Kerrie Young’s great yearning in life was to be a rock star. Instead, at 59 years of age, she finds herself as a housewife in Brisbane with two adult children she adores but is confounded by. Her daughter, a Christian convert who is on a scholarship at university, does not “drink, smoke or have sex”, a puzzled Kerrie says. Her husband thinks Kerrie’s a redneck.

Young has been a lifelong Labor voter, but at the last election she cast her No 1 Senate vote for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. The future terrifies her.

She is dreadfully nervous about being interviewed as one of the people who voted for Hanson. She speaks quickly at the beginning, looking away and laughing defensively when making certain statements. But she thinks the issue is too important not to speak out about, to try to warn people, to hopefully be at the start of what will become a national conversation.



“I don’t think there’s enough awareness of my generation having been told all our lives, paying taxes, paying into superannuation, you can retire, you can get in your bus and travel around, you can go on cruises or whatever, now all of a sudden – boom – you can’t. I want to know why,” she says.

“My friend said retirement is not a right, retirement is a privilege and I can’t see that. If we have all paid our taxes, if our parents have paid their taxes, why are we sending the money overseas, why are we bringing in refugees who I read somewhere it cost $60,000 to each set up.

“This is my money. This is our money.”

With her hair in a neat braid, wearing glasses and a simple floral shirt, Young holds forth on all of her fears while sipping a chai latte in a suburban Brisbane shopping centre. Her retirement. Foreign investment. Immigration. Mining destroying arable farming lands. She is one of roughly 134,000 who gave Hanson a first preference vote in Queensland. The hundreds of thousands who cast votes for her One Nation party Australia-wide delivered four One Nation representatives into the Senate with the chance to have a powerful influence in a chamber where the government has not got a majority.



In the spirit of most dogmatic people Hanson has not let facts get in the way of her cause. She has warned of Australia being swamped by Muslims when they make up 2.2% of the population. In the 1990s Hanson’s focus was on Asians – so far she has not explained what happened to the supposed invasion of the 1990s. She has linked organised crime, welfare fraud, unemployment and the prison population to Muslims without producing data or evidence to back her claims.

Pauline Hanson delivers her maiden speech in the Senate on Wednesday. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Rising inequality, coupled with the ability to create communities of people who live tens of thousands kilometres apart through social media, has made a fertile patch for Hanson to flourish in.

Divided by geography, united by fear

Young is a housewife whose husband has dealt with health issues for many years, meaning periods where he has not been able to work.

Robyn McLaughlin is an amputee recovering from cancer.

Graham (not his real name) lost his livelihood when he was punched on a night out and acquired a brain injury that meant he was not allowed to work in his manual labour industry anymore.

Shirley’s daughter looked for work for years after finishing university while Shirley looked on helplessly until one day her daughter suggested they both kill themselves.

It’s very, very difficult these days to express anything without sounding racist or non-PC Kerrie Young

They live scattered across the country, from Western Australia to Newcastle to Townsville, but they all say almost the exact same thing when asked why they voted for Hanson. The economy. They are worried about their futures and terrified for their children’s. Where are they going to live? What jobs are they going to have? How are they going to survive?

Fuelled by posts on social media, particularly Facebook, they have discovered what they think the root of their problems is – foreign investment and asset sales. This segues into concern about immigration.

While Malcolm Turnbull has been talking innovation and Bill Shorten has been pitching to the middle class, those becoming poorer and feeling the class lines shifting under their feet, have had just one person listening to them. They don’t just read Hanson’s Facebook page, they are talking to her. She is talking to them. Hanson responds to multiple comments every day, reassuring people who are upset about particular policies and situations, arguing with people who disagree with her and seemingly taking them into her confidence (“I don’t handle compliments very well”) while her fans tell her they are concerned about immigration, politician wages (“cut them across the board to the average Australian’s wages”) or offering Hanson advice (“I notice you get quite flustered when you are upset or angry, try mindfulness breathing”).

Or they just talk to her as they would any of their other mates on Facebook. “Good job getting the tea in without looking, really good technique.”

Young has befriended people as part of the community and has had Hanson respond personally to her messages and comments. Young’s political beliefs are a patchwork that don’t follow the conventional patterns – she does not really care about marriage equality either way, is passionate about the environment, suspicious of immigration and upset by foreign investment.

Pauline Hanson jokingly hides behind one of her campaign signs, surrounded by supporters, during her election-night function in Ipswich, west of Brisbane. Photograph: Dan Peled/EPA

She seems slightly surprised at how her life has turned out and will often start ruminating on that while answering questions about policy. At one stage while talking about Indigenous Australians she diverts and reveals she has seen my Facebook profile. “I looked at your wedding photos, you looked so beautiful and happy, I hope you never lose that fresh loveliness, but you will. Nobody gets out of here without a bit of pain.”

