Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am.
Chapter 2: What makes Pauline Hanson a significant political figure in Australia?
Pauline Hanson has spent decades casting herself as the outsider, the voice of people who feel ignored by the political class. Now, One Nation is surging in the polls and in donations. On Friday, their fundraising site crashed under the weight of over $3 million in new money, forcing Labor to treat Hansen less like a fringe dweller and more like a direct threat.
But as Hansen's popularity grows, so does the scrutiny of what sits behind it. This week, she admitted she's taking policy advice from Australia's richest person, Gina Reinhardt, the billionaire mining magnate she describes as a friend and supporter.
Today, contributing editor at the New Daily, Amy Ramikis, on Pauline Hanson's growing momentum and the billionaire and corporate backing of her outsider politics. It's Saturday, June 13th. Amy, good to see you as always.
This week started with Labor running donation ads asking supporters for help to stop One Nation turning its polling momentum into seats, which seems to have quickly turned into a big boost for One Nation.
Chapter 3: How is One Nation's fundraising affecting the political landscape?
How did that play out?
So Labor started the week with their own social media ads asking supporters to chip in $27 to prevent One Nation from turning the polling momentum into seats. It was basically saying, if you want to help us stop One Nation, please give us $27. And One Nation basically turned that into spoofing Labor's ads. They created their own
version of the, you know, quite scary social media ads that Labor had created and then accused the government of trying to silence everyday Australians, not listening to everyday Australians. You know, they were using the line, Albanese thinks $27 buys him the right to silence us. Get rid of the Labor Party, get rid of the lies and start standing up for our country.
And that's what people are donating to the party. And they've said that that has gone very, very, very well for them. It morphed into Fire the Liar, which is another return to the three-word slogans that Australian politics has been, you know, hampered by for the last couple of decades.
It's called Fire the Liar. It comes following a Labor Party campaign...
which really upset Anthony Albanese.
I'll leave the negativity to someone who has made a career out of seeking to divide people.
And then One Nation has turned around and said that they hit their $1 million fundraising target.
Launched this morning has already surpassed its initial million dollar goal, which has been up to 1.5.
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Chapter 4: What role does Gina Rinehart play in Pauline Hanson's policies?
How smart a move was that?
Well, I mean, that's one of the big discontents that Pauline Hanson is picking up on and is able to basically leverage against the major parties by saying, well, they don't trust you because they don't back you and we're being backed by everyday Australians. We don't know if that is true for One Nation.
We're not actually even going to find out who has given money to Pauline Hanson until February 2027 when the declarations come out. And that's only if it's above, I think it's $17,000 or so, what the declaration limit is. We don't know who's giving money to Labor or the coalition either. I mean, we don't know how any political parties raise money. We don't have real-time donation laws.
All the things that the major parties have stopped in terms of transparency around donations, around supporters, around fundraisers, is now coming to bite them on the arse Because Pauline Hanson and One Nation are able to leverage all of the loopholes in our donation rules to fundraise the way that they want to fundraise. And we don't know.
Sarah Martin from The Guardian has done some brilliant reporting on who has been donating to Pauline Hanson, including donations through Gina Reinhart's companies or through executives at Gina Reinhart's companies. And it hasn't really done anything to sort of ping any of Pauline's rise within just normal Australia. People do not seem to care where Pauline Hanson gets the money from.
So I would say that was the miscalculation that Anthony Albanese made, was assuming that people would care where the money was coming from and how much money had been raised because Pauline Hanson is harvesting grievances.
So even though she is of the elite, even though she is exceptionally wealthy, even though her donors are wealthy, or at least some of them are, she is able to present to people that it is everyday Australians who are creating this momentum. And that's the mistake Anthony Albanese made.
Look, it's pretty clear that Hanson's followers don't care where she gets the money from. But do they care about where she gets the policy from? Because she appeared on ABC Radio this week where she admitted she got policy advice from Australia's richest person, Gina Reinhart.
My policy on pensioners being able to work unlimited hours and without losing their pension or their health care card came from Mrs Reinhardt. And I think that's great.
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Chapter 5: How did Labor's donation ads impact One Nation's momentum?
And we saw in mid-cycle last term where Peter Dutton was coming out on top. Peter Dutton was being called the strong leader as opposed to Anthony Albanese's weak leadership leader. Peter Dutton was riding high in the polls. The coalition were riding high in the polls. And in fact, by the time we got to the election, the commentary was around perhaps a minority government for Labor.
And they came out, as we know, winning 94 seats and the coalition basically being completely destroyed in terms of primary vote. And what happened was that people started thinking at the polls, do we want to be so close to America? Do we want to be so close to Trump? Do we want to actually link our country to what is happening in the United States?
And so Pauline Hanson and Gina Reinhart tying so much of One Nation to America and to Donald Trump in terms of those policies may be the thing that eventually changes people's minds when they get to the voting booth.
Coming up, Pauline Hanson's Trump-esque media strategy. Saletisti onnistuu! Saletisti onnistuu! Amy, the more money Pauline Hanson raises, the harder it becomes to avoid the question of what One Nation's actually selling in a policy sense. Next week, she'll be fronting up at the National Press Club where she will face more questions from journalists about One Nation's platform.
What have you made of One Nation's attempts at presenting more on the policy front?
I mean, I think that this isn't any different to what we saw in the 90s in terms of One Nation's policy front. Like it's a lot of front and not a lot of substance or, you know, it's an inch deep and a mile wide.
Yeah, more front than Myers.
Yeah, exactly. More front than Myers or Grace Brothers, depending on what generation you're from. So it's no different. And a lot of these ideas sound fine in practice, but when you dig any deeper, you're like, how does that actually work? including her idea for buying into gas companies 10, 15 years down the track, which was a policy presented at a gas conference.
And we know that gas executives did have input into creating that policy. We've got a lot of culture wars. in terms of their policies. There's a lot of culture war, a lot of rhetoric, but there's no actual substance behind it. But Pauline Hanson turns any attack on the substance of her policy into victimhood, where she will just openly say, they're scared of us.
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