PERSPECTIVES | Hanson’s new rise reopens old questions for Chinese-Australians

This article appeared in UTS:ACRI's Perspectives on June 23 2026. Perspectives is the commentary series of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), offering research-informed viewpoints on developments and debates in the Australia-China relationship.

Australia’s One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s June 17 speech at the National Press Club in Canberra sent a shockwave across the nation.

Recent polling in Australia indicates that One Nation has transformed from a minor protest party into a serious challenger to the traditional major parties. A Roy Morgan poll conducted from June 8-14 put One Nation first on national primary vote support, at 29.5 percent, narrowly ahead of Labor on 28 percent and well ahead of the Coalition on 17 percent. It was the second consecutive week in which One Nation had topped Roy Morgan’s primary vote figures.

Other polling has also underscored the scale of the shift. A May Capital Brief/DemosAU survey put One Nation on 28 percent, while RedBridge-Accent modelling estimated that, if voting intentions at the time were reproduced at an election, the party could win between 46 and 59 lower house seats and replace the Coalition as the official opposition.

Although polls taken roughly two years before an election are snapshots rather than predictions, the results mark One Nation’s most significant advance since its emergence in the 1990s and signal a profound disruption of Australia’s established two-party order.

When Pauline Hanson delivered her maiden speech in September 1996, she warned that Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians’. It unsettled many Australians, and Asian-Australian communities felt a collective chill down their spines.

Hearing her speak now is very much reliving a bad nightmare, coupled by a sinking feeling that this time, she may be here to stay.

When Hanson first entered Australian politics, she was clearly running against a political vision that had shaped the preceding decade. Under the Hawke and Keating governments, multiculturalism had become an important part of official national identity, and then-Prime Minister Paul Keating had argued that Australia lives in Asia and its economic, diplomatic and cultural future lay increasingly in the Asia-Pacific. Hanson’s call to abolish multiculturalism, and her portrayal of Asian migrants, flew in the face of this outward-looking vision.

Yet the timing was also transitional. The election of Australia’s Liberal leader John Howard signalled the beginning of a more culturally conservative politics, in which the meaning and limits of multiculturalism would increasingly be contested.

It is important to realise that the so-called Chinese-Australian community – if there is such as a thing – was smaller in numbers and demographically different at the time. The 1996 Census counted just 111,009 residents born in mainland China, compared with 68,430 born in Hong Kong. By 2021, the mainland-China-born population had risen almost fivefold to 549,618, while the Hong Kong-born population had grown more modestly to 100,148. Altogether, nearly 1.4 million Australians – 5.5 percent of the population – identified as having Chinese ancestry in 2021, making Chinese one of the country’s five largest ancestry groups.

The linguistic balance had also shifted. Mandarin, spoken at home by 2.7 percent of Australians, had overtaken Cantonese, spoken by 1.2 percent, reflecting the increasing share of migration from mainland China.

It is also important to realise that unlike many other democracies, Australia has a compulsory voting system. This means that the demographic transformation has given Chinese-Australians considerably greater electoral power. This was evident in the large swings towards Labor in 2022 and again in 2025, as Labor, in comparison with the Liberal Party, adopted what these communities considered to be a more responsible and less provocative approach to China policy. 

These swings show although Chinese-Australians have traditionally been seen as more likely to vote for conservative parties, there has been in recent years been a growing willingness among Chinese-Australian voters to defend their political interests, particularly when rhetoric about China spills over into suspicion, exclusion or hostility towards people of Chinese background.

Of course, like many other migrant communities, Chinese-Australian voters are diverse in socioeconomic status, migration history, political outlook, and language and cultural practices. Like the Australian public more broadly, they also vote on issues such as the cost of living, housing, education and small business.

That said, in recognition of their growing political significance, Chinese-Australians have gradually moved from being a community politicians could speak about, as Hanson did in 1996, to one that the major parties must increasingly speak to.

Many Chinese-Australian voters have become swinging voters, willing to register their displeasure those who treat them a security risks or politically convenient targets. For instance, in 2025, many Chinese-Australian voters punished the Liberal Party at the ballot box, seeing Senator Jane Hume’s remarks about ‘Chinese spies’ during a TV interview as emblematic of a broader politics of suspicion directed at their communities.

