Love her or loathe her, and most Australians seem to land firmly on one side or the other, Pauline Hanson has been part of the furniture of our politics for 30 years now. She went from a fish and chip shop in Ipswich to Federal Parliament in a matter of months, started a party that rattled both sides of politics, lost it all, did time in a Brisbane prison for a conviction that was later thrown out, danced on Saturday-night television, ran and lost election after election, and then came back to the Senate in 2016. A decade on, the party she started in 1997 is winning lower house seats. This is how it all happened, told as plainly as the sources allow, with the opinions left to the people who hold them.
Brisbane, Ipswich and the fish and chip shop
Her Parliament House biography records that Pauline Lee Hanson was born in Brisbane on 27 May 1954, and that before Federal Parliament she was a mother of four and a small business owner from 1978 to 1997. When she stood up to give her first speech in 1996 she put it in her own words: she came there "not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks", and said her views came from "commonsense, and my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole parent, and as a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop."
That shop was in Ipswich, the old railway and coal city west of Brisbane. The ABC's 2011 timeline of her career opens with her simply as "fish and chip shop owner Pauline Hanson", and by the time she came back to lead One Nation in 2014 she was living at Coleyville, in the Scenic Rim south of Brisbane, according to the ABC.
Brisbane Street, Ipswich. The fish and chip shop and the council seat that started it all were in and around this city west of Brisbane. Photo: Kgbo, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A seat on Ipswich council
Her first taste of elected office was on Ipswich City Council. The Parliament House biography lists her as a councillor from 1994 to 1995, and the ABC's 2011 timeline says she was elected as an independent in 1994. The ABC's 2016 timeline tells it a little differently, putting the start of her council career at 11 March 1995 and saying she was voted out "the following year". It also gives her reason for running: Labor councillors had thrown out the Labor mayor, David Underwood, and she asked, "How can a handful of people throw out a man elected by the people?" Whatever the exact dates, the ABC's 2016 piece says that after losing her council seat she joined the Liberal Party.
Picked by the Liberals, dumped by the Liberals
The Liberals chose her to run in Oxley, the Ipswich-based federal seat, at the March 1996 election. On paper it was hopeless. According to the ABC, the sitting Labor member, Les Scott, held it by 12.58 per cent after three terms.
Then came a letter to the editor. On 6 January 1996, the ABC reports, the Queensland Times published a letter from her about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which said in part: "How can we expect this race to help themselves when governments shower them with money, facilities and opportunities that only these people can obtain no matter how minute the Indigenous blood is that flows through their veins and that is what is causing racism." On 14 February, just over two weeks before polling day, the Liberal Party under John Howard disendorsed her. The ABC says the Queensland branch president told her she could keep her posters if the references to the party were covered up, and that she left the meeting in tears.
The twist was that the ballot papers had already been printed. Voters in Oxley still saw her name listed as the Liberal candidate. On 2 March 1996 she won the seat, the same day Howard swept to power, and because the party had dumped her she took her seat as an independent. The Parliament House record lists her as an independent from 2 March 1996.
"Swamped by Asians": the first speech
On 10 September 1996, a little after 5 pm, the new Member for Oxley rose in the House of Representatives. Hansard records her opening: "I won the seat of Oxley largely on an issue that has resulted in me being called a racist. That issue related to my comment that Aboriginals received more benefits than non-Aboriginals."
The line everyone remembers came later. "I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said, adding that between 1984 and 1995 "40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate." She also spoke about youth unemployment in her electorate, the national debt and what she called "cooking the books" on the jobless figures.
A month later, on 13 October 1996, came another moment that has never gone away. The ABC records that when 60 Minutes reporter Tracey Curro asked if she was xenophobic, she replied, "Please explain."
Parliament House, Canberra, where the new Member for Oxley gave her first speech in September 1996. Photo: jjron, 2008, via Wikimedia Commons (GFDL 1.2).
