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I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am. Pauline Hanson has spent decades casting herself as the outsider, the voice of people who feel ignored by the political class. Now One Nation is surging in the polls and in donations. On Friday, their fundraising site crashed under the weight of over $3 million in new money, forcing labor to treat Hanson less like a fringe dweller and more like a direct. But as Hanson's popularity grows, so does the scrutiny of what sits behind it. This week, she admitted she's taking policy advice from Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, the billionaire mining magnate she describes as a friend and supporter. Today contributing editor at the new Daily, Amy Remikis on Pauline Hanson's growing momentum and the billionaire and corporate backing of her outsider politics. It's Saturday, june 13th. Amy, good to see you. As always. This week started with labor running donation ads asking supporters for help to stop One Nation turning its polling momentum into seats, which seems to have quickly turned into a big boost for One Nation. How did that play out?
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So labor started the week with their own social media ads asking supporters to chip in $27 to prevent one Nation from turning the polling momentum into seats. It was basically saying, if you want to help us stop One Nation, please give us $27. And One Nation basically turned that into spoofing Labor's ads. They created their own version of the, you know, quite scary social media ads that labor had created and then accused the government of trying to silence everyday Australians. Not listening to everyday Australians. You know, they were using the line, Albanese thinks $27 buys him the right to silence us. Get rid of the Labor Party, get rid of the lies and start standing up for our country. And that's what people are donating to the party. And they've said that that has gone very, very, very well for them. It morphed into Fire the liar, which is another return to the three word slogans that Australian politics has been, you know, hampered by for the last couple
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of decades called fire the Liar. It comes following a Labor Party campaign
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which really upset Anthony Albanese. I'll leave the negativity to someone who has made a career out of seeking to divide people. And then One Nation has turned around and said that they hit their $1 million fundraising target, launched this morning, has already surpassed its initial million dollar goal, which has been upped to 1.5. But then Anthony Albanese says, says who? How can you prove it? Did she though? Did she though? Did she? What evidence is there by which One Nation then turned that into. He doesn't believe that we're doing this. He doesn't believe that you can stop the momentum of you guys and raised more money off the back of that.
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So is that a, was that a smart move politically from the Prime Minister? Because unless labor can prove the numbers are wrong, doesn't that give Hanson another grievance that the political establishment doesn't believe ordinary Australians would dip into their pockets and back a battler like her to become, you know, potentially prime minister? How smart a move was that?
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Well, I mean, that's one of the big discontents that Pauline Hanson is picking up on and is able to basically leverage against the major parties by saying, well, they don't trust you because they don't back you. And we're being backed by everyday Australians. We don't know if that is true for one nation. We're not actually even going to find out who has given money to Pauline Hanson until February 2027 when the declarations come out. And that's only if it's, you know, above. I think it's $17,000 or so what the declaration limit is. We don't know who's giving money to labor or the coalition either. I mean, we don't know how any political parties raise money. We don't have real time donation laws. All the things that the major parties have stopped in terms of transparency around donations, around supporters, around fundraisers is now coming to bite them on the ass because Pauline Hanson and One Nation are able to leverage all of the loopholes in our donation rules to fundraise the way that they want to fundraise. And we don't know. So Sarah Martin from the Guardian has done some brilliant reporting on who has been donating to Pauline Hanson, including donations through Gina Rinehart's companies or through executives at Gina Rinehart's companies. And it hasn't really done anything to sort of ping any of Pauline's rise within like, you know, just normal Australia people do not seem to care when where Pauline Hanson gets the money from. So I would say that was the miscalculation that Anthony Albanese made was assuming that people would care where the money was coming from and how much money had been raised because Pauline Hansen is harvesting grievances. So even though she is of the elite, even though she is exceptionally wealthy, even though her donors are wealthy, or at least some of them are, she is able to present to people that it is everyday Australians who are, who are creating this momentum. And that, that's the, that's the mistake. Anthony Albanese made.
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Look, it's pretty clear that Hanson's followers don't care where she gets the money from. But do they care about where she gets the policy from? Because she appeared on ABC Radio this week where she admitted she got policy advice from Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart.
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My policy on pensioners being able to work unlimited hours and without losing their pension or their health care code came from Mrs. Rinehart. And I think that's great.
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How do you think openly stating that will play with supporters?
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Again, I think for hardcore supporters, it doesn't matter. I mean, they know that she gets policy from Gina Rinehart that hasn't been hidden for anyone who's been paying attention. And Pauline Hanson and her supporters have been able to twist a lot of that and just being all like, well, Gina Rinehart so successful, it makes sense that she would get, you know, policy and advice from somebody so successful. I mean, as Matthew Knott from the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out this week, the 5% GDP going to defence spending, that's something that Gina Rinehart wanted. It's also something that Trump supporters want. And Gina Rinehart wants what a lot of Trump supporters want and Trump himself wants. But I don't think that Pauline Hanson's supporters, the core supporters, the ones who are whipping up a big frenzy around all sorts of issues in Australia, care about the actual rationality and logistics of Pauline Hanson's policies. And I don't think that they care where they come from. Whether this works in the long term, though, is another question, because we're in the mid cycle of the election right now, and we saw in mid cycle last, last term where Peter Dutton was coming out on top. Peter Dutton was being called the strong leader as opposed to Anthony Albanese's weak leadership. Peter Dutton was riding high in the polls, the coalition were riding high in the polls. And in fact, by the time we got to the election, the commentary was around perhaps a minority government for Labor. And they came out, as we know, winning 94 seats and the coalition basically being completely destroyed in terms of primary vote. And what happened was that people started thinking at the polls, do we want to be so close to America? Do we want to be so close to Trump? Do we want to actually link our country to what is happening in the United States? And so Pauline Hanson and Gina Rinehart tying so much of one nation to America and to Donald Trump in terms of those policies may be the thing that eventually changes people's minds when they get to the voting Booth.
