If you believe the commentariat, Pauline Hanson should have vanished into political obscurity twenty-five years ago.
The media wrote her obituary more times than most of us have had hot dinners.
Yet here we are in late 2025, and the latest national polls have One Nation nudging 14–16 per cent in Queensland, double digits in Western Australia and New South Wales, and still climbing.
For a party that began with one woman in a suburban Ipswich hall, that is nothing short of extraordinary.
This isn’t some flash-in-the-pan protest wave either. It is the slow, grinding reward for sheer bloody-minded persistence.
Hanson has been banned, bankrupted, jailed (wrongly, as it turned out), ridiculed, de-platformed and declared finished by every fashionable pundit from Sydney’s eastern suburbs to the ABC greenroom.
She simply refuses to go away.
Every time the establishment thinks it has buried her, she claws her way back with the same plain-speaking message: put Australian citizens first, control the borders, cut the bureaucracy and stop taxing working families into penury.
Meanwhile, the so-called centre-right Liberal Party has completed its long, sad metamorphosis into the other wing of the Uniparty.
The evidence is now undeniable.
Whether Labor or the Liberals hold the Treasury benches, the outcomes keep drifting in the same direction: record immigration levels that outstrip housing, schools and hospitals; a public service that grows fatter every year; taxes that rise even when services deteriorate; and a national debt trajectory that no serious treasurer from either side appears willing to arrest.
When the Liberals had the chance (three terms under Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison), net overseas migration still averaged close to 300,000 a year, the bureaucracy ballooned, and the debt ceiling was raised again and again.
Today, under the current Labor government, the settings are merely turned up a notch. The policy differences are now largely cosmetic.
Both major parties are signed up to the same globalist compact: open borders, net-zero dogma, identity politics and an ever-larger state.
The only real disagreement is who gets to manage the decline.
That is why One Nation’s steady rise should worry the professional political class far more than any fleeting teal experiment.
Hanson is not offering another version of the same managerial politics; she is offering a genuine alternative. Lower immigration to sustainable levels, slash red tape, cut taxes on productive enterprise, pay down debt, and restore some common sense to energy policy.
Simple propositions, relentlessly repeated for three decades.
The establishment’s response remains predictable: smear, censor, ignore.
But the punters are no longer listening to the curated narrative. They see the rents they can’t afford, the hospital waiting lists, the power bills that double while wind farms sprout on every ridge.
They are tired of being told their concerns are “dog-whistling” or “far right.”
One Nation is not going anywhere. The longer the Uniparty pretends the problems don’t exist, the higher One Nation climbs. The polls are merely catching up with a reality the political class has spent years refusing to face.
Australia still has a political choice to give us a chance and it isn't Greens, Labor or Liberal.
Thought for the Day
"Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues." George Will
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