One Nation is born
Within months she had a party. The ABC's 2016 timeline dates its formation to 23 February 1997, with co-founders David Oldfield and David Ettridge. It notes that Oldfield had still been working as an adviser to the Liberal backbencher Tony Abbott when he began helping her in 1996. The official launch was on 11 April 1997, which is the date the ABC's 2011 timeline uses as the founding ("April 1997"), so the two ABC accounts differ by a couple of months depending on whether you count the formation or the launch. The Parliament House record shows her sitting as a member of Pauline Hanson's One Nation from 27 June 1997.
Registration in Queensland would matter a great deal later on. The Court of Appeal judgment records that on 15 October 1997 she presented an application to the Queensland Electoral Commissioner to register "Pauline Hanson's One Nation" as a political party. The law required the names of 500 members who were electors. Ettridge arranged the list. The party was registered on 4 December 1997.
Pauline Hanson's 1998 campaign portrait. Queensland State Archives, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
1998: eleven seats in Queensland, then defeat
The Queensland state election of 13 June 1998 was the party's high-water mark. The ABC reports that One Nation took 22.68 per cent of the primary vote, more than the Liberal Party, and won 11 seats. When Hanson came back as leader in 2014, the ABC described that peak as 11 of the Queensland Parliament's 89 seats.
That success came with public money. After the 1998 state election the Electoral Commissioner paid her, as agent for the party, $225,071.07 on 2 September 1998 and $273,566.24 on 25 September 1998, according to the Court of Appeal judgment. Those two payments would later become criminal charges.
Opponents were already circling. On 2 July 1998, the ABC reports, Tony Abbott declared he would fight to have One Nation deregistered, arguing it was a business rather than a party, and its opponents argued it had never had the 500 members it needed.
At the federal election on 3 October 1998, Hanson switched from Oxley to the new seat of Blair. The ABC says she topped the primary count with 35.97 per cent but lost on preferences to her Liberal opponent, because Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals all preferenced each other ahead of One Nation. The Parliament House biography records her as "defeated at general elections 1998". Nationally, the party won one Senate seat, taken by Len Harris in Queensland.
Parliament House on George Street, Brisbane. One Nation sent 11 members here after the June 1998 state election. Photo: Figaro, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
The splits
The cracks opened quickly. By 4 February 1999, the ABC reports, three of the 11 Queensland MPs had quit, saying the party administration had too much control. Three more left later that year and formed the City Country Alliance. The ABC adds that the party lost its state registration and the Electoral Commission of Queensland chased it for the $500,000 paid after the 1998 election.
David Oldfield won a seat in the NSW upper house in March 1999. According to the ABC, Hanson expelled him from the party about a year and a half later after a disagreement. He accused her publicly of being irrational and said: "everything including her maiden speech and every word of any consequence that she's said since, has actually been written for her." He then split the NSW branch away from the rest of the party.
The 2001 elections were mixed. The ABC records the party winning three seats in Western Australia in February 2001, then being cut back to three seats in Queensland a week later. That November she ran for a Queensland Senate seat and lost. The ABC's 2014 report says she was "booted from the helm in 2002 by the national executive".
A signed poster and corflutes from her 1998 House of Representatives campaign. Queensland State Archives, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
The fraud case and 11 weeks in prison
This is the part of the story where it pays to keep a careful eye on what was alleged and what was proven.
Abbott later admitted to setting up a fund in 1998, called Australians for Honest Politics, to help pay for civil court cases against One Nation. The ABC reports that he described it as a $100,000 fund. One of the cases was brought by a former member, Terry Sharples, who fought to have the party deregistered and was bankrupted in the process. The two men tell it differently. According to the ABC, Abbott said he acted alone and offered Sharples $10,000, while Sharples said that Prime Minister John Howard knew about the fund and that he was offered around $20,000.
The criminal case was separate. On 31 July 2001 Hanson appeared in the Brisbane Magistrates Court charged with electoral fraud. She pleaded not guilty and told reporters, "I do believe that this is a political witch-hunt." The ABC reports that at the trial with Ettridge in 2003, the Crown argued that the 500 people on the registration list were supporters of Hanson, not members of the party, saying members had to have voting rights and that $5 was too little for a membership fee. There were 30 witnesses over 23 days, and the jury took a day to find them both guilty.
