Pauline Hanson has rarely had a better opportunity to get her facts right than in 7NEWS Spotlight’s special report broadcast on Sunday night.
Months in production, with unprecedented access to Hanson, it included her first major television interview since calling for an Australian ‘monoculture’ at the National Press Club in June. The interview was conducted in London, by correspondent Liam Bartlett, midway through Hanson’s so-called fact-finding tour of the UK during which the Spotlight crew also filmed her meeting a who’s-who of Britain’s far right.
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Hanson claimed her trip provided both a warning and a political war plan for One Nation — to prevent Australia becoming the ‘sad sorry country’ she believes the UK now is. The anti-immigrant strategies she’s bringing home include a scheme for mass-deportation or ‘remigration’ drawn up by Restore Britain, which also proposes creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants — denying them welfare, housing, and health services to compel their voluntary expulsion.
Heady stuff, if that’s where your politics run. Frightening if not.
It may be 30 years since Hanson warned that Australia was in danger of ‘being swamped by Asians’ — but the message (read ‘Muslims’ for ‘Asians’) is the same. And so are the alarming statistics offered in support. But numbers that can be shouted from the fringes without regard for the facts require much greater scrutiny when the shouter commands up to 30 per cent of the popular vote and is jockeying for post of preferred Prime Minister.
On a podcast with British far-right extremist Tommy Robinson, filmed ‘fly-on-the-wall’ by Spotlight, Hanson claimed Australia was taking in 739,000 migrants a year. “Every 59 seconds,” she told Robinson, “we got a new migrant in Australia.”
If numbers were words, 739,000 would be a weasel. The year Hanson is quoting (2022-23), was the first post-COVID statistic, with a large catch-up factor of Australians caught abroad, family reunions postponed, and foreign students returning. But what makes the number even harder to pin down is that Hanson fails to mention the 219,000 people who left Australia in the same year.
That record catch-up year added 518,000 to Australia’s population — not 739,000. And the number has fallen every year since. In 2025 it was just 301,000 — far less than half what the senator told Robinson.
Spotlight was on hand as Hanson met with Restore Britain founder Rupert Lowe in the Cotswolds. Credit: 7NEWS
The $20 million Cotswolds manor of former Neighbours star Holly Valance, dubbed “radical-right royalty” by the British tabloids, is an unlikely place for earnest consideration of mass deportation. But, invited in, the Spotlight team was rolling as Rupert Lowe, founder and leader of Restore Britain, handed Hanson his party’s manifesto mapping a plan to expel nearly two million people from the UK within three years.
“Pauline, I’d like to give you this,” he said. “This is a jewel of what you need to do in Australia.” A man whose far-right ideology is somewhat at odds with his crumpled country-gentleman manner, could have easily followed it up with “and please pass the sugar.”
Hanson’s reply: “We’re very much on the same page.”
Spotlight later confirmed her commitment. “Do you think Senator, this concept of mass deportation is a good one?” Hanson was asked.
“Oh, I love it,” she replied.
Lowe’s claim of nearly two million illegal immigrants in the UK is at least twice the most widely cited estimate of Britain’s illegal population.
But who, in Hanson’s monocultural nation, would be in her Australian mass-deportation queue? Riding through Luton’s Muslim quarter with Robinson, she put the number at 100,000: people who “get off the airplane, destroy their identification… overstay their visas and play refugees.”
Virtually every number quoted by Hanson has one thing in common. Credit: 7NEWS
The Senator’s clear suggestion — and Robinson’s even clearer assumption as they traded disparaging quips about the prevalence of women in burkas and niqabs outside the car window — was that the majority of her ‘100,000’ are in the vanguard of radical Islam.
With the brevity of truth, the real number is 77,700 who stayed on after their visas expired or were cancelled, led by citizens of China, Malaysia and the US. Not one of the top three groups is from the Middle East. The typical “illegal” is not a boat arrival or a black-flag radical, it’s someone who flew in on a student or tourist visa and simply never went home. If her mass deportees are ever lined up, the third-largest contingent will be Americans.
There was similar arithmetic throughout Spotlight’s behind-the-scenes coverage of Hanson’s UK tour. She told Nigel Farage’s treasury spokesman — Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick — that one imperative for removing ‘illegal’ immigrants from Australia was that “we’ve got 150,000 people that are living in cars, tents. We can’t provide the housing for them.” The closest official figure relating to that claim is in the last Australian Census, which tallied 7636 people in tents, improvised dwellings or sleeping rough. That’s one-twentieth of the Hanson homeless.
When Robinson discussed the number of Muslims in Australia with Hanson — “you’ve got about 4 per cent… that’s a million? — she replied “they do breed.” In fact, Muslim families on average have three children — and the number is falling.
Mark Twain wrote (quoting English statesman Benjamin Disraeli): “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Disraeli — twice prime minister and three times Britain’s treasurer — was a canny politician who clearly knew the power of numbers to convince. Hanson is a perhaps pale, but fervent, imitator.
The Spotlight report captured an unguarded Hanson amidst a likeminded coterie, who share her innumerate approach to immigration statistics. All her numbers run the same way.
Away from the truth.
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