Pauline Hanson has always said the quiet part out loud, using the outrage that inevitably follows as evidence she’s telling an inconvenient truth.
In a recent Sky News interview she questioned whether there are ‘good Muslims’ at all, coupled with an insinuation that Muslims hate Westerners, framing Islam itself as the problem rather than distinguishing between mainstream believers and the small minority attracted to extremism.
It wasn’t a particularly carefully worded argument.
There has been pushback, and not just from the usual suspects. Sharri Markson challenged the generalisation in real time when conducting the interview. Ray Hadley, hardly a voice from the softer end of the public debate, urged Hanson to apologise, pointing to the vast majority of Muslim Australians who are peaceful, productive and unremarkable in the best sense of the word.
Hanson didn’t merely offend progressive sensibilities, she crossed a threshold that even sympathetic audiences recognise as crude and counterproductive.
But the more consequential issue is not the media skirmish that followed her remarks. It’s what they do to both policy and politics in this country.
On the policy front, Hanson’s framing actively undermines the genuine task she claims to care about: dealing with extremism. Countering extremism relies on intelligence work, targeted policing, financial disruption and crucially community cooperation. The harder the state works to distinguish between legitimate religious life and ideological radicalism, the more durable and effective its interventions become.
By treating an entire faith community as presumptively suspect, Hanson hands extremists the story they crave: that Australia will never accept Muslims as fully Australian, so separation is inevitable and grievance is justified. It is strategically foolish to say the least. It makes the job harder for the people actually charged with keeping our country safe.
It’s also corrosive at a civic level, but not merely in the vague ‘social cohesion’ sense that Albo and his team like to wheel out when they run out of specifics. Blanket suspicion warps public judgement, encourages misdirected fears and lowers the political incentive to do the painstaking work of policy.
Pauline Hanson’s sweeping attack on Muslims may generate headlines, but critics argue it ultimately makes combating extremism harder by alienating the very communities needed to keep Australia safe
As Hanson ramps up political outrage, the Coalition faces a choice: chase protest politics or draw a clear line between tackling extremism and unfairly branding an entire faith community.
If the public is taught to view the problem as ‘Muslims’ rather than ‘extremists’ then the subtle tools that work to combat extremism look like weakness. And that is how democracies end up with performative toughness and ineffective security outcomes.
One Nation’s rising vote in recent months isn’t an amusing sideshow, it is a direct threat to the Coalition’s right flank. When protest sentiment hardens, the temptation for Liberal leaders is to chase the protest party’s language in the hope of starving it of oxygen. But Hanson’s intervention this week suggests she’s not auditioning for government, or at least not seriously anyway.
If the Coalition simply imitates her it legitimises her framework and risks looking like a pale copy of the original. And it too risks not being taken seriously as an alternative government.
This is where Angus Taylor’s response to the Hanson furore is hopeful. In his first few days he hasn’t taken the bait. New leaders get a brief window to establish themselves. So far Taylor has looked determined to project seriousness, sticking to economic and managerial terrain where oppositions can build credibility.
It’s a nice contrast to the antics of Hanson, and it’s the Coalition’s best pathway to undercut One Nation.
Taylor’s opportunity is to draw the distinction cleanly: be uncompromising about extremism, but refuse the intellectual laziness of treating an entire faith as beyond moral differentiation. Hanson thrives on raising the political temperature. If Taylor holds his nerve, he can turn the argument back onto first principles: that liberal democracy defends itself by policing behaviour, not branding belief.
