What is it about Pauline Hanson that draws such relentless hostility? On this week’s Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux came back to a question he keeps returning to — casting the latest coverage as the newest instalment of a campaign he says has run for thirty years.
Three Decades, Same Story
They’ve spent thirty years trying to destroy her, Jeremy said — and, he added with emphasis, failed every single time. Since her earliest days in public life, Hanson has been a fixture in the crosshairs of the media and the major parties, and yet she persists, and in some respects flourishes.
The sheer durability of the effort, to Jeremy, tells its own tale. Nobody wages a thirty-year campaign against a figure who doesn’t matter. The unrelenting hostility is, in effect, an admission of her staying power.
Entitled To Speak
The latest spark was a media segment Jeremy read as one more bid to silence Hanson. His defence wasn’t of any specific remark but of the underlying right: a public figure is entitled to speak, to be interviewed and to put her case, without an organised push to shut her down.
He linked it to his deep belief in free speech. You can disagree with Hanson entirely, he argued, and still see that trying to erase her from public debate is the wrong instinct for a democracy.
What They’re Really Afraid Of
Jeremy’s read on the hostility was blunt: the major parties are frightened, perhaps for their own jobs. A plain-spoken figure who resonates with disaffected voters is a threat to anyone whose seat rests on the status quo.
That fear, he suggested, is why the coverage so often slides from scrutiny into something sharper. It was never really about one controversy — it’s about what Hanson represents to a political class that would rather she vanished.
The Public Keeps Deciding
For Jeremy, the real verdict rests with voters, not commentators. Thirty years of attempts to finish her have failed because a sizeable share of the public keeps handing down its own judgement.
In the court of public opinion, he argued, Hanson has outlasted her critics time and again. The long campaign against her, in his telling, reveals far more about those conducting it than about the woman who keeps surviving it.
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