Andrea Carson - One Nation Pauline Hanson

ANDREA CARSON - Professor of Political Communication, at La Trobe University
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INTRO: Lately, we’ve seen One Nation support surge in the polls - with immigration being one reason for voter dissatisfaction - despite current migration numbers falling. But analysts say higher support doesn’t always mean more seats, and questions remain about the party’s credibility and future influence. RTR’s Allan Boyd caught up with a leading political analyst.
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Source:  Yes, One Nation’s poll numbers are climbing. But major party status – let alone government – is still a long way off - Published: February 9, 2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Support for Pauline Hansen's anti-immigration party, One Nation, is climbing in the polls, tapping into voter frustration with major parties and the ongoing cost of living pressures. But can this newfound support translate into parliamentary seats or potential long-term political influence? Could One Nation ever be a major party in Australia? Could Hansen become PM? Analysts say the party faces significant barriers in Australia's electoral system. There are also questions about credibility, leadership depth, and whether the party could ever grow beyond its divisive right-wing populist policies. And with Blita Pauline Hansen such a volatile high-pressure figure, how far can that momentum really go? And what could that mean at the next election? To discuss this, I am joined by Dr. Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication at La Trobe University. Welcome, Andrea. Thank you. So we're seeing a significant surge here in support for One Nation, around 26-27% last time I looked. What's driving that the increase right now, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

I think you touched on it in the introduction there, Alan, that there's a high degree of frustration. And voters are looking towards a protest vote, but there's lots of caveats that we need to think about, and I'm sure we'll get to them about this increase for Pauline Hansen. Yes, it is a record rise. It's the highest number that Hansen has had in the polls, even higher than it was during the beginnings of the party back in the 1990s. But we're also in different times. There's been a very steady decline in support for the two major parties over that time. At the last election in 25, a third of voters didn't vote, uh, put their first preference with the major party. So times are changing, but that doesn't necessarily mean this is going to translate into leadership or even opposition leadership for Pauline Hansen or the party.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Who do you think one nation is winning over with this recent polls?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

I think it's a really important question, and it's people who feel that their politicians are not doing enough for them. And that's a large part of the electorate uh or of Australia right now. It's people who feel that maybe they're the have nots and not the haves, people who are struggling to purchase a home or to pay their mortgage, people who are finding it hard for ends to meet. And I think it's also people that probably don't follow politics super closely, but they're hurting with the hip pocket and Pauline Hansen saying things that cut through and address some of their issues.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

It's interesting because they've never really been a strong political force, despite being around since the 90s. Why have they never been a strong political force?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Well, one of the reasons is that we have compulsory voting and a preferential voting system. And the major parties have been pretty good at not directing preference flows to one nation. This hasn't always been the case. At the last election, the coalition did, and they also did in the upper house, which is why One Nation has, at the last election, there were two upper house members that got through for One Nation that did completely off coalition and some of the other parties' preferences, but mainly coalition. They wouldn't be there if the coalition had made a strategic decision not to do that or to direct its, I should say, the reliant on voters doing that. But the other thing to note is that while One Nation's really good at getting the headlines, they haven't really had a strong lower house presence and certainly not at the federal level. In Queensland in '98, they did get 22% of the vote and 11 seats at a state election. But federally, they're pretty much an upper house party, and even then their presence is relatively small. So for that party to make the gains, and we're seeing that in early polling, but we also need to emphasize that this is polling well outside of an election. So I mentioned compulsory voting, and when it comes to compulsory voting, we have a mandated 33-day election campaign, which sharpens people's minds about how they're going to vote, where newspapers and radio and the internet has a lot more coverage of elections. People are thinking about who they're going to vote for a lot more than what they are when they get a telephone call or are doing an internet poll with a polling company asking them where they would put their vote if an election was tomorrow. And those factors make a difference.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, I suppose that compulsory voting and the lack of people's interest in voting preferentially themselves has got a bit of an impact on that.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

And it's this far out of the poll, out of an election. The next election, if it goes full term, isn't until 2028. We've already seen in the last, well, just this year or even the last week in federal politics, just how fast moving this space is. Can you imagine how many more events and things are going to occur in the political landscape between now and 2028 that's going to shape the way that people think about where they might park their vote? And then the pointy end of that last month of an election campaign where you've got everyone out there trying to win over the hearts and minds. So to be making judgments off these polls in 2026 is a very brave thing to do. They're an indicator, but they're not much more than that at the minute.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

