polling shows that almost a third of voters will give their first preferences to One Nation candidates.
Australian voters have, election after election, rewarded a politician whose signature product is grievance framed in racial and ethnic terms. Whatever the precise vote share in any given poll, the durability of that support is what makes Hanson's project more than a personal eccentricity. It is evidence of a market.
The 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum exposed how large that market can be. Roughly six in ten voters said No to a modest, non-binding constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We have been told repeatedly, especially by Senator Jacinta Jampijinpa Price that our proposal was "racist" and would divide the country by "race".
Researchers and pollsters have offered competing explanations — misinformation about the Voice's legal effect, a general distrust of politicians, small-c constitutional conservatism, and, for a significant minority, straightforwardly racialised hostility to Indigenous recognition.
Read Marcia’s full editorial
https://nit.com.au/16-09-2026/26504/racist-pseudo-science-still-shapes-australian-politics
NACCHO Aboriginal Health Australia
Katie Kiss - Social Justice Commissioner
Senator Malarndirri McCarthy - Northern Territory
Marion Scrymgour MP
One Nation Party
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price
