By Andrew Martin

The outcome of the South Australian election in March 2026 should be of concern to all progressively-minded people and all those who care about human decency. Whilst the Australian Labor Party were able to retain government with the self-described “socially conservative” Peter Malinauskas elected as premier, it is the result of One Nation that is deeply concerning. 

One Nation emerged as a far-right party after Pauline Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal party in the 1996 federal election for making racist comments regarding Aboriginal people. Unfortunately, there was a large layer of the population who were susceptible to, and even eager to hear her xenophobic views. She remained on the ballot, running as an independent.

Every sort of racist under the sun; from garden-variety types to fully fledged Nazis flocked to her political project, One Nation. Former Liberal politician David Oldfield became her chief political advisor. Oldfield had been an advisor to the former Liberal PM Tony Abbott (notable for wholesale attacks against the working class and for eating a raw onion with the skin).

As a co-founder of One Nation, Olfield was responsible for its political strategy and writing Hanson’s speeches. As the political party grew, its connection to white supremacist movements became more obvious, underlining the fact that Australia had not come to terms with problems of systemic racism. These problems persist to this day.

An Historic Breakthrough

One Nation won two lower house seats in the South Australian parliament. It is the first time One Nation has secured lower house seats outside of Queensland. The election result will give them a massive cash windfall. According to Redbridge Group, One Nation now has a primary vote as high as 26%, eclipsing the Liberals at 19%.

By winning 22% of the vote in SA, they have potentially secured $2 million in taxpayer funds for future elections. Not that they are short of money. According to the Grattan Institute a major source of income for One Nation is “dark money”. While they receive many individual donations from their constituents, a large portion comes from undisclosed sources that don’t meet the threshold for public transparency – about 79% in one recent disclosure period.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has also provided financial support and gifts such as flights (and trips to Bali). It has also attempted to secure large donations from Koch Industries and the NRA in the U.S with the promise of changing gun ownership laws (which was spectacularly exposed by the ABC). Other benefactors include the Australian Hotels Association, the Australian Retailers Association, and real estate and construction firms.

Although One Nation presents itself as a party that struggles for the “battler” or “ordinary Australians”, it remains aligned directly and indirectly with the most reactionary sections of the ruling class. It takes real (and perceived) grievances that many working class people feel such as lack of housing and redirects their anger towards migrants. 

Anti-Immigration

One Nation has always been opposed to immigration. Apart from hatred for indigenous people, anti-immigration is  their single defining policy. As far back as 1996, Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech to Parliament claimed Australia was being “swamped” by Asians. For a while, this schtick earned her outrage, controversy and popularity in the decaying working-class rustbelt of Ipswich and the backwaters of rural Queensland, especially in the north.

But this was only going to get her so far. The integration of South Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino and South Korean migrant groupings into urban centres of Australia meant sections of ruling-class opinion, including that of the Liberal party, were against anti-Asian racism as it cut into their base of support. Hanson’s message lost traction, fading from the discourse of right-wing shock jocks like Ray Hadley, Alan Jones and John Laws.

She would’ve been a one-trick pony, but for one event – the September 11 twin towers attack in 2001. This single event relaunched her fledgling career as she rode the waves of reaction against Muslim and Arabic people. After a stint in jail for electoral fraud, she was feted as a celebrity, rehabilitated on episodes of Sunrise and Dancing with the Stars and referred to as an “anti-terrorism expert”.

Her faltering robotic voice and anti-intellectualism appealed to those who felt modern society was racing ahead of them. It also appealed to a ruling class that sought greater integration with the project of the “American Century”, who used One Nation as a feeder party to channel votes to the Liberal Party and change the discourse of contemporary debates well to the right, tarring everything they didn’t like with the brush of “Cultural Marxism”. The culture wars of the 2000s and the rise of conspiracy theories played into her hands.

In 2020, Hanson exploited the crisis created by Covid for everything it was worth. Her following grew to 340,000 on Facebook. She revived the Sinophobic rhetoric of her first iteration and was successful at racialising Covid which was reported to have spread from the Wuhan province in China. 

It is always easier to make a claim than it is to refute one. The conspiracy theory that Covid was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory found a willing audience who spread it across the dark corners of the internet. No proof was needed, only xenophobia.

The cost-of-living crisis has provided explosive fuel for the fire of anti-immigration. In January this year, Hanson’s close adviser James Ashby urged Australia to consider mirroring the White House by restricting visa approvals for up to 75 countries. One Nation’s immigration policy calls for 75,000 migrants to be deported and for international arrivals to be cut by more than 570,000.

Racists

Not everyone who votes for One Nation is a racist, but all the racists of Australia are flocking to them, draping themselves in the flag, reproducing and spreading its toxicity. Hanson has a long history of making racist attacks on individuals and communities. In March 2026, Hanson was formally censured by the Senate—her second such sanction in four months—after stating in a Sky News interview that there were “no good Muslims”.

