Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club appearance confirmed what a vile reactionary she is and what a threat her far-right party poses to all working-class people. She has nothing but contempt for workers, denouncing them as “lazy” and “on their phones” too much, complaining they are too hard to sack, and expressing opposition to paid maternity leave.
She wants to create a monoculture of white nationalists and a country of low-paid and subservient workers whose only purpose is to further enrich bosses both large and small—the big banks, the supermarket chains, the Murdochs and Gina Reinharts plus every shonky property developer, spiv and rip-off merchant.
Hanson is out to take away the rights working-class people have fought for. She wants to slash welfare and health care, severely restrict abortion rights, further undermine union rights and increase military spending to prepare for war. All of this is on top of climate denialism and her racist attacks on Aboriginal people and migrants, who form a substantial section of the modern Australian working class. The monoculture Hanson wants to impose on us is one that obliterates all our basic freedoms.
Her program is explicitly to the right of even US President Donald Trump, and shares much in common with the extreme racist nationalism of the pre-World War II fascist dictatorships. Indeed, Hanson is openly promoting the violent British fascist gang leader Tommy Robinson.
More people are starting to wake up to the threat that One Nation poses. That immediately raises the question of how she can be pushed back and eventually defeated.
Hanson can’t simply be wished away. We can’t rely on appeals to middle-class opinion that assume mainstream norms should and will prevail. She has to be fought, and it is going to be a long and serious battle. To have a chance of winning it, we have to build a powerful working-class movement that can abolish the conditions that breed far-right reaction. That means fighting to overturn the exploitative capitalist order, not backing lesser-evil mainstream parties that merely prop up the oppressive status quo.
The proponents of lesser evilism argue that, while parties like the ALP and the US Democrats are far from perfect, workers need to hold their noses and vote for them in order to keep out worse alternatives like Hanson and Trump. But while voting Labor might temporarily prevent One Nation forming government, it will definitely not stop the advance of the far right over the longer term. Experience shows it will only fuel it.
In country after country where liberals and social democrats have called on workers to vote for the supposedly lesser evil candidate to defeat the fascist threat, it has singularly failed to see off that threat.
In France, many left-wing people voted for the supposedly moderate Emmanuel Macron to stop Marine Le Pen, head of the white nationalist and fascist National Rally, becoming president. In office, Macron has ruled in an extremely authoritarian and racist manner little different from extreme right nationalist governments like Meloni in Italy, Orban in Hungary or Trump in the US. Macron has forced through harsh neoliberal measures and waged blatantly racist campaigns against Muslims and migrants. Democratic rights have been savaged and unions attacked, all to serve the interests of the big end of town.
Far from support for the National Rally being undermined, the party’s vote in the first round of the French assembly elections surged from 18.7 percent in 2022 to 33.2 percent in July 2024, peaking at 37.06 per cent in the second round. And this extreme nationalist fascist party is the front runner for the 2027 French presidential elections. So the lesser evil option has not only led to the sorts of policies people who voted for it were trying to avoid, but has also strengthened the evil it promised to act as a bulwark against.
It is similar in Britain. The Starmer Labour government thoroughly demoralised its working-class supporters with its program of swingeing cutbacks to boost the profits of big business. British Labour ramped up military spending and implemented a concerted racist campaign against migrants and refugees. No wonder racist pogroms erupted and Nigel Farage’s far-right nationalist Reform UK and the blatantly fascist Restore Britain surged in the polls.
Labour won the 2024 general election with 33.7 per cent of the vote compared to 14.3 per cent for Reform. But for the last year, Reform has consistently led Labour in the polls by at least 4 or 5 percent and often considerably more, with Restore Britain polling another 3 to 7 percent on top of that.
Similarly, voting for the Democrats in the US did not stop the rise of Donald Trump. The lesser evil Joe Biden, like every other Democratic president, sought to advance the wealth and power of the US big business establishment. Far from combating reactionary racism, Biden’s administration carried out mass deportations of migrants and refused to rein in racist police. Biden increased military spending, backed Israel’s war on Gaza, and did nothing to improve working-class living standards. The Democrats therefore merely prepared the ground for Trump’s return to office.
Even if the Democrats win the presidency next time round, the far-right nationalist and fascist forces will not simply disappear. They are likely to become even more extreme, as they have everywhere from Germany to Italy to India.
