Immigration

Recent polling has shown her party One Nation have pulled ahead of both Labor and the Coalition in popularity, largely thanks to her penchant for making sweeping and often inaccurate statements scapegoating minorities for the real crises at play in modern Australia.

Like most of Hanson’s stunts, it has garnered a lot of media attention. That’s both good and bad — good because it’s important to know what Hanson is espousing, but bad because it gives her the notoriety and airtime she so clearly seeks.

Here, we combat that approach by fact-checking her speech and debunking a handful of the incorrect claims she made throughout it.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has used her first-ever address to the National Press Club to launch a broad attack on the rights and existence of trans people, describing the movement for trans equality as a “militant force” that must be “confronted” and a “subversive transgender ideology” that must be “dismantled”.

In the 17 June speech in Canberra, Hanson claimed that “almost every instrument of government” was dedicated to what she described as a “transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”. She also pledged to remove Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner and argued that transgender “propaganda” was being imposed on children in school.

Hanson used military-like languge to imply transgender people and their supporters are an attacking army (like ‘militant’, ‘force’, ‘insurgency’), language to imply disease (like ‘infecting’), and also used out-of-date language (such as ‘transgenderism’).

“But now I want to turn to one very, very important social and cultural issue facing this country. I refer firstly to the transgender insurgency. The transgender ideology has penetrated almost every regulatory authority and it is supported by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Anna Cody, who in government I would sack. So too, the head of the Human Rights Commission, Hugh de Kretser.”

Hanson continued to comment on transgender people in sport, and who should be allowed in what bathrooms, before launching into LGBTQIA+ organisations being involved in regulatory bodies.

“We cannot be a multicultural society,” she told the packed club.

“We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

Hanson also made a broadside attack on transgender rights, pledging to sack Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner and claiming “almost every instrument of government [is] dedicated to a transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”.

A commentator here drew my attention last night to a new policy paper from the Restore Britain group that has been launched by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth in the House of Commons, and who, this weekend, launched his own political party.

That party is called Restore Britain, and sits further to the right than any other likely to attract media attention in the UK at present.

Entitled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, this paper claims that the UK could remove every undocumented migrant now living in the country within a few years through sweeping legal change, administrative expansion, and a deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures. 

[…]

In short, it would be one of the largest state economic programmes in modern British history, put together with the deliberate intention of pursuing hate whilst imposing threats, fear, intimidation, incarceration and violent relocation on many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of people.

The supposed numbers involved are staggering. The suggestion is that up to 2 million people might be forced from the UK within three years. About 75% half of those would supposedly leave voluntarily due to the hostile environment the policy would create. That environment would undoubtedly target all migrants, regardless of their legal status. It would be totally foolish to think otherwise. The remainder, the report suggests, would be forcibly removed. Official estimates do not suggest that anything like that number of people are illegally resident in the UK.

[…]

We are often told that the state is powerless. That includes the claim that it is powerless to house people, powerless to fund social security, and powerless to invest in care.

This paper implies something quite differently. The implication is that the state is immensely powerful. The suggestion is that it is capable of tracking, detaining, transporting, and expelling millions. The contradiction is obvious, but it exposes something deeper.

The choice revealed is whether the state wants to do things that are good, to which the answer from the current political establishment is that, apparently, and for reasons that are not clear, it does not, or something straightforwardly evil, which is what this paper proposes, of which it is apparently thought to be capable.

The question is not, then, about whether the state has power. The question is about how that power is used, and to what ends.

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

This is an absurd claim. As an Australian who grew up in arguably (and famously) the most homogenously small-minded and bigoted part of it, I can assure you that "Russian operatives" did not turn Australia racist overnight via Facebook. Australia is a big box of racist fireworks; forty years of fiscal austerity is the match tossed in.

ASIO is investigating pro-Russian social media influencers who are working with an offshore media organisation to condemn Australia's support for Kyiv, while also using "social media to spread vitriolic, polarising commentary on anti-immigration protests and pro-Palestinian marches", he said.

"These state-sanctioned trolls are more than propaganda puppets; they want to turn hot-button issues into burning issues, tipping disagreement into division and division into violence," he said, giving the annual Lowy Institute address.

A large neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, had also attempted to leverage recent anti-immigration and cost-of-living rallies in Australia, he said.

Anti-immigration rallies that have drawn out tens of thousands of Australians in capital cities are being secretly controlled by neo-Nazis – part of a co-ordinated “fraud on the public” experts say could become even more violent when they march again next month.

An investigation by this masthead can reveal how neo-Nazi leadership is using far-right influencers to sell the March for Australia rallies as a “spontaneous” groundswell of “everyday Australians”, while they stack crowds with plain clothes Nazis and send key members interstate to headline rallies. Some neo-Nazis have even donned yellow vests to act as official safety marshals in order to bring marches under the group’s control.

Leaked chatlogs, recordings and insider accounts tell the full story of how the March for Australia rallies grew out of a mysterious TikTok video in early August and descended into a day of chaos and violence across the country on August 31.

And they lay bare the strategy of Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, as they move to radicalise the right to their dangerous fascist ideology under the cloak of the Australian flag.

In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.

I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.

Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.

The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” – referring to Hamas – as well as its supposed “front organisations in Germany and Europe”.

This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to increase deportations of asylum seekers to Greece.

These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition – the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens – and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.

Legal experts agree that sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador would be flagrantly illegal under both U.S. and international law — and that the idea itself is shockingly authoritarian, with few parallels in our nation’s history.

The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.

“You can’t deport U.S. citizens. There’s no emergency exception, there’s no special wartime authority, there’s no secret clause. You just can’t deport citizens,” says Steve Vladeck, a legal commentator and law professor at Georgetown. “Whatever grounds they try to come up with for denaturalization or expatriation, the one thing that is absolutely undeniable is that people are entitled to individualized processes, before that process can be effectuated.”

[…]

 Trump, for his part, suggested Friday evening on Air Force One that he would follow the Supreme Court’s ruling to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that,” Trump said. “I respect the Supreme Court.”

To this point, his administration has not yet followed the high court’s order to “facilitate” return of a man whom, by the government’s own admission, it wrongfully deported and imprisoned in a foreign gulag.

“The problem that we’ve seen over the last week is a series of Supreme Court rulings that have gone out of their way to not endorse what Trump is doing, but also created these procedural artifices that have in some respects thwarted what the lower courts are doing,” Vladeck explains. “At this point, what is it going to take for a majority of the Supreme Court to treat the government’s behavior with the kind of contempt that the government is treating the lower courts?  

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.