Like her soulmate Trump, Hanson hasn’t flamed out. We need to understand why

From the moment he descended his golden escalator, Donald Trump came coated not just in tangerine-coloured make-up but teflon. Controversies that would have been disqualifying for conventional presidential candidates slid off him like a perfectly cooked omelette from a non-stick pan. Scandal actually became his friend, because it made him the centre of attention. Nothing he did or said ultimately blocked his march to the White House.

Trump’s fiery launch speech, in which he attacked Mexican immigrants, was widely seen as self-immolatory at a time when the Republican Party, following successive defeats in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, needed to attract more Latino support. For a reality TV star whose bone spurs helped him avoid conscription during the Vietnam War, mocking Republican senator John McCain for being held captive for 5½ years in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp was akin to shooting himself in both feet.

As for refusing to disavow the support of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, it was surely a political extinction event. And yet Trump continued to soar in the polls. Even when, in the final weeks of the campaign, an out-take was aired from the show Access Hollywood in which Trump boasted of sexually molesting women, he remained a viable candidate. After his shock victory, it emerged more white female voters had backed him than Hillary Clinton.

The great analytical failing repeatedly committed by those covering the Trump revolution in its early years – myself included – was to assume normal political rules would eventually apply. They never did, and never have. Even after his part in the January 6 insurrection, when the MAGA mob ransacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, he won re-election in 2024. His boast, on the eve of the Iowa caucus in 2016, became almost prophetic: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Even now, when his approval ratings are at historically low levels because of the disastrous Iran war, polling shows nearly 80 per cent of Republicans continue to back him. Low by his standards but hardly lavatorial.

In the rise of Pauline Hanson, a similar dynamic is playing out. Not only is she shifting the “Overton window” of what is considered permissible by the voting public, but shattering it with a brick. Calling for monoculturalism in a migrant-majority nation, as she did in her speech to the National Press Club, had Trumpian echoes. Ditto, asking on Sky News in February: “How can you tell me there are good Muslims?” Describing domestic violence as a “two-way street” also seemed potentially politically self-handicapping at a time when a number of polls have suggested she is the most popular party leader among female voters.

Unabashedly showing off a “sexy” new plane, a gift from the country’s richest woman, threatened to trash her Aussie battler branding. So, too, popping up at Dolce & Gabbana fashion events in Italy, a culture war warrior in haute couture. Her European itinerary also carved out time for a podcast appearance and street walk with far-right agitator Tommy Robinson. Now she is accused of using party funds to pay for a five-star London hotel. Yet the latest polling suggests One Nation is still more popular than Labor. If it wasn’t such a mouthful, it would be tempting to call her “Polytetrafluoroethylene Pauline”, the technical term for a non-stick coating.

Shock value is obviously part of the appeal. Saying the unsayable. Creating a permission structure for supporters to say the unsayable. Lifting what then prime minister John Howard called “the pall of censorship” when he was trying to appease her backers after Hanson’s shock victory in the 1996 federal election.

Using invective previously thought to be outside the political mainstream also works as a bonding mechanism with supporters. It reinforces a sense of cultural affinity. When this kind of language comes under attack from conventional politicians and the press, it only enhances its appeal. Part of the lure of populists such as Trump, Hanson and Nigel Farage, after all, is to give sneering elitists a poke in the eye by breaking behavioural standards set by said elites. Cheering on a norm-busting populist under fire from the political establishment itself becomes an expression of contempt for the political establishment. In short, rage at politics as normal is overriding.

Obviously, we have seen this screenplay before. In the United States, with Trump. In France, with Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. In Britain, with Farage. But it is always worth remembering Pauline Hanson’s role in the emergence of this blockbuster populist franchise in the late 1990s. In recalling her previous rise and fall, there is a mistaken tendency to think she flamed out after her awkward “please explain” moment on 60 Minutes in October 1996, when she seemed bamboozled by the word xenophobic. However, One Nation achieved its first big breakthrough at the Queensland state election in 1998, where it won more than 22 per cent of the primary vote.

Hanson lost in the federal election later that year. Thereafter, the party was hampered by infighting. Still, it took the 2001 Tampa election to neuter One Nation as a political force. This history reminds us that Hanson has already shown more political durability than commonly thought. In an age of populism, which she herself presaged, it is not just her rise that is worthy of note, but the fact she has been around now for 30 years.

Donald Trump has always been more representative of America’s past and present than his critics would prefer to think, which helps explain his staying power. The same is true of his Australian political soulmate.

Nick Bryant is the author of the History Never Ended Substack.