On 20 August 2003 both were convicted in the District Court of dishonestly inducing the Electoral Commissioner to register the party, and each was sentenced to three years in prison. Hanson was also convicted on two counts of dishonestly obtaining the two 1998 funding payments, with concurrent three-year terms. The Court of Appeal judgment sets this out. The ABC reports that she shouted, "Rubbish, I'm not guilty... it's a joke," and cried as she hugged Ettridge and her two sons. The ABC's figure for the money is "more than $500,000". The two payments in the judgment add up to $498,637.31.
The sentence drew criticism from unexpected places. Three days later, the ABC reports, Liberal backbencher Bronwyn Bishop said it was something you would expect under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, adding: "I've been very critical of her and her party, but... this is someone who has been sent to jail because she spoke her views and that is not acceptable in this country."
The appeal was heard on 5 November 2003. The next day, 6 November, Chief Justice de Jersey, President McMurdo and Justice Davies allowed both appeals, quashed every conviction and directed that verdicts of acquittal be entered. The Chief Justice found that the Crown could not "safely sustain" its case that the people on the list were members only of a separate body, the Pauline Hanson Support Movement, and not of the party. Because a retrial "would in the circumstances be futile", there was none. The ABC reports that she walked out of the Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre that day with her sons. The ABC's 2014 report puts the time she served at 11 weeks.
So the record is clear: she was convicted, she was jailed, and the convictions were quashed and replaced with acquittals. A week and a half after her release she threatened to run against Abbott in his Sydney seat. "I hope Tony Abbott never becomes prime minister. I detest the man," she said, according to the ABC.
The wilderness years
The next decade was a long run of near misses. The ABC's timelines record most of them:
- March 2003: she ran for the NSW upper house as an independent while the fraud case was still going and got 1.9 per cent of the vote. The ABC's 2011 timeline says she had moved to Sylvania Waters in Sydney.
- 2004: she ran as an independent for a Queensland Senate seat and lost.
- 2007: she launched Pauline's United Australia Party on 24 May and again lost a Queensland Senate bid.
- 2009: she ran as an independent for the state seat of Beaudesert and lost. During that campaign, the ABC notes, News Limited papers published photos said to be of her in the 1970s. She denied they were her, and they were later revealed to be a hoax.
- February 2010: she announced she was selling up and moving to the United Kingdom. She came back.
- March 2011: she ran for the NSW Legislative Council and lost.
- 2013: she rejoined One Nation and ran for the Senate in NSW. The ABC's 2016 timeline gives her 1.14 per cent of the primary vote. Wikipedia gives 1.22 per cent.
- February 2015: as One Nation leader again, she contested Lockyer at the Queensland election and lost.
In between came the moment many people remember best. In late 2004 she was on Channel Seven's first season of Dancing with the Stars, partnered with Salvatore Vecchio. The Age reported in November 2004 that she was the highest-scoring competitor once the phone votes were counted, despite getting the lowest tally from the judges in that round. In the final she and Vecchio were runners-up to the Home and Away actress Bec Cartwright and Michael Miziner, according to the ABC and Channel Seven's own Dancing with the Stars press kit.
In March 2007 she published her autobiography, Untamed and Unashamed. On 19 November 2014 she announced her return as One Nation leader. "This time I will be in control, no-one is going to pull my strings, or tell me what to say," she told the ABC. The same report said the party had once reached 18,000 members but had floundered since 2002, and that its six candidates at the 2012 Queensland election had won 2,525 votes between them, about 0.1 per cent.
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Launching her autobiography, Untamed and Unashamed, in March 2007. Photo: Velovotee from Sydney, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Judging the fashion parade at the Kurri Kurri Nostalgia Festival in March 2011, the same month she ran for the NSW upper house. Photo: Steve Daggar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
2016: back in Canberra
The comeback came at the double dissolution election of 2 July 2016. The ABC says One Nation ran 27 candidates. During the campaign she called for a ban on Muslim immigration, a royal commission into Islam and a ban on new mosques. The Australian Electoral Commission's final Queensland Senate figures gave One Nation 250,126 first preference votes, or 9.19 per cent, which was 1.19 quotas. She was the third senator elected in Queensland.
