Fact-checking Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech

Last night, Senator Pauline Hanson delivered her maiden speech to the National Press Club in Canberra.

Recent polling has shown her party One Nation have pulled ahead of both Labor and the Coalition in popularity, largely thanks to her penchant for making sweeping and often inaccurate statements scapegoating minorities for the real crises at play in modern Australia.

Like most of Hanson’s stunts, it has garnered a lot of media attention. That’s both good and bad — good because it’s important to know what Hanson is espousing, but bad because it gives her the notoriety and airtime she so clearly seeks.

Here, we combat that approach by fact-checking her speech and debunking a handful of the incorrect claims she made throughout it.

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Fact check: Immigration is to blame for the housing crisis

Hanson blazed out of the gates with a number of incorrect assertions about Australia’s housing crisis. She claimed that “housing demand in Australia substantially outstrips housing supply”, and that “unsustainable demand is being driven by several factors, but the biggest is high immigration”.

In a recent video essay for ABC, housing market analyst and economic commentator Eliza Owen laid out the actual key issues informing the housing crisis. Those include:

• Average house prices outpacing average incomes
• Decreasing home ownership making the rental market more competitive and costly, pushing people out of the private rental market and into social housing
• Decline in development of social housing
• Declining productivity of housing construction

She noted that statistics show claims of a supply-demand imbalance aren’t accurate. There are around 27 million Aussies, and assuming an average household size of 2.5, we would require 10.8 million dwellings. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), we have 11.4 million dwellings — so it’s more an issue of how we utilise the supply we have.

While Owen and other experts acknowledge that an increasing population naturally increases housing demand, they also say migration is certainly not, as Hanson claims, the “biggest” crisis factor.

Director of the Australian National University’s Migration Hub, Professor Alan Gamlen, told SBS that “research consistently shows that migration has a negligible … a relatively small impact on housing costs”. He says “land availability, dwelling approval rates, construction costs, labour shortages, tax incentives such as negative gearing, interest rates, and wealth levels” are far bigger drivers of the crisis. Regardless, “migration remains the dominant political scapegoat”.

Additionally, reducing migration could create more harm, because we need skilled migrant workers to build up our construction workforce shortages.

Owens cites house values skyrocketing at record rates during 2021 — a time when borders were closed due to COVID. “The problem with using migration as a lever to affect the housing market is that it could actually have detrimental affects,” she says. “Skilled migration in particular contributes so much to the economy.”

Fact check: The ‘language problem’ of immigration and calls for monoculturalism

Continuing on her anti-immigration barrage, Hanson went on to criticise multiculturalism and advocate for monoculturalism, saying “Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella”.

Citing 2021 Census data, she acknowledged that 32 per cent of the population were born overseas, and 23 per cent use a language other than English at home. She also noted that in that same census, 872,000 people self-reported speaking English “not well” or “not at all”,  and asked, “How can you generate social cohesion if people can’t speak the language?”

Well, she conveniently didn’t mention the percentage for that last stat of those who self-report as not speaking English well — it’s only 3.4 per cent, far lower than the proportion who are multilingual. Suffice to say, Australia is not under threat of a lack of social cohesion due to a significant minority not yet feeling confident in their English-speaking skills.

Hanson claimed that “only a fool would ignore the growing language problem which is a function of immigration“. However, research-backed experts say that a singular shared language is helpful but not vital for social cohesion. In fact, they say linguistic diversity can improve social cohesion, while demonising those who cannot yet speak a prescribed monocultural language can alienate them, leading to social exclusion and tension.

Hanson repeatedly asked if multiculturalism and diversity are “what Australia supports” or “wants”. Hanson clearly wants the answer to be “no”, but statistics point to a pretty strong “yes”.

The Mapping Social Cohesion Report 2024 says that 71 per cent of people agree that accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger. 82 per cent agree or strongly agree that “immigrants improve Australian society by bringing new ideas and cultures”.

