A student walkout against Pauline Hanson and One Nation was announced for 17 September 2026. I think the students were right to organise it (Green Left, 2026).
Not because One Nation represents some uniquely terrible aberration in Australian politics, nor because every person who supports it should be dismissed along with it, but because I see the movement as concentrating several problems already spreading through contemporary politics: division, the confusion of political performance with governing competence, and a communications environment extraordinarily well suited to populism.
The question of competence matters. Its relationship to the public performance of leadership matters just as much. Contemporary politics allows expertise to be distributed around the politician. Researchers, advisers, consultants, lawyers, lobbyists and communications professionals can supply expertise while the public figure supplies identity, certainty and performance.
Ask a sufficiently difficult question and an explanation can be displaced by the prepared line, the familiar enemy, the anecdote, the slogan or the pivot. Donald Trump is a prominent contemporary example of the political force of identity and performance. Political success does not itself demonstrate mastery of complex policy.
One Nation makes this arrangement particularly interesting because its political identity is built around the ordinary Australian standing against elites, institutions and professional political classes. Yet a national political organisation cannot operate on ordinary intuition alone. It requires money, lawyers, researchers, administrators, policy development, media strategy and professional political expertise.
The useful questions are consequently concrete: who supplies that expertise, who develops the policy, where does the money come from, how are those relationships disclosed, and what happens when anti-establishment politics depends upon an increasingly sophisticated establishment of its own?
Then there is the contradiction sitting directly inside the name. One Nation promises unity. My criticism is that its public framing makes division central to that promise: an Australian “us” set against a threatening “them”, ordinary Australians against elites, national belonging against cultural difference. Hanson’s reported call for a monocultural Australia provides a concrete example (Speers, 2026).
Those divisions generate the grievance from which the promise of restored unity obtains its political force. A politics organised around overcoming division must keep presenting a divided Australia in order to keep offering unity as the answer. The cure depends upon the persistence of the condition it claims to cure.
None of this belongs exclusively to the political right. Contemporary communications technology rewards conflict across the political spectrum. Anger captures attention, certainty suppresses complexity, grievance sustains engagement, and enemies provide an organising focus for all three. Careful explanations of difficult systems fare considerably worse. Political communication consequently selects increasingly for communicative fitness rather than governing competence.
One Nation is particularly well adapted to this environment because division is simple, grievance is repeatable and outrage keeps the political signal circulating.
That is why I think the students were right to call for a walkout. A walkout will not resolve the conditions producing One Nation, and the students themselves will hardly agree about every political question. They do not need to. Refusing a politics that derives its coherence from repeatedly dividing the population is itself a legitimate political act.
The larger problem outlasts the protest: we have built communications systems increasingly capable of making division profitable, simplification persuasive and the performance of competence difficult to distinguish from the thing itself.
References
Green Left (2026). Students say NO to Hanson: Nationwide Day of Protest – Gadigal Country. Event listing, 17 September.
Speers, D. (2026). Defiant Pauline Hanson gives Labor and the Coalition plenty to be nervous about. ABC News, 18 June.
