Pauline Hanson was once dubbed ‘queen of the men’s rights movement’. Her 30-year career shows why
- Written by: Weekend Times
Over recent weeks, Pauline Hanson made headlines for her comments on domestic violence. She declared domestic violence is “a two-way street”.
Media outlets then unearthed a 2025 podcast episode in
which Hanson called paid domestic and family violence leave a “holiday”, and alleged domestic violence diverts police attention away from “real crime”.
While Hanson says her comments were taken out of context, her stance on domestic violence is not new.
In fact, as I chart in a forthcoming piece in Australian Historical Studies, her identification with male grievance has been core to her politics since day one. She’s been dubbed “queen of the Australian men’s rights movement”.
Yet this aspect has been largely overlooked by journalists and scholars alike, overshadowed by her attitudes toward racial diversity and immigration.
Defender of men’s rights
In 1996, Hanson told a journalist:
I think the most downtrodden person in this country is the white Anglo-Saxon male.
In 2023, she said in parliament:
[…] but, no doubt, I will be the only woman today speaking for the most oppressed and neglected minority in Australia: men.
As evidenced by these two quotes, almost 30 years apart, Hanson has consistently cast herself as an unwavering champion of men’s rights.
Though the manosphere has been trending in recent years, it’s just the latest manifestation of the men’s rights movement, which took off in the 1960s.
A subset of this movement is the fathers’ rights movement. Its followers believe the push for women’s rights has gone “too far”, that the Family Court is under feminist rule, and that the “feminist domestic violence industry” weaponises family law against men.
At the core of both movements is a simultaneous belief in male supremacy and male victimhood, with women as the primary villain in both cases.
Hanson championed the men’s rights agenda long before the rise of the manosphere. Hanson 1.0 (1996-98) and Hanson 2.0 (2016–) alike adopted many of the movement’s demands as core policy. This was most evident in attacks on family law for its supposed anti-male bias, a victim-blaming rhetoric of domestic violence and general anti-feminist sentiments.
Read more: ‘Masculinism’ is uniting the US right – what is it?
Hanson vs the Family Court
Since the 1990s, Hanson has been an ardent believer in the myth that men are victimised by the Family Court system.
In her 1996 maiden speech, she attacked both the Family Law Act and child support scheme for being biased against “non-custodial” (male) parents, arguing the former “brought death, misery and heartache to countless of Australians” while the latter “has become unworkable, very unfair and one sided. Custodial parents can often profit handsomely at the expense of a parent paying child support”.
After Hanson founded the Pauline Hanson One Nation party in 1997, men’s rights movement sentiments were expanded into its core policy platform. She took the men’s rights agenda to the 1998 federal election, with a central focus on the elimination of a supposed “bias” against men in family law and child support cases. One Nation even actively recruited men’s rights activists as candidates.
Hanson’s return to parliament as a senator in 2016 saw a radicalisation of her fathers’ rights advocacy. In her Senate maiden speech, Hanson labelled family law as the “most discriminatory, biased and unworkable policy in this country”, arguing that it had worsened since her first stint in politics.
After successful lobbying by men’s rights groups, in 2019 Hanson moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system and was appointed as its deputy chair.
Throughout the inquiry, Hanson endorsed evidence from the men’s rights groups invited to give testimony, while disparaging bodies representing single mothers and women’s legal services.
Echoing the grievances of the father’s rights movement, Hanson’s concern has always been with how family law affects men, not mothers or children.
In her view, single motherhood is an “industry” that uses taxpayer money to prop up unemployed women. She has vowed to make it One Nation policy to “come down on single women out there who are continually having child after child”.
The aim for Hanson appears to be to tap into angry white men’s grievances. As in the men’s rights movement, the goal seems to be to restore men to their “rightful” place as patriarchal heads of the household.
Hanson vs domestic violence
Hanson has long advanced men’s rights movement myths about domestic violence.
Demonstrating the increasing radicalisation of Hanson 2.0, in her 2016 maiden speech she warned the murder of women by their former partners out of “sheer frustration” would increase unless men are treated with more respect in “this unworkable system”.
She has also repeatedly claimed many women’s domestic violence allegations are provoked by “frivolous” things, and that “21 men a week” commit suicide because of child support and custody disputes – a statistic experts say is impossible to prove.
Read more: Domestic violence isn’t a ‘two-way street’. The evidence shows it’s gendered and often deadly
These comments parrot men’s rights ideology, which has linked male suicide to “anti-male” family law, and consistently diverts blame for domestic violence from violent men to women and the Family Court system.
That Hanson – an elected official – continues to push this rhetoric during a national domestic violence crisis, with one woman killed by male violence every 11 days, is downright dangerous. It normalises and accepts violence against women.
Hanson vs feminism
Lastly, Hanson has been staunchly anti-feminist since her early days in parliament, appealing to men who feel directly threatened by feminism.
In the 1990s, Hanson blamed feminism for pushing the balance “too far [in favour of women] and men don’t know what to do”.
In recent years, she has taken a more vehemently anti-feminist stance, reflecting the increasingly overt anti-feminist politics of the far-right more broadly and the mainstreaming of the manosphere.
In a 2019 parliamentary speech, she stated she had had a “gutful of hearing from man-hating feminists […] I’m sick and tired of this constant criticism of men in Australia, especially if they’re white”.
For Hanson, it appears to be specifically white men who are the real victims. It seems her role is to be their saviour and to restore their stolen masculinity.
So Hanson’s recent comments are not an aberration. Her anti-feminist and pro-men’s rights beliefs have been as consistent over the last 30 years as her racism and stance on immigration. It’s clear that men’s rights is central to Hanson’s political project.
Blair Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
