In a 1950 essay, the critic AA Phillips wrote of a “cultural cringe” in which insecure Australians looked to Britain for instruction. Today, some Australians are championing far-right British actors and importing their visions of doom to Australia.
In June, the former Australian Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, which is organised around the idea of “renewing” western civilisation. “Sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures,” said Abbott, “[is] the surest and swiftest way … to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian foundational ethos (which is actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere).” Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff, now a Sky News Australia commentator, said: “You are a petri dish … [on] multiculturalism and radical Islam, you are where we don’t want to go.”
Both are fighting a civil war for the command of Australia’s right, on terms set by the challenging party: One Nation, founded by Pauline Hanson, a former fish-shop owner who became infamous in 1996 for claiming that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”.
Now a Queensland senator calling for a “monocultural” Australia, Hanson’s enemy is Islam. Like Reform UK with the Tories, One Nation is cannibalising the Liberal party in polls, and is second onlyto the Australian Labor party, which is in government.
Hanson is fresh off a “fact-finding mission” in the UK partly shaped and documented by Australia’s Channel Seven program Spotlight. She’s photographed with Nigel Farage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in London (a meeting fell through due to the Clacton byelection). She tours Tower Hamlets with recent Reform convert Robert Jenrick, to weirdly observe British Muslims going about their daily lives. She meets Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe at the country house of Holly Valance, the Australian-British singer. Lowe gives Hanson a copy of his party’s policy paper Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, saying: “This is a jewel of what you need to do in Australia.”
The report promises to remove “roughly 1.8 million illegals … living in our midst” in “exactly three years” through a “new hostile environment with voluntary returns and forced deportations”. Hanson later exclaims she “love[s]” the idea of mass deportations, clarifying that she means “for the ones that are [in Australia] illegally”. That despotic phrase, unnatural to the Australian tongue, is now parlayed on breakfast television.
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Hanson meets with Tommy Robinson; the meeting most preoccupying Australians. In a podcast released on X, Robinson approaches Hanson with deference, even tenderness: “I have the great pleasure of meeting a lady I’ve looked up to for years.” Both see themselves as martyrs after serving jail time: Hanson for 11 weeks in 2003 for electoral fraud before her quashed conviction; Robinson, several times, including for fraud and contempt of court.
She tells Robinson that the trouble started with the end of the White Australia policy under the Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1973. The policy – introduced in the Federation of Australia’s states in 1901 – arbitrarily administered a near-impossible dictation test in European languages to preserve Australia’s white, mainly British, population. Contrary to Hanson’s claim, it was gradually dismantled by both Liberal and Labor governments from the 1950s onwards; Whitlam removed its final remnants in 1973 and introduced protections against racial discrimination in 1975. Hanson insists that European migrants assimilated better than more recent arrivals from the global south. (She now denies that she wants to revive the policy.) In footage cut from Robinson’s podcast but broadcast by Spotlight, Hanson says of Muslims: “They do breed.” She catches herself, in both versions: “They are having children … in the Qur’an it says Allah will provide, well, the Allah providing is the taxpayer.”
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Like Robinson, Hanson blames Islam for ruining western societies, disparaging an entire people while disregarding the unregulated markets that have torn up the old worlds they mourn. Robinson grew up in Luton, a deindustrialised car town whose working class feel abandoned; the Australians to whom Hanson appeals are breaking under cost of living pressure.
Their visions contain shadows of truth, but their blind spots are black holes, sucking those who entertain them into a vortex of conspiracy that licenses hate. Britain suffers street violence and racial and religious tensions. Governments have failed to properly address the violence done to young women and girls by grooming gangs. But these scenes, consumed in frenzies on an X feed, are abstracted from British circumstances and sent by algorithms to scare Australians.
Australians are already afraid. On 14 December 2025, a father and son murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi beach. This was the worst terrorist attack on Jews globally since 7 October; the deadliest in Australian history. It spawned from a vengeful ideology imported on to Australian soil, with no defensible claim to being a faith. This attack and the politics practised by Hanson and Robinson are in no way equivalent. But both share the feature that they convert the countries they inhabit into a battleground for wars from elsewhere, endangering vulnerable minorities.
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Australia and the UK are different countries, with divergent immigration histories. Multicultural Britain was built by the postwar promises the empire made to its subject peoples. Since the dismantling of the White Australia policy, Australia has shown a powerful capacity to embrace successive waves of migrants; though not without a racism compounded by Indigenous dispossession.
There is a thoughtful and humane conversation to be had about how migration can be scaled in complex societies that sustains a shared sense of nationhood: one more capacious than the exclusive nostalgias to which Hanson and Robinson remain enslaved. Australia is well equipped to have it. White working-class Australians welcomed my family when they arrived from India in the 1960s and 1980s. Hanson refuses to accept that Australia’s multicultural way of life has grown up without her, resisting the monoculture not by government mandate, but through ordinary acts of decency that bind and make a society.
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Politicians like Hanson call themselves conservatives, even as they disavow that philosophy’s first commitment: to pay special attention to what is rare about one’s own country. By internalising British anxieties, we stop ourselves from seeing Australian problems – and our rare ability to solve them – with our own eyes.
Jack Jacobs is an Australian doctoral researcher in history at the University of Oxford