In November 2025, Hanson was suspended from the Senate for seven sitting days after wearing a burqa on the Senate floor, a repeat of a 2017 incident intended to protest the garment. Hanson has frequently targeted Australian Muslims, proposing a ban on Muslim immigration, a Royal Commission into Islam, and the “banning of the burqa”.

In 2018, she introduced a Senate motion supporting the slogan “It’s OK to be white,” which is widely recognised as a white supremacist trolling phrase. Her career is built on the notion of white victimhood. The impact of her rhetoric has normalised extreme forms of racism and empowered far-right movements.

White Supremacy

The really stupid thing about being a white supremacist, despite their idiotic violence, is that they are always going to be doomed to failure. History will piss on white supremacists. If they’re not reviled enough in this lifetime, future generations will hold them in total disgust and contempt and will wonder how they were ever tolerated or given so much freedom of expression and airtime.

This is not just a moral question; white supremacy is deeply irrational on its own terms. It repeatedly undermines the very society it claims to defend. First, it rests on a fantasy about history. White supremacy in Australia depends on erasing or minimising the reality of invasion, frontier violence, and dispossession following British colonisation of Australia. 

But that past does not disappear—it shapes land rights, inequality, incarceration rates, and political conflict today. So instead of stabilising society, or restoring its grandeur, the ideology traps Australia in endless denial and periodic backlash whenever truth resurfaces (for example, around debates on Australia Day or constitutional recognition).

White supremacy cannot grasp the material basis of modern Australia. The country is structurally dependent on migration and on integration into Asia—economically, culturally, and geopolitically. Clinging to a racial hierarchy inherited from the White Australia policy is not just reactionary, it’s incoherent with how modern society functions. The workforce, universities, and entire sectors would simply not operate under those old assumptions.

But white supremacy does represent a certain social psychology reinforced by state institutions. Our society contains systematic structural problems that perpetuate racism. Ingrained in the culture of Australia is a series of myths laced with racial superiority, such as the idea that this country was peacefully settled, that the wars the ANZACS fought were about protecting an “egalitarian” way of life and “mateship”. The myth that Australia was once a “fair” place is bound up with notions of fair skin. This appeals to alienated sections of society who connect simple stories to explain their identity.

As alluring as these myths might be, white supremacy is a dead end. It produces a bad strategy even for the ruling elites who use it to maintain their power. White supremacist currents fracture the working class along racial lines, which clearly sections of the ruling class desire—but overall, these fractures intensify crises, and pit society into spirals of self-destruction. 

Racism under capitalism is a persistent problem, but it also inhibits capital accumulation because it increases social despair and dysfunction, and destroys opportunities for whole sections of the population that might otherwise fulfil their potential and add to society’s productivity. 

Historically, moments of explicit racial exclusion have coincided with strategic blindness—for instance, fear-driven immigration regimes or alignment with imperial powers that lead to disastrous adventures (such as on the beaches of Gallipoli). The racism of the Nazi’s led to their biggest blunder – thinking they could conquer the peoples of the Caucasus and the Eurasian Steppe and subjugate the Soviet Union under the jackboot of Fascist rule.

Racism is also on a collision course with scientific facts. The pseudo-science of eugenics – the selective breeding of humans, which could improve populations and eliminate their weaknesses no longer has a following like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. This ideology relies on mystified hierarchies that experts in biology, anthropology, and history have completely discredited. Yet, somehow, forms of it persist because it serves psychological and political functions—status, identity, scapegoating—not because it corresponds to reality. That gap between belief and reality is what makes it so alluring for the truly ignorant; it requires constant distortion of evidence and experience to sustain itself.

In the Australian case, white supremacy will always fail, even if it is electorally successful. White Australian nationalism is never going to be stable. Its inherent infusion of violence will rip the country apart, creating a rallying point for humanist and progressive forces to fight back. The more the left “Cultural Marxists” are attacked by the right, the greater the interest in the rational ideas of the socialist movement, which defends the rights of workers and all the oppressed.

The rise of One Nation gives more fuel to the fire of white supremacists movements. Hanson and her party have sanitised the views of the far-right and brought them into the mainstream. Like neo-Nazi movements throughout Europe, One Nation has framed immigration as a civilisational threat and the primary cause of social decay. The discourse has evolved from targeting skin-colour to arguments about embracing “Australian values”.

The great shame of white supremacy in Australia is that it survives not because it works, but because it is continually reproduced through institutions, media, and politics—even as it seeks to cannibalise these sources of its power for its own aims. The 19th-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but tends towards justice”.

While that is true, it will take a concerted fight to rid Australia of racism.