One Nation’s Surge to Number One Involves More Than Just Disaffected Voters

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has taken out top position in two polls released since Sunday, 31 April 2026. This marks a phenomenal surge for a minor party that positions itself on white nationalism, antiimmigration sentiment and not much else, attracting disaffected grassroots voters whose interests the party doesn’t serve, but it’s much the same way that Donald Trump became president.

One Nation topped Redbridge and YouGov polls this week, whilst a further Morgan poll saw Hanson’s party tie with federal Labor, while the government only retained the lead in a fourth poll by Fox & Hedgehog. This surge in One Nation began in January, when the far-right party commenced coming in second in the polls to trump the Coalition opposition, which at that point was astounding.

This unprecedented busting of the duopoly hold that the majors, Labor and the Liberal Nationals, have had over politics for a century might have only impacted polling in early 2026, but by March, it was reflected in the South Australian election results, with One Nation garnering the second highest primary vote, whilst the far-right party took out the Farrer byelection in New South Wales in May.

Hanson has always placed herself in the vicinity of where Trump has positioned himself on the political spectrum as the leader of the MAGA movement in the United States, and that is as an anti-establishment voice for the common (white) people, which is despite both their politics consistently supporting policies that undermine workers’ rights and benefit big business.

But Hanson’s meteoric rise in popularity cannot solely be put down to disaffected white Australians all of a sudden turning to her, as it’s also part of a broader campaign across the western world being pushed by the Trump White House that aims to erode the welfare state and basic human rights to the benefit of billionaires, or the Epstein class. And these days, Pauline’s quite fond of billionaires.

Mates in high places

Hanson founded One Nation in 1997, the year after she entered federal parliament to take the lower house seat of Oxley as an independent, after she’d commenced her candidacy as a Liberal member, prior to being given the boot by them for airing her racist views about First Nations people and immigrants whilst out on the campaign trail, as a then Ipswich fish and chip shop owner.

These days, however, Hanson hobnobs with billionaires, and she’s been especially close to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, in recent times. And so important is this relationship to the iron ore mining magnate that Rinehart gifted Hanson a $1 million plane in April, which was accompanied by $2 million in cash donations for One Nation that came from some of the tycoon’s stockbroker mates.

This gifting of the plane followed revelations last November that involved Rinehart having flown Hanson to Florida to address a CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and Hanson spoke on a range of issues that tick all the MAGA boxes, including mass migration and climate denialism. Hanson even attended Trump’s Halloween party at the estate.

Rinehart is a supporter of Trump. His taking office in early 2025 on a platform that included the pro-mining slogan “drill baby drill” appealed to her. The trip to see the US president alongside Hanson appears to have solidified Rinehart’s support for One Nation, and she’s now encouraging her well-off associates to follow suit, after she’d backed the Liberals in their failed attempt to take office in 2025.

Another recent soiree that drew attention to the growing alliance occurred when Rinehart hosted a dinner party on her private jet in April that included ten of One Nation’s top donors, besides herself, along with Hanson and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who left the Nationals Party to join One Nation last December, and has long been understood to be a close associate of Rinehart’s.

MAGA before Trump turned to politics

So, One Nation’s surge in the polls too coincides with this nation’s billionaire class turning to the former chip shop owner as someone who evokes populist appeal and can at the same time cast votes in the direction of policies that best suit big business to the detriment of workers and First Peoples, as well as a figure who has no qualms about demonising minorities to consolidate power.

Trump’s second coming as US president has prominently involved a mass deportation drive targeting undocumented migrants, which has presented his disaffected supporters with an enemy to blame for all their woes, and his morphing of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) into an agency to proactively hunt down migrants, has also created a force to silence domestic political dissent.

Hanson is now benefiting from the support of an exponentially rising white nationalist movement in this country that’s roots lie in the antivaxx/antilockdown demonstrations of the COVID era but shifted into the March for Australia demonstrations that occurred from August 2025 to February this year. And these “Australia First” advocates are now a common and rising voice in the public sphere.

This movement arose distinctly in the wake of the mass pro-Palestinian march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August 2025, which a week later, resulted in PM Anthony Albanese determining to recognise Palestine as a state. And this show of Australian civil society support for Palestine and the decision to recognise the state were not considered top of the pops by the White House.

Another convenient aspect to the position of Hanson as a Make Australia Great Again leader is that her politics have for three decades now been predicated on making divisive comments, deriding minorities, railing against “woke politics”, even before the term was coined, and her policies have been lacking if not completely bare, which is the same way that Trump first rode into the presidency.

A global shift

Early this year, statisticians at polling agencies were tapping on their screens, trying to make their computers spit out the correct information, as the machines kept insisting that One Nation was coming second in the polls. Now, at midyear, it appears that the far-right minor party is this nation’s most favoured, and commentators are seriously talking about the prospect of Hanson as PM.

The Liberal Nationals opposition have been imploding out in the open, with new leader Angus Taylor attempting to trump Hanson by announcing a (white) “Australian values” immigration policy and stepping up our deportation regime to target migrants of “subversive intent” in April, while more recently, his new policy proposes to block Australian residents from accessing welfare benefits.

Hanson has been gaining in popularity amongst the broad white nationalist movement that first raised its head late last August and involved monthly rallies calling for a return to a white Australia-focused society. Hanson appeared at the first such rally held on Ngunnawal land in Canberra last October, as well as making an appearance at a Naarm-Melbourne demonstration the next month.

But the rising white nationalist movement in Australia is taking place at the same time that a British version is underway in the United Kingdom, whilst the white supremacist movement in the United States has been on the rise since the first Trump presidency, with it not being too much of a stretch to describe the current Trump administration as openly white supremacist.

Trump White House insider and richest man on the planet Elon Musk made a televised appearance at one of the “Unite the Kingdom” white nationalist rallies held in the UK last year, and he openly spoke about the white British crowd being undermined by a flood of migrants, and he advised white Brits to rise up and topple their own government to stop mass migration before it’s too late.

So, the real question is whether the forces behind the rise of One Nation can just be put down to local disaffected voters, when we’re in a climate where the White House has openly announced it’s monitoring this nation’s migration crime and it’s also actively propagandising our public sphere to stymie anti-US sentiment and to disseminate pro-American ideas.

And in taking these various aspects into account, as Hanson does surge at an unprecedented rate in the local polls and talk turns to whether she could viably lead the country, questions must be asked about whether a populist grassroots surge is the sole catalyst, or whether the support of the Epstein class and the MAGA White House is somehow influencing this unexpected sea change down under.