‘Doomed to fail’: is this the end (again) for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation?

Pauline Hanson on the campaign trail in October. One Nation came away from the 2024 Queensland election empty-handed.

“When Pauline Hanson left One Nation, the party did it tough,” recalls Jim Savage, who spent 11 years running the entity that had been founded in her flame-haired, firebrand image.

Hanson, from Queensland, burned her personal brand of rightwing populism into the Australian political psyche in the late 1990s. Her party won 11 seats at the 1998 Queensland election but within a few years it had all but collapsed. Hanson resigned in 2002 amid an electoral fraud scandal, was sent to jail (later acquitted on appeal) and then vanished from public life.

Savage says that in 2015 he and other One Nation officials went to visit the founder at her farm, near Ipswich, an old coalmining city in Queensland’s south-east, to convince her to run again.

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“We went and said: ‘Pauline we think we can win a Senate seat. The party has the status and the structure. You’ve got the name.’

“One Nation wasn’t enough without Pauline and Pauline wasn’t enough without One Nation. We could see we were going nowhere, and that’s why we let her come back.

“But the minute she got elected [to the Senate], she went about dismantling everything. It’s a bit like opening Pandora’s box, we got more than we bargained for.”

Hanson was written into One Nation’s constitution as “president for life” in 2018, with the power to hand-pick a successor. She will be 74 when she is up for re-election to the Senate.

Yet even the diehards who kept One Nation running in the wilderness years like Savage – who fell out with Hanson after she regained control – doubt the party can survive when its founder eventually decides to step back.

Last month’s Queensland election has raised more questions about the viability of One Nation post-Hanson. Her long-term aide and protege, James Ashby, failed to win the seat of Keppel. And once more One Nation has wound up with more acrimony than electoral success.

The party now has no MPs in the Queensland parliament.

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Hanson and fellow Queenslander Malcolm Roberts are the party’s only senators, with One Nation boasting just four state representatives – one each in the upper houses of South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales.

Stephen Andrew – who won under the One Nation banner in 2017 and 2020 – fell out with the party and defected. He lost his seat of Mirani, partly because One Nation advised voters to preference the Liberal National party.

One Nation’s decision not to direct preferences to Andrew was “the most treacherous, incompetent act that I am yet to witness in Queensland politics,” posted Rhys Bosley, a recreational shooters’ advocate and an independent candidate.

Andrew shared the post on his Facebook page.

Succession plan

For Jeff Knuth, it was his anger at gun control, the sale of public assets and what he saw as the “betrayal” of the old Country party that rallied him behind Pauline Hanson’s One Nation banner.

Knuth had been among the 11 One Nation candidates who swept into Queensland parliament in 1998 when Hanson’s party secured 22.7% of first preference votes statewide – the second highest of any party – at its maiden election.

It was a moment that would reshape the country’s political landscape, with Hanson’s infamous warning to white Australia that it was in danger of being “swamped by Asians” – one that would reverberate through migration policy for decades to come – appearing to find mainstream appeal.

But the party, in its early incarnation at least, did not last long.

“We went in, as the 11 MPs, like lambs to the slaughter,” Knuth says. “And, sadly, the person we felt that would be guiding us, did more attacking than guiding.”

A few months after the Queensland success in 1998, Hanson lost her federal seat. Within a year, Knuth said he was ousted from One Nation. By the end of 1999, none of those 11 would remain under its then yellow and navy blue banner.

The party’s return to prominence, via Hanson’s Senate campaign in 2016, has lasted much longer. But Knuth and others see warning signs that, when Hanson does eventually step back, One Nation could capitulate again.

“To be honest, I’m amazed it’s gone as long as this,” he says of the party he twice represented, including as a candidate at the 2015 Queensland election after an unexpected call from Hanson. “I predicted a long time ago it’s going to go nowhere, the way it’s structured, and nothing’s changed.”

He says he has now walked away because the political movement he was told would bring accountability to politics was run more like “an incorporated body” than a political party.

“She was running, I could say, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Inc,” he says. “She wouldn’t have branches, there was no actual structure … I reckon any party that doesn’t include branches and people as its backbone is doomed to fail. It was a pseudo party.”

Many interpreted the Queensland election as the forerunner to a succession plan. Ashby – who never really did his job from the shadows – stepped to the forefront and became One Nation’s de facto state leader, even while the two-term MP Andrew was sitting in parliament.

Ashby raised more money for his own campaign in Keppel – including with backing from Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart – than One Nation’s Queensland division has banked in donations for more than two years.

In the end, Ashby fell short. Despite a marginal increase to the One Nation vote across Queensland, about 8% of all first-preference votes statewide, the party is without a representative in the state parliament for the first time in more than seven years.

Andrew’s loss has rankled with many, particularly in the recreational and professional shooting community which looked upon him as a key advocate.

Pauline does have an X factor, but that’s waning now

Jim Savage

“Stephen was the only One Nation member to take a seat from a major party in the Queensland parliament since 1998, he is clearly a far better retail politician than Ashby is,” Bosley wrote in his post.

“James Ashby could have asked Stephen for lessons and worked with him. Stephen was already helping other local candidates, he was their best asset in that region and it was crazy to get rid of him.”

Savage says that after Andrew was elected in 2017, it took Hanson more than three months to reach out to him. He now joins the long list of people who have risen to prominence under the One Nation standard but fallen foul of the matriarch.

“Pauline does have an X factor, but that’s waning now,” Savage says. “I can’t see the party going anywhere now. No one else will get elected.”

‘It was highly predictable’

Others who weren’t surprised by One Nation’s 2024 Queensland election result include one of the state’s leading political pundits – the Griffith University associate professor of politics Paul Williams – and One Nation’s arch-rival on the political right in Queensland: Robbie Katter.

“It was highly predictable,” the newly re-elected member for the sprawling seat of Traeger in the far-flung north-west says.

Katter, the third big-hatted bloke of his name in a political dynasty going back to 1966, says minor party success in such a geographically distinctive state with a unicameral parliament requires a consolidation of resources.

“To get bums on seats you need to concentrate your effort,” Katter says. “You can’t concentrate your effort when you are trying to run 93 candidates at once. The two can’t coexist.”

While the eponymous party he leads scored less than a third of One Nation’s primary vote statewide in 2024 and didn’t live up to expectations of being kingmakers, the Katters – who ran in only 11 electorates, all in the state’s centre and north – still held three seats and will dominate a crossbench otherwise comprising only one Green and one independent.

Williams, meanwhile, writing for Guardian Australia in January, predicted that Ashby was unlikely to win Keppel but flagged he might, possibly as soon as next year, succeed Hanson as the federal senator for Queensland.

Hanson hung on to her Senate seat by the “skin of her teeth” in 2022, he says, is likely to have her only federally elected colleague lose his seat at the next election and will be in her mid-70s when her term expires.

“When Pauline retires, she’s got a certain charm about her,” Williams says. “Has James Ashby got the same sort of charm? I’d say not. He’s not going to be the same magnet for votes.”

Katter, too, imagines One Nation will have “enormous trouble trying to maintain the party beyond Pauline”.

“In fact, I’m not too sure how they can exist beyond Pauline’s retirement,” he says. “I think she’s developed a really strong following out there nationally – and I know full well that doesn’t translate to Johnny-on-the-spot next to you.

“We’re probably privileged, on our side, that I share the same last [and first] name with Dad.”

Guardian Australia tried to speak to senior One Nation figures but was told the only person who could talk about the future of One Nation was Hanson. She declined an interview.