“Ongoing acceptance of multiculturalism and immigrants from a diverse range of countries is a key indicator of cohesion, helping protect our society from social divisions,” the ABS added.

Fact check: ‘The hoax of global warming’

This one is pretty easy. Hanson referred to “the hoax of global warming which is now climate change“. Scientists across the globe have proven such claims by climate change deniers wrong time and again.

While climate change is a natural process, research clearly shows that it is occurring at an alarmingly high rate due to human interference. Most people understand this to be an indisputable fact, not a hoax. You can find more factual evidence on the matter via the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water here, via NASA here, or via the United Nations here.

Fact check: The ‘transgender insurgency’

True to form, Hanson used her speech to demonise minority communities in Australia — namely, the Islamic community and the transgender community.

On the latter, she used a number of wildly overblown terms: “the transgender insurgency”, “the transgender ideology”, “the transgender campaign”, and “the transgender movement”. She called it a “very important social and cultural issue facing this country”, claimed it has “penetrated almost every regulatory authority”, is “infecting all of society”, and that it’s “a militant force right throughout society and must be confronted”.

Such sweeping statements are misleading, creating the idea that the trans community is larger and more influential than it really is, and that they are unsupported by Australians.

ABS data shows less than 1 per cent of Australia’s population are trans or gender diverse.

A 2025 Redbridge survey found 91 per cent of Australians agree or strongly agree that trans people should have the freedom to live their lives in the way that makes them happy. Furthermore, it found that 86 per cent don’t want the government to politicise the trans community and trans issues for political gain.

Fact check: ‘Sex is fundamentally tied to the body’

Confusingly, Hanson quoted Germaine Greer on sex, gender, and biology, despite the fact that the writer has only formally studied literature and is not a biologist. Nonetheless, Hanson quoted her incorrect assertion that gender should be defined by one’s anatomy.

Many certified experts dispute this. Biologist Dr Lixing Sun, a Harvard Radcliffe fellow and distinguished research professor at Central Washington University, says that a binary view of sex and gender based on anatomy is oversimplistic and incorrect.

“Biological sex and gender are far more complex than we know,” he told Harvard’s Radcliffe magazine. He explains that binary definitions of “biological sex” fail to account for the natural biological reality of intersex individuals. “Variations in genes, chromosomes, and internal and external sex organs are often called disorders in sex development in the medical community. I think that’s wrong in many cases. It’s just natural variation,” he adds.

His advice for those (like Hanson) who wish to define a binary biological sex? “Leave the issue to scientists.”

Fact check: One Nation ‘isn’t racist’

Hanson claimed that media outlets “repeat the lie that [One Nation] are a racist Party”, claiming the label is “untrue”.

As the leader of the Party, Hanson herself has been found by the Federal Court of Australia to have been racist.

Per the Human Rights Law Centre, the Court found that remarks made by Hanson on X in 2022 towards Senator Mehreen Faruqi amounted to a “racist attack” violating section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Hanson had to pay Faruqi’s legal fees (despite a failed appeal to have the sum reduced).

It’s notable that Hanson’s “free speech” defence in the matter was explicitly rejected by the Federal Court — and yet free speech is listed as a key One Nation policy.

Another key One Nation policy — clearly on display in Hanson’s speech — is immigration. Their policy centres on a xenophobic “future where Australians come first”, achieved through immigration cuts and deportation.

To be clear, the Macquarie Dictionary defines racism as follows:

• The belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others.
• Offensive or aggressive behaviour to members of another race stemming from such a belief.
• A policy or system of government based on it.

Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman, the man in charge of anti-racism efforts, agrees that One Nation is “dehumanising” and “scapegoating migrants” by blaming them for things like the housing and cost of living crises.

“That is implicitly racist, because … the only signal as to whether someone is a migrant usually is the colour of their skin, or their name, or their accent, and it draws on this deep vein of racism that’s always existed from the time of colonisation,” he told The Guardian in May. “This notion that some people belong here more than others or some people are superior to others.”