She did not come in alone. The AEC's list of senators elected and reports in The Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald show four One Nation senators: Hanson and Malcolm Roberts in Queensland, Brian Burston in New South Wales and Rod Culleton in Western Australia. The Herald called it "the outcome 'nobody expected'" and noted that the Turnbull Government would need the One Nation bloc to pass bills opposed by Labor and the Greens. In the same piece, election analyst Antony Green pointed to the party's "abysmal record" of keeping its MPs in line.
He was right about that. Culleton was gone from the party by the end of 2016, and Burston quit in 2018 after what the ABC called a prolonged feud with Hanson. In February 2019 he accused Hanson of sexual harassment and was filmed in a scuffle with her chief of staff, James Ashby, at Parliament House. The ABC reports that Hanson denied the claims, calling them "retaliation", and said she "can't stop laughing about it". These were allegations, and they were never proven in court.
In a Jabiru J230 at the Caboolture Air Show in April 2016, a few months before the election that sent her to the Senate. Photo: Aviationbystirling, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Senator Hanson in December 2016, her first year in the Senate. Photo: jfish92, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
The burqa, twice
On 17 August 2017 Senator Hanson walked into Question Time wearing a full burqa. The ABC reports that her arrival drew audible gasps. She called for the garment to be banned, saying she wanted to highlight security risks. "I am very much against the burka," she told radio 2GB. "It is not a religious requirement. This is brought in by men who want to cover up their women. It is oppressing women."
The Attorney-General, George Brandis, replied close to tears: "To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do. I would ask you to reflect on that." Labor and Greens senators gave him a standing ovation. Labor's Penny Wong said it was "one thing to wear religious dress as a sincere act of faith, there is another to wear it as a stunt here in the chamber". On the other side, her colleague Malcolm Roberts told Lateline that she was "a woman with courage standing up for women".
She did it again on 24 November 2025, after her bill to ban burqas and face coverings had been blocked. The ABC reports that when she was sanctioned and refused to leave, the Senate President, Sue Lines, suspended the chamber for more than an hour and a half. Online she called her colleagues "hypocrites" and said she would "display this oppressive, radical, non-religious head garb... so that every Australian knows what's at stake." Independent senator Fatima Payman called the stunt "abhorrent and disrespectful". The next day, The Guardian reports, the Senate censured her by 55 votes to five, with only the four One Nation senators and Ralph Babet voting against. The motion said her actions were "intended to vilify and mock people on the basis of their religion". She refused to apologise and was suspended for seven sitting days.
The Senate chamber in Canberra, scene of both burqa episodes, in 2017 and 2025. Photo: JJ Harrison, 2012, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
In the Senate since 2016
The Parliament House biography fills in the day-to-day record. She sat on the joint committee on the National Broadband Network from 2016 to 2018, chaired a Senate select committee on lending to primary producers in 2017, and was deputy chair of the joint select committee on Australia's family law system from 2019 to 2021. She was re-elected for Queensland in 2022. The record also shows a change of name: she has been listed as Leader of "One Nation", rather than "Pauline Hanson's One Nation", since 28 January 2026.
In court again: the Faruqi case
In September 2022, on the day Queen Elizabeth II died, the Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi posted that she could not mourn "the leader of a racist empire". Hanson replied on Twitter telling her to "piss off back to Pakistan". Faruqi sued under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The ABC reports that on 1 November 2024 Justice Angus Stewart of the Federal Court found the tweet was an "angry personal attack", that it was "anti-Muslim or Islamophobic", and that it breached the Act. He ordered her to delete it and pay Faruqi's costs. Hanson had told the court she did not know Faruqi was Muslim, and her lawyers argued the tweet was fair comment on a matter of public interest. Outside court Faruqi called the ruling "landmark". Hanson said she was "disappointed" and argued the decision showed "the inappropriately broad application of section 18C, particularly in so far as it impinges upon freedom of political expression."
