Pauline Hanson’s Dog Whistling on Muslims Sets Politics into Race to the Bottom

“Oh, you know, you say, ‘Oh, well, there is good Muslims out there,’” One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson said to Sky News host Sharri Markson during an interview on the evening of 16 February 2026. “How can you tell me there are good Muslims?”

This dog whistling rhetoric delivered by the nation’s arch xenophobe, with 30 years’ experience in the game, comes at a point in Australian history when social cohesion is at an all-time low. Pauline’s outburst has triggered in its wake multiple instances this week of white nationalists around the country rising in Islamophobic crescendos.

Hanson further took the moment to demonise the suburb of Lakemba, which sits on Wangal land in Sydney’s southwest, as it has the most concentrated Muslim population on the continent. Indeed, in the wake of Pauline’s diatribe, Lakemba mosque received a letter threatening the lives of Muslim people, which was obviously spurred by the One Nation leader’s outburst.

With its exceedingly wealthy backers and links to the MAGA White House, One Nation, a minority party, has this year out polled the Liberals, one of the two majors, for the first time. Hanson is riding a wave of white nationalism that erupted in August 2025, after tens of thousands of pro-Palestinians marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, embarrassed the western establishment.

And this white nationalist death threat against Muslims delivered to the mosque contains political concerns, including the suggestion to deport all Muslims. Yet, it’s not being investigated as an act of terrorism, which does tend to reveal how NSW authorities perceive the targeted threat of violence against one group, differently to how it treats those threats against other groups.

Homegrown MAGA rising

Hanson is riding this wave of populist support, as she delivers rhetoric that mimics that of the Trump White House. President Donald Trump has been consolidating power domestically, via the demonisation of undocumented migrants, and whilst the March for Australia movement has targeted mass migration, Pauline is making this campaign more directly about Muslim constituents.

Markson further quizzed Hanson on whether a leaked Liberal plan to ban immigration from regions in 13 countries, like Nigeria, Lebanon and Afghanistan, was too discriminatory. Yet, Hanson said she agrees with it. The plan had been devised by former Liberal leader Sussan Ley post-Bondi, and it mimics Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban”. However, Ley is considered to be a moderate Liberal politician.

Hanson told Markson she agrees with the suggestion of former Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett that the Liberals, the Nationals and One Nation must join in order to defeat the Labor leadership in that state. And this too comes on the back of Hanson earlier stating that if the Australian constiuency wants it, One Nation will run candidates in all seats for the next federal election.

The One Nation leader, who entered the Australian political arena in 1996, further used the Trump White House example of the suggested dissolution of the white polity and its culture in certain European nations, “like France and Denmark and England… and Canada”, whom she considers are now swamped by “radical Islam”, with its adherents she posits hating westerners.

“If we open up the borders and allow more into the country, we are going to suffer,” Hanson told Markson. “I tell you what, I have no time for the radical Islam. Their religion concerns me, because of what it says in the Quran. They hate westerners, and that is what this is all about.”

Global West white supremacy

Multiple polls over 2026 reflect a turning from the Liberal Nationals coalition, which has usually maintained the first or second position in the local political polls for the last century. The Coalition has been in free fall since federal Labor won on a landslide at the May 2025 federal election. And the rise of Hanson appears to be intimately linked to that of MAGA in the United States.

The Australian white nationalist movement erupted onto the scene at the 31 August 2025 March for Australia rallies, which have been repeated monthly ever since. These gatherings have also included neo-Nazi elements, who had been on the rise since March 2023, but were made to disband their umbrella group, the National Socialist Network, after hate group laws were recently passed.

As ASIO had noted over the COVID period, local far right actors have been linking into global white supremacist networks. The uptick in nationalist mobilisations in this country have followed a more than 12-month-old campaign of white riots in Britian over immigration, which appear intimately tied to the MAGA movement in the US. Indeed, the rise in nationalism in all three countries seems linked.

MAGA insider Elon Musk made a televised appearance at a September 2025 British Unite the Kingdom rally, and he spoke to UK movement leader Tommy Robinson about how white British citizens should rise up and overthrow their government for its sins of progressing mass migration. And Robinson then made a televised appearance at Australian antiimmigration rallies last December.

The Trump administration has been vocally deriding European nations over their levels of immigration, because it considers this is diluting and threatening western civilisation. The idea that Washington is interfering in our domestic sphere got some grounding when a US State Department official announced last November, that the US is now monitoring migration crime in Australia.

Authoritarianism on its way down under

The Trump administration’s shift to authoritarianism has not officially been recognised in this country. Our political class is charging ahead with relations with the US government as if nothing has changed and it remains a bastion of freedom and democracy, which means that the shift towards conservatism it is demanding take place in our polity is proceeding without noted attention.

The idea that this country could fall into authoritarianism rule is about as likely as it was that the US government would topple over into a Trumpian dictatorship, and now that this shift has occurred in that nation, our country’s closet ally, it is much more likely that changes in the local political environment will progress undetected until it is too late and autocratic rule is established.

The fear that what has transpired in the US in respect of the MAGA movement repeating in Australia has seemed far-fetched, but with the rise of Pauline Hanson to become a major contender in the polls, it now makes sense that a populist leader, who has been spouting far right rhetoric to the constituency for the past three decades, might actually take the top office.

The other sure sign that this nation’s public sphere is becoming more closed is that NSW authorities threatened those pro-Palestinians seeking to protest the visit of Israeli president Isaac Herzog to Australia last week with a serious NSW police response if they mobilised, and when that transpired on 9 February 2026, 3,000 police officers brutally set upon a group of 20,000 demonstrators.

This development has been made all the more severe by the fact that NSW premier Chris Minns, NSW police minister Yasmin Catley and NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon have all refused to condemn the open violence perpetrated by the NSW police upon Sydney’s pro-Palestinians, and in doing so, they’ve left the door open for further police violence to deal with nonconforming civilians.

So, whether it’s a Labor state government attempting to use violence to stop criticism of Israel’s 28-month-long genocide in Gaza or whether it’s the nation’s most successful far right white supremacist politician vying for the top office on a MAGA wave, it seems that the entire Australian polity may be at risk of collapsing over into oppressive rule.