Labor Is Legislating the Bedrock for a Future Authoritarian One Nation Government

Multiple polls in early 2026 have Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party coming in at second place behind the Labor government. Of course, unlike the Coalition opposition, One Nation only holds a few seats in parliament and has only ever run candidates in limited electorates. But Hanson has said that if the constituency desires it, her party will run members in all seats at the next election in 2028.

Hanson’s surging past the Coalition in the polls is an aberration. It hints at a break in the more than a century-old stranglehold major parties have had over Australian politics. Former Nationals deputy PM Barnaby Joyce defected to One Nation in December. And speculation that Liberals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price might follow has just been put on hold.

Hanson and Joyce provide One Nation with two populist leaders and with this surge in white nationalist support the party is now seeing, the party now appears a legitimate threat to the majors, and while this might be slight, it’s also increasing in viability.

This surge in the vote for One Nation, which is a party that has, since 1990s-inception, platformed itself as a pushback against multiculturalism and a reassertion of white Australian identity, is also occurring alongside rising draconian lawmaking by Labor on the pretext of an antisemitism crisis, which, as the Trump White House has revealed, could later facilitate authoritarian governance.

Rising MAGA down under

Since the Trump administration retook office in January 2025, the US president has initiated a new era of the international order, as he’s threatened US security relations with European allies, and foreshadowed annexing Canada and Greenland. So, for a vassal state like Australia, the prospect would seem either casting us aside into China’s ‘sphere of influence’ or our very own annexation.

The major party political class has not come to terms with our nation’s greatest ally having become an authoritarian state and thrown out the rulebook pertaining to post-World War II rule of law and diplomacy. Both the Albanese government and the collapsed and defunct Liberal Nationals do not seem to understand that some vague western ties with the US will continue to matter.

Trump swept to power with his supporter base made up of disaffected white Christian Americans. US journalist Chris Hedges warned of the rising force of American Fascists in his 2007 study on them. Since the massive outpouring of civil society support for the 3 August 2025 Sydney Harbour Bridge march for Palestine, nationwide white nationalist marches have occurred every month since.

The white nationalists who’ve been “marching for Australia” of late, support MAGA and its current mass deportation drive against undocumented migrants in the States. They position themselves as prioritising antiimmigration and just as it’s rumoured that Hanson has recently attended an event held by president Trump at Mar-a-Largo, these white Australian supporters of One Nation have links to grassroots MAGA supporters in the US.

Laying a foundation for authoritarian rule

Ausralian Labor governments, the Liberal Nationals in Queensland and the Country Liberals in the Northern Territory have been passing increasingly authoritarian laws that have appeared since Israel commenced mass murdering the Palestinians of Gaza. The genocide in Gaza and Trump’s January 2026 kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, have bookended the fall of the post-World War II era.

Take NSW, for instance, the former Coalition government kicked off the authoritarian lawmaking with its 2022 antiprotest regime that rules out unauthorised protests via threat of steep prison time. Then in the wake of a staged antisemitic crimewave, NSW Labor rolled out a swag of hate crime and antiprotest laws in February 2025, and last December saw an ability to blanket ban protests passed.

This new prohibition on protests over sections of NSW for up to 90 days was legislated following the 14 December 2025 ISIS inspired Bondi Beach massacre, as were the recent hate laws that the Albanese government passed at the federal level on 20 January. These include a new regime to list and prohibit hate groups, along with a new ability to deport people on grounds of racial hatred.

Civil liberties experts have long warned that the issue with democratic governments passing draconian laws is that if an authoritarian party came to power, it could wield them in fascistic ways. This process has been occurring in the United States for the last 12 months: old laws permitting overreach lying dormant on the books have been reawakened in order to siege total control.

An example of how this could play out in Australia has just been delivered by federal Labor as its new listing hate groups regime appears to have the reach to allow for the targeting pro-Palestinian critics of Israel. The UK government has outlawed Palestine Action, and the local fear is that the government could deem pro-Palestinians antisemitic and prohibit their presence on the streets.

In response to this reasonable fear, Australian attorney general Michelle Rowland and home affairs minister Tony Burke have written to the Australian National Imams Council to assure it that the laws will not be used against criticism of a foreign nation and its policies. However, the law itself will allow this if Labor is voted out at the next election and another government applies them in this way.

NSW and federal Labor have both legislated hate laws with an exceptionally wide berth that none of the ministers involved can guarantee in the future will not be wielded in an authoritarian manner by a different set of politicians.

The stage is set

Much of the Australian constituency remains unaware that the US Trump administration has long been hinting at attempting to foil upcoming midterm elections to prevent the Democrats from taking the majority in the Congress, and US commentators have been discussing whether the 2024 presidential election might be the last national vote, prior to the unleashing of a MAGA dictatorship.

The rise in white nationalism that’s behind the One Nation surge in the local polls is rising alongside a spike in white nationalism across the west, with full scale antiimmigration riots erupting in the UK a number of times since mid-2024. MAGA insider tech bro Elon Musk made a televised appearance at one such UK rally last year, to encourage white British people to overthrow their government.

So, while the suggestion that One Nation could continue to surge ahead and one day in the future take power, and in order to ensure that white identity is reasserted, it might move to consolidate that power through the use of draconian laws that Labor and the Liberals have left scattered throughout the books might sound far-fetched now, but so did a Trump dictatorship a year ago