So it's a long way out.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Well, it is. And um, listeners might recall this time last year in Feb 25, or January 25 is probably a better example. It looked like Liberal was going to win the 2025 election. They were well ahead in the polls and the betting markets, and the smart money at that time was on Peter Dutton. The reality by the time May swung around was that Labour had the biggest win it's ever had in terms of seats in the party's history. It got 94 lower house seats, and that wasn't predicted five months out. So we need to be very careful about using polls, which are a snapshot in time, for predictions about what's going to happen further down the track.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Indeed, I suppose it's also about the sort of policies that One Nation put forward. And traditionally it's an anti-immigration party. It seems that some voters just recently fearing that immigration is out of control, yet current ABS data shows a clear downturn in net migration since COVID. But we seem to keep believing the hype of One Nation, and even the Liberal Party's the last few days have been talking about immigration. And it's yeah, we seem to believe all of this hype without checking the facts on this.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Well, facts only get you so far. People have emotional responses to things, and front of mind is the Bondi terrorist attack. The largest number of people that have been killed on Australian soil for a political uh racist reason. That's pretty horrific, and that is going to influence the way people are thinking, rightly or wrongly, about the composition of Australian society, which also leads into questions about immigration. We call that salience, why that's a salient issue now or front of mind issue now. It doesn't mean it will be a front of mind issue in 2028. And usually what are front of mind issues as you get closer to a general election are things that people deal with day to day, which is what sort of expenses they're encountering, how big their home loan is, where where interest rates are at, they're starting to go up again. So that's going to take some of people's attention and may come at the expense of the focus on immigration. However, acting against this is also you've got a party such as One Nation where it's in their interest to keep immigration on the front page. So they will be doing all that they can to get those headlines around immigration because they know when people fear migration or the number of people coming in on immigration visas, that does well for their party. And so they've got a vested interest in talking about this. But your question also underscores another important point here, and that is one nation doesn't have a breadth of policies. They've got policies on migration, but they don't have the type of sweeping landscape of policies that the major parties of the coalition and the Labour Party have. And so when you get to an election campaign, that's where they get exposed for uh not having the answers to the other problems that occupy people's minds.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yes, there's more to the cost of living than uh immigration. Hanson's been promoting this anti-immigration theme since the 90s, uh, with very little success really when expanding One Nation. Do you think that uh Hansen's policies here, her racist policies, to be honest, ignore the vital roles that immigrants play in Australian society in general?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Oh, yeah, they clearly do. I mean, we've had role commissions into aged care. We know we've got a teaching shortage, the regions of which some of your listeners will be from will know how hard it is to get staff. Australia relies, we're a big country, big island nation. We rely on migration to fulfill a lot of those roles. We've got an aging population and people with high-end needs where they need to go into aged care facilities. These are not particularly well-paid jobs, and it's often migrants that are filling these roles. And so we're very grateful as a society to immigration when it's servicing the regions and it's doing these essential critical healthcare roles. And we're less grateful to immigrants when we start thinking about them, not in terms of individuals, but in terms of mass numbers, uh, of which you point out have actually been going down. But I guess most people have very busy lives. They're not across all of the detail all the time on all issues. And so using as a shortcut, the types of headlines that they're reading and hearing in media commentary and also online on Facebook, on social media. And at the moment, there's quite some, I guess I could use the word hysteria around migration, and some of that's um to be expected given that people are traumatized by what happened in Sydney.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yeah, um, and then we also saw a terrorist event here in Perth a couple of weeks ago at um Invasion Day rally, where someone threw a bomb into the crowd.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Well, that's right. And these are uncertain times, and this is, I guess, where Australia is part of the globe, where these are international debates that are being had, many protest movements around the movement of people across nations. And so Australia is not immune to those debates. But importantly, we're also not America. We're very lucky to be quite some distance away with strong democracy and a robust political system that can absorb some of these debates without being reactionary. So when I hear commentary about we're following the populist movements of Europe and of US, there's also some important differences between Australia than there is between the politics in those countries. And compulsory voting is one of them where the parties need to get the most number of votes, and usually that's in the center. It's not appealing to the fringes. You can afford to do that as a politician if not everyone's voting. You're only trying to get those that you know are going to turn up to the polls, and they tend to be those that are more following politics a little closer or more reactionary. In Australia, everyone gets to vote and it dampens down some of those extremes.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

So that compulsive voting that we'd have here in Australia is helping to keep that sort of fringe out of the centre, I suppose?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, I mean uh that's a a common view. Not everyone has that view, but to me, I read much of the academic literature on this about it, they call it the median voter, that politicians are trying to draw attention um to the most number of votes.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Is there such a thing though as a median voter? Sorry to interrupt you there.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Um well, not in terms of an individual, but in terms of where are the most votes, and they're usually at the center. But and and so the uh the compulsory voting does help and the preferential Well, if you look at say the teal vote, which we haven't touched on yet, which is also a movement that is um really taking off. At the beginning I talked about the major parties only got a third of the vote each, the other third went to independence, country independence and to the teals. And so there's another protest movement going on there where voters are recognizing that they actually want someone in their electorate who's dedicated to their electorate. And many of the teals are also benefiting from the preferential voting system, not getting quite enough votes to win outright, but getting enough votes from preference flows from the major parties to get across the line. So our history shows that once an independent gets into power, they usually stay there because the electorate's usually pretty happy with how they perform. They usually get a second turn.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Just finally, the uh the by-election that been triggered by the leadership spill in the in the Liberals. How do you think what do you what do you reckon is going to happen there?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

I think that's a really good segue from the last conversation about independence. So there is an independent that's going to run in the seat of Faro, which is Susan Lee's seat. She got a sizable amount of the vote last time. She's rerunning this time. I think this protest vote that we've been seeing is not just about Bundai and an appeal to one nation. It's also a protest that the Liberal coalition has not been doing enough and that it hasn't got its shop in order. It's been playing internal politics and looking inward rather than outward. And so I think that protest vote is likely to play out in Susan Lee's electorate as she says goodbye to politics. And the beneficiary of that is probably likely to be an independent. Now, there will be one nation that there will be a candidate from one nation in that lower house seat. Last time they got about 6% of the vote. I imagine that will go up somewhat, but again, this will depend on preference flows. So it depends on how many other candidates are vying for that seat and where they're telling their supporters to put their votes. And given that the independent's probably going to get a larger share of the primary votes if we're going on what happened in the 25 election within this seat, I would think she's got a very good show.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

For the uh independent.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Well, it's very interesting to see how that works.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Keep in mind, um, political scientists, of which I am one, uh notoriously bad at predictions. Uh we're good we're good at diagnosing things as they unfold.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

So So I won't put 50 bucks on it.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't put fifty bucks on it, but these are the things to consider in looking at what the possibilities are for that Cedar Farrer as Susan Lee bows out of politics.