The Turnbull government has signalled it will press on with meeting One Nation’s demands to place restrictions on the ABC.

The communications minister, Mitch Fifield, said he would negotiate to make the Pauline Hanson driven reforms a reality, despite opposition from the majority of the crossbench. He listed legislation, including re-establishing the ABCC, Gonski 2.0 and the childcare reforms, the government has managed to pass despite hostilities.

“The more people say we can’t do something, the more determined the government is to deliver on behalf of the Australian people,” Fifield told the media on Friday, standing next to a beaming Malcolm Turnbull on the second anniversary of his prime ministership. “So I will be giving this the same application I do with everything else.”

Fifield succeeded where even Turnbull failed, passing the Coalition’s raft of media reforms in a mixed-bag Senate, which will see the two-out-of-three media ownership and 75% reach rules scrapped.

Fifield did it with the support of the Nick Xenophon Team – whose support it won with the inclusion of a $60m innovation fund and inquiry into the actions of Google and Facebook – and One Nation, which demanded changes to the national broadcaster.

Hanson wants the government to legislate the ABC to be “fair and balanced”, which it has defined as “giving a fair-go”, but has not been able to articulate what that would look like in a legal sense beyond wanting to challenge what it says is the organisation’s leftwing bias.

Hanson has also demanded the government establish an inquiry into whether the ABC has an unfair advantage with commercial competitors and wants the broadcaster to publish “details of the wages and conditions of all staff whose wages and allowances are greater than $200,000”.

The government agreed, de-coupling the demands from its media reforms legislation into a separate package that Labor, the Greens and, crucially, the Nick Xenophon Team have already said they will reject.

But Fifield believes he can change their mind.

“What we always do in the Senate is we don’t start with our colleagues, our crossbench colleagues, where we would like them to be or where we think that they should be,” he said. “Our starting point is where they are. We treat their position with respect and then we work from there. When you do that, you can get good outcomes.”

But speaking to Guardian Australia, Xenophon said the only universe where he would vote for the One Nation-fuelled legislation was “not one that I am living in”.



“We strongly support the ABC,” he said. “There is no need to change the charter. We don’t support it. They have to be accurate and impartial [already]. ‘Fair and balanced’ is fraught with difficulty. We don’t support it.”

The Tasmanian crossbencher Jacqui Lambie also stands against the legislation, telling the Senate on Wednesday night it was “the worst lot of crap I have seen”.

“You are a disgusting bunch of individuals at times,” she said. “You have no moral values and to go after the public broadcaster is an absolute disgrace.”

Hanson said One Nation’s deal was about transparency.

“The ABC receives over $1bn a year from the Australian taxpayer,” she said during Wednesday’s Senate debate. “We are not all leftwing bleeding hearts wanting to open our borders to illegals and refugees.

“We are not all supporters of gay marriage. We are not all supporters of corrupt unions and socialist agendas.

“We are not all supporters of becoming a republic.

“And we are definitely not all supporters of destroying our Australian identity, culture and way of life to continue the push for multiculturalism and forever saying sorry.”