In Australia, decades of both Labor and Liberal governments ruling for the corporate rich, attacking workers’ rights, privatising core services, running down the health system, demonising Muslims and refugees have likewise created the soil in which support for One Nation has grown as the supposed anti-establishment party.
When Hanson first shot to fame in the 1990s, there was outrage at her unbridled racism. Thirty years later, she has been normalised by the media and the mainstream parties, which have adopted large chunks of her reactionary agenda.
Labor has recognised the challenge posed by One Nation and is beginning to talk up its supposedly pro-worker credentials to appeal to progressive voters. However, Labor in government has not advanced the interests of working-class people. Quite the reverse. The ALP consistently works to undermine any serious fight by workers to stand up for their rights.
One of the worst crimes of Labor politicians and the trade union leaders that are allied to them is that for decades they have undermined working-class cohesion, class consciousness and workplace organisation. In doing so, they have severely weakened the very forces that could have blunted Hanson’s impact and led the fight against her political influence. Another term of Labor in office will further compound this problem, and do nothing to resolve the growing alienation and bitterness in society or turn it in a progressive direction.
ALP MPs at times criticise Hanson’s racism. But it doesn’t land because it seems so insincere given that Labor’s track record is one of locking up refugees, overseeing record levels of Aboriginal deaths in custody, introducing harsh laws targeting Aboriginal and African youth, apologising for migration, supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and demonising its opponents.
Labor is highlighting Hanson’s blatantly anti-worker agenda on wages and conditions. However, the impact of Labor’s criticisms is weakened by the reality that the Albanese government and ALP state governments have consistently championed the interests of the banks, the property developers, the mining companies and the rest of big business. Labor has presided over declining wages and imposed anti-worker laws with some of the most severe restrictions on the right to strike in the Western world.
Labor may not be as right wing as One Nation, but the lesser evil is still an evil. Instead of clinging to it out of fear of the alternative, the oppressed need to build and vote for a socialist party that will actually stand up to all the evils of capitalism.
In the US, it has been the concerted mass mobilisations against ICE, in particular the sustained protests and strikes by workers in Minneapolis, that played a key role in pushing back Trump, not anything the Democrats have done. In the UK it has been the mass protests in response to the pogrom against migrants by loyalist gangs in Belfast that helped isolate the far right, not anything the Labour government did.
It is that sort of mass action that needs to be built over the coming years in Australia. But as well as street mobilisations directly against the racist far right, there needs to be a fight back on every front, from the defence of living standards, opposing the military build-up, defence of women’s rights, concerted action on climate change and much more.
A key part of that will be rebuilding fighting unions that are prepared to take on the big corporations and the governments that back them. Even more importantly, we need to build a socialist political alternative to the far right and to the ALP and the Greens.
A socialist party that organises in every workplace, every school and every university for the liberation of workers and all the oppressed. A socialist party that offers hope of a better world to the misery of capitalism and far right despair.
A socialist party that unapologetically demands a complete overhaul of the capitalist status quo and its oppressive tyranny over workers. A socialist party that counter-poses working class solidarity and democracy to One Nation’s racism and authoritarianism.
Socialists are not just out to make capitalist society a little bit fairer, slightly less racist and sexist. We are fighting for a society in which workers have democratic control over everything and have no other agenda when exercising that control than meeting the needs of the mass of people rather than the super-rich, as under capitalism.
Such a thoroughgoing democratic society will have no room for wars, racism and bigotry, no room for billionaires and the likes of Hanson. It will strive in a planned way to improve the lives of all in terms of health care, housing, education, child care and meaningful and enjoyable work rather than soul-destroying drudgery, all without ravaging the environment.
We need this radical vision if we are to defeat the likes of Hanson, Trump, Farage and Modi. Most of the other opposition to Hanson, including the ALP, are apologists for the capitalist status quo, which means they are totally incapable of providing a thoroughgoing alternative to far-right reaction and the unequal conditions that breed it.
So while we want to see Hanson’s momentum checked in the Victorian election this November, re-election of the state ALP government—or Albanese in 2028—will not end the far-right threat. A fighting alternative has to be built to One Nation and to the very foundations of the capitalist system that is the breeding ground of racism and the far right.
