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This article examines one of the longest-standing populist radical right parties outside of Europe: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The article outlines the party’s development and position in the Australian political landscape, before explaining how it articulates the ideological features of the PRR (nativism, authoritarianism and populism); how these interact; and in what ways this differs from European PRR parties. It shows that the party has steadfastly remained focused on targeting outgroups – immigrants, asylum seekers, Asians, Muslims, and First Nations Peoples, amongst others – rather than clearly defining its ingroup – ‘ordinary Australians’ – and considers the role of Australia’s settler-colonial history and geographical context in this. It then analyses how the party has broadened its platform in recent years by engaging with gender identity, vaccine mandates, climate change scepticism and sovereign-citizen issues; before explaining the factors that have prevented it from achieving the success of many European PRR parties.

Drawing on a multimodal approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research critically examines the 2017 “burqa stunt” of Australian far-right populist politician, Pauline Hanson. Adapting Scalmer's (2002) conceptualisation of the “political gimmick”, this paper makes the following arguments: Firstly, that Hanson's “burqa stunt” must be understood as an articulation of Islamophobia and political performance. It was the interplay of Hanson's radical right and populist ideologies that informed the stunt. As such, this paper bridges the ideational and performative approaches to populism. Secondly, the stunt was the product of the mediatisation of politics and the logics that govern contemporary media in Australia. The aim of Hanson's stunt was clear: to generate controversy and media attention. In this, the “burqa stunt” was incredibly successful and was extensively covered both nationally and internationally. The stunt was the most overt expression of the anti-Muslim racism that has defined Hanson's contemporary political resurgence. This paper furthers our growing understanding of how far-right populist actors strategically employ performance strategies designed to generate controversy and media attention. It also highlights how racist far-right actors are able to articulate Islamophobia in novel ways that exploit the logics of the contemporary media environment.

This paper critically examines the ‘It's OK to be White’ Senate motion made by Australian far-right politician Pauline Hanson in 2018. Deliberately innocuous, the ‘It's OK to be white’ slogan was d...

This brief contribution explores how the 2020 COVID-19 crisis has been exploited by Australian populist radical right politician, Pauline Hanson. In particular, I discuss how Hanson, through her political communication on Facebook, has used the COVID-19 crisis to prosecute her longstanding nativist policies on issues like immigration. I further discuss how Hanson’s anti-Asian and Sinophobic rhetoric has occurred alongside an increase in anti-Asian racism in Australia throughout the COVID-19 crisis. I conclude by discussing the implications of this as well as foreshadowing future empirical work on this topic.

The purpose of this paper is to showcase critical discourse analysis (CDA) in political communication research through an empirical case study of right-wing populist discourse in Australia. It is a...

Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–2020 were an unprecedented crisis in scale and impact. In response, Australian political leaders employed a collective understanding of purportedly unique cultural tropes in their rhetoric to make sense of the crisis to the public. Here we explore how and why these cultural discourses are utilized during moments of ecological and existential crisis, and how they differ according to party and ideology. Using qualitative critical discourse analysis of a key address to the media and the federal parliament, we examine the rhetoric of four Australian political party representatives in their responses regarding these bushfires: Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Liberal Party of Australia; Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, Australian Labor Party; Richard Di Natale, The Australian Greens; Malcolm Roberts, Senator for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. We show how each actor’s rhetoric interacts with and weaves together their discursive climate policy positions, and adopts Australian cultural signs, symbols, and practices relative to new circumstances. Each actor may vary in expressing cultural tropes; we reveal how culture can be negotiated to align with partisan political agendas, even in moments of unprecedented destruction.