She appealed and lost. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 22 August 2026 that the Federal Court had upheld the judgment and that she would now seek leave to appeal to the High Court. Liberal Party president Tony Abbott backed her, saying section 18C "is a risk to free speech". The Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, responded that it was "pretty hard to say we should have more racist hate speech than we currently have."
The vote, 2025 and 2026
At the May 2025 federal election, AEC figures show One Nation winning 991,814 House of Representatives first preferences, or 6.40 per cent nationally, and 899,296 Senate first preferences, or 5.67 per cent. Malcolm Roberts was re-elected in Queensland, and the party picked up the sixth Senate seats in New South Wales (Warwick Stacey) and Western Australia (Tyron Whitten). The ABC reports that Stacey resigned three months later for health reasons. Sean Bell, who had been Hanson's adviser for nine years according to One Nation, was appointed in his place in September 2025, despite objections that he was a Queenslander taking a NSW seat.
On 8 December 2025 the former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who had quit the Nationals, joined One Nation. The ABC reports he would keep his seat of New England until the next election and then run for the Senate in NSW. He cited renewable energy and immigration policy, and said of Hanson: "She has driven the political agenda, she had made us, when I was with the Coalition, react to where she has gone." He later told 7.30 that he saw parallels with Nigel Farage's Reform UK.
At the South Australian election on 21 March 2026, ABC results show One Nation with 22.9 per cent of the lower house vote, ahead of the Liberals on 18.9 per cent. It won four of the 47 House of Assembly seats (MacKillop, Hammond, Ngadjuri and, after a recount, Narungga by 58 votes) and three Legislative Council seats, including former senator Cory Bernardi. Labor won 34 seats and kept government. Hanson said she was "extremely proud" and called the seven MPs a "starting point".
Then came the Farrer by-election in May 2026. Farrer, in southern NSW, had been held by the Coalition since 1949, and by Sussan Ley for the last quarter-century. The ABC reports that One Nation's David Farley led the primary vote with more than 40 per cent and won, giving the party its first ever seat won at an election for the House of Representatives. "We're coming after those other seats," Hanson told the victory party.
Speaking at a rally in November 2025. Photo: The Unshackled, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
What she stands for, and what people say about her
In her own words, her platform has always been about saying what others would not. Returning to the leadership in 2014, she said One Nation "was born because many Australians felt they were disregarded by other political parties and their voices were not being heard", and described her approach as "daring to raise issues that were politically incorrect and having a common-sense approach rather than an elitist attitude". In the same statement she criticised the foreign ownership of farmland and housing, halal certification and multiculturalism, which she said was "only segregating us as a nation". The ABC reported in 2016 that One Nation supported zero net migration.
Her supporters see things the way Malcolm Roberts put it after the 2017 burqa episode: a woman of courage. Barnaby Joyce called her a "fellow traveller" who had set the agenda that the major parties then followed. Bronwyn Bishop, no friend of One Nation, called her a political prisoner when she was jailed in 2003.
Her critics put it in very different terms. In the Faruqi case, Justice Stewart said that Senator Hanson "has a tendency to make negative, derogatory, discriminating or hateful statements in relation to about or against groups of people relevantly identified as persons of colour, migrants to Australia and Muslims". During the 2025 censure debate, Faruqi told the Senate that "this parliament drips now in racism", and George Brandis's 2017 rebuke still gets quoted. Even her old ally David Oldfield claimed the words were never really hers. For her part, she has always rejected the label of racist, as she did in the first lines of her maiden speech.
The other side of the coin: a protest against Pauline Hanson in Garema Place, Canberra, in September 2026, with Greens MLA Laura Nuttall speaking. Photo: Nick-D, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Thirty years on
When Pauline Hanson stood up in the House in 1996 she was an independent with no party, no staff to speak of and a speech the whole country argued about. Thirty years later her party has members in the Senate, the House of Representatives and the South Australian Parliament, and she is still in the Senate for Queensland. In between there were the 11 Queensland seats, the splits, the conviction and the acquittal, the dance floor and a dozen losing campaigns. Whatever you make of her, there aren't many people who have been written off as often in Australian politics and kept coming back.
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