Hanson’s One Nation has been Young’s personal middle ground between parties that have let her down. She will not vote Greens as she does not think they talk about the environment enough and she will not vote Nationals because she thinks they don’t believe in climate change. She has never voted Liberal and she is appalled by Labor’s behaviour over the past six years and does not think there is any talent there anyway.

“The rot set in when they all ganged up on Kevin Rudd, everybody I know says Kevin Rudd is a real prick, blah blah blah, if you can’t work with him maybe it’s your problem? Truly brilliant people are really hard to for normal people to deal with, look at Paul Keating. Everyone thought he was an asshole too, but he is brilliant.”

Young thinks Australia does not have the resources to support many more people and there should be a temporary stop to immigration, as well as an examination of the welfare system. When it comes to these issues, her angst could almost be lifted directly from Hanson’s maiden speech.

All the businesses are gone, car manufacturing is gone, sugar is gone, everything’s gone for that little bit of money Shirley

“The ones who are working are getting taxed more and more to pay for the people who aren’t working, it’s just untenable, it’s not possible to keep going that way. It’s like if you get a fish tank and they’ve got too many fish in it, they start eating each other. That’s what happens,” she says.

“It’s very, very difficult these days to express anything without sounding racist or non-PC. I wouldn’t hurt anybody, I don’t care what you do in your own time, I honestly believe there is a section out there who stop any intelligent debate by throwing these ‘vile racist bigot’ comments around. Is there a way to express disapproval of certain value systems and certain belief systems without sounding racist? Is there a way of doing it? Or do you just have to wear it? I’ve been called that, my friend that I walk with every day calls me her redneck friend. And I say to her ‘are you aware that this happens in Islam? Do you understand what Eid is?’”

‘We’re selling Australia’

Young is also called a redneck by her husband and the mocking by people close to her is common to other Hanson voters. Further north on the Sunshine Coast Shirley talks in a granny flat she is housesitting.



Shirley’s daughter does not know that she votes Hanson (“I would never tell her, she supports Muslims”) and Shirley is careful before she tells friends, sounding them out first to see if they already agree with her on other issues.

As she welcomes me at the door she tells me she has been researching my name and knows it is Lebanese. “Is your father a Muslim?” she asks narrowing her eyes. To her small comfort the family were Maronite Christian when they arrived in Australia.

“[Hanson is] interested in what I’m interested in which is the selling of Australia, I don’t mind foreign investment but our land is going, if you go to another country you can’t buy the land … Australia is just too open,” she says.

A short and talkative woman who cheerfully describes herself as fat, Shirley is 66 and retired. She has lived in Cairns and Sydney before settling on the Sunshine Coast and voted Labor until she switched to One Nation at the last election. She is also a Sri Lankan immigrant.

“I got out of Sydney because people thought I was Muslim, and I get Muslim men looking at me, I started to feel treated differently, in shops people weren’t serving me,” she says.

“I got this in Cairns in the 70s … I remember getting an ice cream for my little girl, who’s really white, can’t go in the sun … they could see me, it was packed this ice cream shop, all these people were behind me, these girls were serving everyone in the shop except for me.

“I got really sick of it, I said really loud ‘Am I too short? Am I too black for you to serve me?’ It happened so many times in Cairns, it really did. We were classed as Aboriginal, we were treated as Aboriginal, which was not very nice.

“There’s still racism here, I feel it I know it and I don’t care.”

So does she have any empathy for how Muslim people, and Aboriginal people, may feel about Hanson and her comments? She concedes Hanson “came across as racist” in the 1990s in the way she spoke about Aboriginal people but what Hanson really wanted was equality for all, not for one group (Indigenous people) to be treated differently from other Australians by getting certain welfare payments.

It’s about time Australians stood ground for their own country Graham

“She said you’re gonna lose Australia, Australia is going to be lost, and all these yeas later she’s absolutely right, we’re selling Australia. It’s OK to have foreign investments, but all the businesses are gone, car manufacturing is gone, sugar is gone, everything’s gone for that little bit of money, they’ve sold it,” she says.

“They’re sending everything offshore where it’s cheaper, so it’s not Australians getting employed, the mining, they’re employing people on 457 visas, I think it’s the worst thing ever, that loophole.”

Shirley’s primary concern is foreign investment but while others want to ban all immigration as an extension of that, or loathe Muslims, she is more tepid. She tells a story of being glared at by a woman in a headscarf to illustrate her point about some of them not being trustworthy.

“Stop the people from coming at the moment, but they’re not all bad, I know some good ones, and they agree, because they say ‘we don’t know who’s coming in’, they consider themselves Australian. They don’t want sharia law, these are Muslims talking to me, the average Australian does not want it, they’re too scared to say anything,” she says.

