“Australia’s reputation as a constructive, proactive middle power will be destroyed overnight and that standing internationally will take years to restore,” he told the ABC.
“Australia is not a great power that can do anything it wants.”
The China solution: lots of missiles
One Nation’s desire to pull up the drawbridge and build Australia’s defences isn’t limited to multinational institutions.
This is powerfully illustrated when it comes to the country that shares some of the deepest human and economic connections with Australia — China.
Senator Hanson has been an inveterate critic of Chinese immigration, as well as Chinese investment in Australia – vowing to force many foreign investors from owning or controlling essential services, real estate and agricultural land.
Senator Hanson has also been clear that she sees China as a clear and urgent military threat to Australia.
When a Chinese naval task group circumnavigated much of Australia last year, Senator Hanson took aim at both the Albanese government and at Beijing.
“They’re sending a simple message: China can attack our largest cities at will, and it has no respect for Australia,” she wrote.
“We need missiles — lots of them — to better deter aggression such as we witnessed in the Tasman Sea, and we need platforms (ships, subs, aircraft, and mobile land-based launchers) that can carry and shoot a lot of them.”
In some ways, this isn’t radically different from the orthodox positions of both major parties.
The Albanese government is never going to describe China in the same terms, but both Labor and the Coalition also believe that Beijing could pose a sharp security threat to Australia in coming decades.
Labor has also invested heavily in new missile systems for Australia, which it says will be critical to building deterrence.
But beyond that, One Nation has made some truly eyebrow-raising promises on defence spending, pledging to increase the defence budget to 5 per cent of Australia’s GDP — vastly more than the target of either major party.
Senator Hanson said earlier this week that increase would cost the budget “about $70 to $80 billion” but analysts have estimated the real figure could be closer to an additional $400 billion over four years — which would require massive tax increases or spending cuts to fund.
The Taiwan question
Pauline Hanson has also made a sharp break from the status quo on perhaps the most sensitive issue in the Australia-China bilateral relationship: Taiwan.
Australia maintains an awkward balancing act on Taiwan — it “acknowledges” but does not “recognise” Beijing’s position that Taiwan is nothing more than a wayward province, and maintains healthy commercial and unofficial political ties with Taipei.
But Senator Hanson wants to take a radically different approach.
In 2024 she told the Senate that Australia’s One China policy was “a polite farce that does not reflect reality” and that “Australia and the rest of the world should recognise Taiwan for the independent sovereign nation it has effectively been since the 1950s.”
“The [Chinese] regime’s highest priority is to capture Taiwan, most likely by force, and turn that beautiful island nation of 24 million free people into another oppressed, polluted, communist hellhole,” she said.
It’s an argument that might resonate with those who chafe at the way Beijing coerces Taipei, and who feel like recognising Taiwan (which effectively functions as its own nation) is simply an acknowledgement of reality.
But in reality it would plunge Australia into almost completely unknown territory.
Dr Armstrong says unilaterally recognising Taiwan would be “one of the most consequentially adverse foreign policy decisions for Australia in its modern history”.
“No other significant countries have recognised Taiwan as an independent nation, not even the United States,” he says.
“China is the biggest trader in the world and our biggest economic and trading partner.
“Recognising Taiwan would lead to the severing of diplomatic and economic ties with Australia’s biggest external market and lead to a substantial loss of Australian private and government income.
“And it would crater our relationship with China and invite dramatic economic retaliation, while doing absolutely nothing to safeguard Taiwan’s autonomy.”
Dr Lim agrees that unilaterally recognising Taiwan would, at the very least, lead to serious economic retaliation from Beijing.
“This is not to say that the self-determination of the Taiwanese people is not an important value,” he tells the ABC.
“But the complexity of the issue means that pursuing that value requires a nuanced and extremely skilled use of diplomacy and statecraft.
“Right now there is little evidence that One Nation has thought through the second- and third-order consequences of this.”
Trump and the US alliance
Senator Hanson has been one of Donald Trump’s biggest fans in Australia, and One Nation has copied some of the tools in the MAGA playbook to get where it is right now.
She has praised the US president’s sweeping tariffs, even though Australia was swept up in them, saying she loved tariffs and that Trump had every right to protect US industry.
She’s also lined up with the Coalition and Labor behind AUKUS and Australia’s ambitious pitch to build nuclear-powered submarines.
“I also believe in AUKUS,” she told journalists earlier this week.
“That needs to happen. We need to have that agreement with our allies.”
But there are other voices in her party that seem far more sceptical of the US, and who have embraced a more conspiratorial frame of thinking about the world’s dominant power.
This week, Nine newspapers unearthed a podcast interview with One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts from 2024, when Joe Biden was still in power.
“That country that I had so much respect for is just the world’s greatest terrorist organisation now,” he said.
“American people are fantastic; they are lovely people … but their government has been hijacked by these globalist parasites since 1913 and probably before, and it’s now controlling the world’s largest military force ever.”
Unsurprisingly, the Coalition pounced, with MP Garth Hamilton, saying Australians “deserve to know whether One Nation would put anti-American conspiracy theories at the heart of our foreign and defence policy”.
The Pacific, the permanent contest and foreign aid
Finally, what does One Nation make of the permanent contest in the Pacific, and Australia’s relationship with its nearest neighbours?
Senator Hanson has spent decades criticising foreign aid, and at the last election pledged to save up to $3 billion a year by “redirecting and reducing” foreign aid — which would represent a massive and utterly unprecedented 60 per cent cut.
After the government announced $600 million over 10 years for the PNG rugby league team, the One Nation leader took to the airwaves to accuse Pacific elites of pocketing money from Australian taxpayers.
“We’re being taken for fools, absolutely bloody fools,” she said.
“There’s so much corruption over there. A lot of members of parliament are buying units here in Australia for their own use and gain.”
She also expressed deep frustration that Pacific nations that receive large amounts of Australian development money remain deferential to China.
“They’re holding us to ransom. Let’s see what China has to say about it. I’d tell them where to go,” she said.
“I’d actually cut the funding. I’d say no mate, this is the way it’s going to be. You either work for us or there’s no more money. We’re not going to keep filling your coffers.”
Senator Hanson seemed to moderate her stance on foreign aid slightly at the National Press Club, but still insisted that Australia should pull funding from Pacific nations that form close ties with China.
The senator is right that corruption remains a persistent problem in the region.
But Dr Lim says the reality is that if the federal government slashes aid to the Pacific, the most likely outcome is that China simply happily fills the vacuum.
And that weakens, rather than strengthens, Australia’s grip.
“The reality is that abandoning our partners in the Pacific would only lead them to turn more towards China and any other actor who can offer them the economic opportunity that they seek and deserve,” he says.
The government also remains convinced that China is seeking a permanent security foothold in the Pacific.
If Australia effectively abandons the region, then that job will — presumably — become much easier.
“In other words, cutting foreign aid would likely mean a net loss for the taxpayer because of all the new defence expenditure that would be required to counter the gains made by Beijing when it steps in to replace us as the region’s partner of choice,” Dr Lim says.
“Aid and diplomats are much cheaper than troops and weapons.”
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