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# Why One Nation is attacking women
- URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-one-nation-is-attacking-women/
- Published: 2026-08-23T04:08:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T04:08:55.000Z
- Author: Kelly Cvetkova
- Tags: Far Right, Australia, Gender and Sexuality, #308

Pauline Hanson has spat in the faces of the millions of Australian women who have experienced family violence by describing the crime as a “two-way street”. Returning to a tired victim-blaming rhetoric that women just “shouldn’t put up with it”, she’s trying to turn the clock back on attitudes to women experiencing violence and the real difficulties they face getting support. 

Hanson has featured on right-wing podcasts asserting that women are treating the family courts and child support payments as a “cash cow”, a system that needs to be “reined in”. These comments not only fly in the face of reality but are also an attack on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Australia. The 2025 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey found that 34.7 percent of children in single parent households live in poverty. Eight out of every ten of these households are headed by women. Domestic abuse is the main reason women become homeless in Australia, women and children making up nine out of the ten people attempting to access specialist housing services. 

Hanson’s outbursts are not the result of ignorance. One Nation’s increased attacks against the rights of women, whether on the issues of domestic abuse, abortion rights or parental leave, are part of the intensification of its far-right agenda, and an attempt to integrate a broader range of social issues into it. Women, according to this logic, are just another interest group that gets “special treatment” thanks to wokeism and whose endless demands are a drain on business and wealth creation. In her now infamous speech at the National Press Club, Hanson made this clear, stating “if women take time off \[to have children\] and they are not paid their wages because they’re not working, fair enough ... Why should business pay? They’re not at work”. 

This parallels her attacks on organisations like the National Indigenous Australians Agency, which she argues should be abolished to save taxpayers from “wasteful Indigenous grants”. She likewise attacks LGBTI people, specifically the “transgender insurgency”, that has “penetrated almost every regulatory authority”. Who is on the other side of this equation? Apparently, as Hanson told parliament in 2023, “the most oppressed and neglected minority in Australia”, is—wait for it—“men”. 

The positioning around women’s rights is also intended to garner One Nation stronger support with a wider and more hardcore base of potential members and campaigners, most recently on the issue of abortion.

While the party has always maintained sexist talking points about the family courts and the evils of feminism, it has not previously actively campaigned against abortion rights. Hanson has been testing the waters on this issue lately though, indicating that she thinks Australia needs to “have a conversation” about abortion and flagging that she thinks abortion rights should be restricted after twenty weeks. She’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of infamous anti-abortion activist and influencer Joanna Howe. When Malcolm Roberts was questioned at a Brisbane Christian conference about whether the party would move to a policy of banning abortion altogether, the One Nation senator said that it was “becoming \[his\] goal” to do so.

Barnaby Joyce has been the most explicit in why the change of approach has come now. Speaking to a Sydney crowd of anti-abortion demonstrators, he stated, “What I see before me here is about 1,500 people who can hand out how to vote cards”. One Nation has a clear desire to recruit those sections of the right who are motivated by this issue. And why not—they are an already organised layer of activists who can be relatively easily deployed to campaign, especially if One Nation seems able to deliver and potentially reverse their flagging fortunes. 

Abortion has, in practice, been a settled issue in Australian politics for decades. Nearly three in every four people support legal abortion in some or all cases. But the right know both that there is a motivated minority available to them, and are confident that an aggressive campaign can swing more people behind the cause—especially when Labor is too cowardly to fight on the issue, as it was during the Voice referendum, for example. And the reality is that attitudes to abortion are already going backwards. A *Guardian* Essential poll found that between November 2024 and July 2026, the percentage of people who agree abortion should be legal in all cases dropped from 41 to 29\. Attitudes towards women in general are becoming worse overall, particularly among young people. A 2026 study by the University of Melbourne revealed that approximately 40 percent of boys aged 13 to 17 agreed that women lie about domestic and sexual violence. Support for the use of violence to resist feminism was highest among adolescent boys at 28 percent, followed by adolescent girls at 21 percent. One Nation is trying to seize on these shifts, accelerate them, and gain electorally from them. 

They’ve already shown that a sizeable minority of dedicated far right individuals can have an outsized impact on the political landscape. Despite 73 percent of Australians supporting cultural diversity, this has not stopped Pauline Hanson from making “monoculture” a talking point. One Nation can campaign on positions that are generally unpopular at the moment because they’re not trying to win over every single voter. They’re working instead to gather together the most ideologically committed and rabid of the far right to create an organised force of people who can better influence, and potentially govern, society. They understand that providing an integrated right-wing world view that draws together all the issues that mobilise different parts of the far right will create people likely to remain loyal and useful to the party for this purpose. 

This is the real threat One Nation represents. The far right is dangerous, not simply because Pauline Hanson might win more votes, but because they are building a dedicated and active movement. If we’re going to win, socialists need to build one of our own.