“I’m not a politician, I’m not an accountant, I’m not anybody who knows anything but I see stuff and think ‘that doesn’t look right to me’, the average Joe Blow feels things more than they actually understand or know, they feel things, they know stuff.”

Hardship, hard yards and grievance unheeded

Most of Hanson’s supporters do just “know stuff”. A lot of their news, like most people’s, comes from Facebook. But theirs is dissected by rightwing blogs and sites. Their world view is reinforced on pages such as Hanson’s and their own invitation-only private groups with more than 10,000 people congregating on one.

They are mostly older than 50, mostly live in regional areas, and have not had easy lives. Their grievances, real and imagined, make up the bedrock of their politics. For a long time they have not felt voiceless, but that they have been screaming and nobody is listening to them.

They are driven by their own circumstance, the greater good and other people do not really factor into it. It’s about what they have lost, what’s slipped through their fingers, what their children are going to miss out on. They don’t have the luxury of worrying about other people.

In Newcastle, Robyn McLaughlin is recovering from chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer while getting treatment related to her amputated right leg. She has long been faithful to the minor parties and voted for Hanson in the 1990s, for much the same reasons that she votes for her now.

Hanson speaks at a rally against Islam in Brisbane in April 2015. Photograph: Jamie McKinnell/AAP

“Bringing all these so-called refugees into the country there’s no infrastructure to support what we’ve got here, it’s already been drained. I’m a baby boomer, I’ve worked all my life, I’ve done the hard yards, I’ve paid taxes and yet because I’ve saved money and been taught to be sensible for a rainy day I can’t even get a disability pension, it’s quite unfair. Myself aside, there’s pensioners, veterans, kids on street and all this is being ignored and we’re bringing in all these people, they don’t want to integrate,” she says.

The 67-year-old is a dyed-in-the-wool Hanson supporter who she says she pays extra to go to a butcher that uses a halal free abattoir and that the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement “fits nicely into the global governance that the UN is pushing”.

Graham is another who, having taken body blow after body blow throughout his life, is easily convinced of the existence of villains and Hanson is happy to supply them. Graham suffered an acquired brain injury after being punched in 2001 and though he has recovered his speech and motor skills he is not allowed to work in the maritime industry. After, as he puts it, being followed by the black dog for a number of years, he is rebuilding his life in Western Australia. But he is worried. He is worried about how he is going to keep finding work, he is worried about his daughters on the other side of the country in Victoria, he is worried he could get hit again, he is worried about what could happen next, and he is worried about Muslims.

“Primary schools are going visiting mosques, that’s trying to encourage kids and speaking about their religion, and then when you see their side of Islam and what they do actually believe in is pretty disgusting. Such as against the females, they are not being able to wear a bikini, they see someone wearing a pair of shorts and they think they have the right to rape them,” he says.

It’s just so much easier to call her a racist bigot rather than actually think about something and do something Kerrie Young

“It’s totally wrong. They turned their religion into a violent religion. It’s about time Australians stood ground for their own country, my grandfather and great uncles didn’t go to war to let other societies into our country to change our religion and the way we live our free life.

“I worry about my kids and their kids, putting all these mosques around Australia. All of a sudden they will be putting their votes in and they won’t allow our Anzacs to sell or pledge their poppies or raise concerns.”

Graham is strident in his political beliefs but does not want his full name printed like many other Hanson supporters. They say they don’t feel ashamed voting for Hanson but most have people very close to them who do not know how they vote.

They see the election of Hanson as a final stand, one of their very last chances to be heard, a slight possibility that maybe the future will be OK. They feel Hanson understands them, and to many Hanson voters, what they feel is crucial.

Back in the suburban shopping centre Young sighs and looks past the shoulder of the person sitting next to her when she talks about the reaction to her choice to vote for Hanson.

“People immediately, many people, the minute you mention Pauline Hanson roll their eyes and call her a racist or a yobbo, or that stupid woman … she’s xenophobic.

“No, she’s someone who feels something [but] who wasn’t educated enough to know the big words, that’s all. I really believe her heart is in the right place and what she’s trying to say, is very, very pertinent to how we should be thinking bout the future but it’s just so much easier to call her a racist bigot rather than actually think about something and do something about something that is going to affect you and your children.”

Hanson’s views are inflammatory, divisive and simplistic. But while her supporters’ views can be out of step with mainstream Australia, they constitute a growing minority that needs to be acknowledged. Labor and Liberal parties have had falling primary votes since the early 1990s and at the most recent election One Nation recorded a higher primary vote in Queensland than the Greens. Just condemning Hanson is not enough; there is an argument to be properly explained and won. The people who vote for Hanson, mostly from increasingly marginalised communities, are ignored at the country’s peril.