Hanson’s recent speech could reasonably be experienced as offensive or alienating by Chinese-Australians. She singled out Mandarin and Arabic as evidence of a ‘growing language problem’ and asked how social cohesion was possible if people could not speak English. She declared her vision of as a ‘monocultural’ society, arguing that multiculturalism is a bad idea. She stated that she wanted everyone to live under a single cultural umbrella: Australia as a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ nation. During the question-and-answer portion of her National Press Club address, she also described China’s regional presence as a ‘real concern’ and a potential threat.

Responses from Chinese-Australians to Hanson’s speech were swift and copious. The administrator of a politically active, Australia-focused WeChat group appeared to capture the mood of many members when he wrote: ‘Perhaps Chinese Australians of our generation should make it our mission to do everything we can to prevent One Nation from coming to power.’

Another member agreed but went further: ‘Unless we take up this mission, our children and future generations will blame us.’ Numerous Chinese-Australian organisations across the country have also issued open letters condemning Hanson’s remarks.

Early responses to Hanson’s speech on Chinese-language platforms such as WeChat and RedNote appear to fall into three broad patterns, although the majority of Chinese-Australians have indicated that they are against One Nation and are worried about Hanson’s potential ascent.

For one group, the speech has been a moment of awakening, exposing more clearly what One Nation stands for and dispelling the belief that Hanson’s politics had definitively shifted since her ‘swamped by Asians’ comment, and now primarily targeted Muslim migrants. For a second group, it has reinforced and vindicated a long-standing distrust of Hanson and her politics of exclusion. A third group, however, continues to rationalise its support for One Nation, either downplaying Hanson’s anti-Chinese rhetoric or insisting that her criticisms apply only to migrants deemed insufficiently assimilated, and not to people like themselves.

There may be several reasons why Chinese-Australians in the third group continue to support One Nation. As noted earlier, many Chinese-Australians traditionally voted conservatively. This began to change as renewed Sinophobia, fuelled by a ‘China threat’ narrative, pushed some voters towards Labor, which was seen as adopting somewhat less hawkish rhetoric towards China and Chinese-Australians. Even so, Hanson’s strongly conservative positions, including her attacks on Muslims and Indigenous Australians, opposition to ‘mass immigration’, and pro-business, anti-worker policies – may resonate with some Chinese-Australians who hold similar views.

Another reason is that many younger Chinese-Australians and recent arrivals did not live through the traumatic period of ’Pauline 1.0’. Over the past decade, Hanson has broadened her politics of exclusion while shifting its principal target from Asian migrants to Muslims, making opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration central to One Nation’s agenda. This shift appears to have encouraged an illusion among some Chinese-Australians that Hanson’s hostility is directed only at Muslims and therefore does not concern them.

For Chinese-Australians who had come to see Hansonism primarily as an anti-Muslim project, her National Press Club speech should shatter that illusion. By targeting Mandarin-speaking households, rejecting multiculturalism and advancing a monocultural vision of Australia, Hanson made clear that Chinese-Australians remain within the reach of her politics of exclusion. The speech may therefore have a clarifying – and potentially unifying – effect, reminding diverse communities of their shared vulnerability and significantly influencing how many Chinese-Australians vote at the next federal election.

That said, even with a clear understanding of Hanson’s long record of anti-Asian and anti-Chinese rhetoric, some Chinese-Australian voters may continue to support her. Like voters in any community, they weigh competing concerns – including immigration, crime, economic insecurity, social conservatism and distrust of the major parties – and may decide that these priorities outweigh the racism directed at people of their own background. Their support would not erase Hanson’s history; instead, it would show how political identification can sometimes override ethnic solidarity.

There could be another explanation: some Chinese-Australians may consciously or unconsciously engage in racial distancing. In other words, they may see themselves as successfully assimilated and economically successful migrants who will be spared the exclusion directed at Muslims, refugees or supposedly ‘unintegrated’ Chinese-Australians.

The next federal election is still roughly two years away, and much can change before then. But Hanson’s latest speech – a one-stop shop for virtually everything she opposes – may prove to be a crystallising moment for many Chinese-Australians, forcing them to confront difficult questions about cultural identity, political allegiance and belonging. It lays bare the tension of living as part of a multicultural society while confronting a political movement that rejects multiculturalism both as public policy and as an account of what Australia has become. In that sense, the speech demands a reckoning with not only Hanson, but also how Chinese-Australians understand their place in the nation and the political choices required to defend it.

Note: This Perspectives piece is adapted from Wanning Sun’s article originally published in FT Chinese on June 22 2026.