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Coming up, Pauline Hanson's Trump esque media strategy. I mean, the more money Pauline Hanson raises, the harder it becomes to avoid the question of what one nation's actually selling in a policy sense. Next week she'll be fronting up at the National Press Club where she will face more questions from journalists about One Nation's platform. What have you made of One Nation's attempts at presenting war on the policy front?
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I mean, I think that this isn't any different to what we saw in the 90s in terms of one Nation's policy front. Like it's a lot of front and not a lot of substance or, you know, it's an inch deep and a mile wide.
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Yeah, more front than Myers.
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Yeah, exactly. More front than Myers or Grace Brothers, depending on what generation you're from. So it's no different. And a lot of these ideas sound fine in practice, but when you dig any deeper, you're like, how does that actually work? Including her idea for buying into gas companies 10, 15 years down the track, which was a policy presented at a gas conference. So, and we know that gas executives did have input into creating that policy. We've got a lot of culture wars in terms of their policies. There's a lot of culture war, a lot of rhetoric, but there's no actual substance behind it. But Pauline Hanson turns any attack on the substance of her policy into victimhood, where she will just openly say, they're scared of us, they're scared of what we want to do. And you know, this shows that people want change, which is true, but I think people want change that's actually going to be enacted. Whereas Pauline Hanson, she never goes after the wealthy, she never goes after the elite, she's not going after fossil fuel companies, she's not going after any of the big corporate interests. She is basically using anger to cement the status quo. And that is why Pauline Hanson is so attractive to Australia's elite, particularly the corporate elite, which have absolutely fallen behind Hanson. Big business is now behind One Nation and that should speak volumes, but we are no longer in a fact based world.
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Amy, thanks for breaking down One Nation's policies. Your next challenge is to talk about their media strategy because One Nation has recently shut down the ABC out of campaign events, including the Farah by election.
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Today's question, who exactly is running the One Nation show? Bye bye to the abc. Pauline Hanson's chief of staff, James Ashby, taking it upon himself to boot. The ABC from a media event on
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the eve and this week an event in Perth as well. But Hanson is also going on ABC radio when she wants to talk directly to voters. So what's going on there?
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This is exactly the Trump playbook as well. I mean, Trump leveraged mainstream media by basically banning parts of mainstream media and then going on those same networks to explain why he was blaming, you know, banning the fake news media. He created a real environment where people no longer trusted any media unless Trump was on it. And he's still doing that. You know, he walked out of an interview very recently, you one sided crooked network. So let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good day. And it's worked for him with that group of people who are exceptionally angry. Like basically giving it to the media works as a media strategy. Pauline Hanson has absolutely borrowed from that. And we know that there is low trust in media and a lot of that is deserved. But a lot of journalists are still doing a lot of very good work. Again, Sarah Martin at the Guardian has been doing fantastic work and has found herself personally targeted by, by Pauline Hanson and her supporters. People may remember there was a recent media conference where she went and asked some very valid questions and was basically, you know, told to shut up. Did you just say shut up? Yes, I did tell you to shut up.
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I guess the double whammy too is, Amy, is that Pauline Hanson and One Nation have a huge social media presence now. And so that is one way that they can speak directly to their support base. It means that she can really can pick and choose who she speaks to.
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Yeah, absolutely. And she's been doing that for years. It's not just Pauline Hanson, it's Malcolm Roberts. It previously was Jared Renick, it's Barnaby Joyce going on all of the podcasts and speaking directly to people with softball questions. You know, it's the Carl Stefanovics of the world who are starting to do this pivot of really, you know, platforming what is Australia's far right in order to just ask the questions, which is introducing them to new audiences through, you know, basically a slipstream through mainstream media. It's Pauline Hanson being on Dancing with the Stars, you know, on breakfast television. All of this has created Pauline Hanson being an absolute media darling at the same time as she is absolutely just blasting the media for not being credible. And every single time that she's asked a tough question, she again plays the victim and says, they're just all against me. They don't believe you. The Australian, Australian people want change. While also leveraging social media to speak directly to people I think the question is for the media now is, do they do what is right? And if Pauline Hanson or her staff start banning journalists, do they actually work in solidarity to be all like, you can't do that. You know, it's all of us or none of us. Which is increasingly what we're seeing from the press in the United States, where there's a lot more calls for unity from the press in not playing Trump and the White House's games about banning certain reporters and organisations, or do they continue to lean into it, where they're not actually giving, you know, any sort of support to media colleagues who are being banned not for poor behaviour, not for unethical behaviour, but for asking questions that Pauline Hanson and one nation find uncomfortable?
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Amy, thanks so much for your time. I'll go on Dancing with the Stars if you do.
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Apparently it's you get straight to the top of the political elite. So maybe we'll finally be everyday Australians if we do Dancing with the Stars.
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Magnificent. Thank you.
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Thank you.
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7:00am is a Daily show from Solstice Media. It's made by Ariel Richards, Atticus Bastow, Chris Dengate, Crystal Keller, Ruby Jones, Travis Evans, Zoltan Fetcho and me, Daniel James. Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio. Thanks so much for listening to 7am this week. Have a great weekend.