Australians are angry, but meeting Pauline Hanson's outrage with our own has only fueled her rise. According to the latest Guardian Essential Report, One Nation maintains a meteoric rise in the polls, with 29% of voters crossing the Hanson line and 23% becoming One Nation curious. The driving force appears to be anger, as measured by the right track/wrong track metric.
Understanding the Anger Machine
Political strategist Ed Coper, in his book Angertainment, explains how algorithms cater to our lizard brain's thirst for outrage, driving voters to the far right. One Nation is not just tapping into grievance but harnessing a new centre of gravity: anger pills that build momentum and shape a darker reality. For 30 years, Hanson focused on race, but now her messages travel beyond the fringes, serving commercial interests of big tech platforms.
We have met Hanson's sense of outrage with condemnation and cancellation, but in asserting her illegitimacy, we have helped her secure the opposite: she is the angry outsider we co-created.
A Radical Proposal: Engage with Equanimity
Instead of feeding Hanson's anger machine, what if we treated her with equanimity? By engaging with her ideas on their merit, we expose her most vulnerable point: not her language or demeanour, but her potpourri of half-baked ideas. A second set of responses to proposals she put forward at her National Press Club address earlier this month makes this point: none of her populist policies are actually that popular.
Hanson's address to the NPC was revealing. Different actors used anger for their own ends: Hanson to reinforce her outsider status, the press gallery for headlines, and GetUp! to energise its activist base. But almost by accident, genuine scrutiny of her policies revealed how unprepared she is to govern.
Exposed by Genuine Scrutiny
The best question posed was how her call to pull out of the UN would invalidate Australia's shipping and aviation treaties. She had no idea. Other claims, like scrapping all paid parental leave, were swiftly walked back. As for the so-called 'mono-culture' panic, by the end of the week Hanson was embracing our rainbow World Cup squad as the cultural model she was championing.
From a distance, equanimity can risk looking like acquiescence, but it is actually the opposite: by choosing to engage, we hold her to account rather than rejecting her views outright and allowing them to stand condemned but never actually contested.
One Nation Voters Doubt the Party's Ability to Govern
A final table on the reasons people are concerned about a One Nation vote draws this theory out. A majority of One Nation-curious voters fear the party is not equipped to govern – even those saying they would vote for Hanson are concerned about this.
So, here's my radical plan to confront Hanson: embrace her right to participate in the political discourse and engage in good faith. Don't ridicule her, don't sneer at her lack of sophistication, don't search for reasons not to take her seriously. Because with these numbers, she is deadly serious.
Rather than taking her outrage bait, let's hold her to the same standards as other participants in our representative democracy. Rather than shutting her down, let's keep asking her politely to please explain. By engaging Hanson and her supporters, we can channel the political momentum building behind her into something more productive: a genuine, good-faith discussion about Australia's place in an increasingly unstable world.
As Coper points out, the one thing that travels further than anger is genuine empathy, meeting people where they are and inviting them to be part of something bigger. One nation, indeed.
