Jack and Norah Seccombe owned a fish and chip shop in Ipswich, Queensland, in which Hanson and her siblings worked from a young age, preparing meals and taking orders.

However, Hanson received widespread media attention when, leading up to the election, she advocated the abolition of special government assistance for Aboriginal Australians, and she was disendorsed by the Liberal Party.

Hanson argued that "mainstream Australians" were instead subject to "a type of reverse racism ... by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded 'industries' that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups".

The majority of attendees were of Asian origin, where an open platform attracted leaders of the Vietnamese, Chinese, East Timorese and Sri Lankan communities.

Domestically, One Nation opposed privatisation, competition policy, and the GST, while proposing a government subsidised people's bank to provide 2 per cent loans to farmers, small business, and manufacturers.

During her term in Parliament, Hanson spoke on social and economic issues such as the need for a fairer child support scheme and concern for the emergence of the working class poor.

The reaction of the mainstream political parties was negative, with parliament passing a resolution (supported by all members except Graeme Campbell) condemning her views on immigration and multiculturalism.

Then-Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock announced a tougher government line on refugee applications, and cut the family reunion intake by 10,000, despite an election promise to maintain immigration levels.

[38] Various academic experts, business leaders and several state premiers attacked the justification offered by Ruddock, who had claimed that the reduction had been forced by continuing high unemployment.

[44] After an election campaign dominated by discussion over hoax photographs, she was placed third behind the Liberal National Party's Aidan McLindon and Labor's Brett McCreadie.

[45][46] On 23 July 2010, while at an event promoting her new career as a motivational speaker, Hanson expressed interest in returning to the political stage as a Liberal candidate if an invitation were to be offered by the leader Tony Abbott in the 2010 federal election.

Attorney-General George Brandis got a standing ovation from Labor and Greens senators after he gave an "emotional" speech saying to Hanson: "To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do.

[97] On 15 October 2018, Hanson proposed an "It's OK to be white" motion in the Australian Senate intended to acknowledge the "deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilization".

[104] Shortly before the ban came into effect, in August Channel Nine paid for Hanson's trip to Uluru and on their A Current Affair program she was shown in a controversial episode climbing the rock.

The ceremony includes the words: "[the Parliament] recognises the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples as the traditional custodians of the Canberra meetings, and pays respects to elders past, present and emerging."

[128] On 24 March 2017, after the 2017 Westminster attack, Hanson made an announcement in a video posted to social media, holding up a piece of paper with her own proposed hash tag “#Pray4MuslimBan”.

[136] On 1 November 2024 it was reported that Federal Court of Australia judge Angus Stewart had ruled that Hanson's tweet was an "angry personal attack", unconnected with the issues Faruqi raised, and was therefore "anti-Muslim or Islamophobic".

Also repudiating Hanson's views on immigration and multiculturalism were Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, the Queensland National Senator Ron Boswell, Sir Ronald Wilson and former Prime Minister Paul Keating.

[138] At the 1997 annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communications Association (ANZCA) at La Trobe University, a paper was presented with the title "Phenomena and Epiphenomena: is Pauline Hanson racist?".

After months of silence, then-Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley proposed a bipartisan motion against racial discrimination and reaffirming support for a nondiscriminatory immigration policy.

The League of Rights offered financial and organisational support for her campaign against Asian immigration, and in December she announced she was considering forming a political party to contest the next election.

Milton Osborne noted that public opinion research indicated Hanson's initial support in the 1990s was not necessarily motivated by racist or anti-immigration sentiments, but instead from voters concerned about globalisation and unemployment.

[144] In 2019, Hans-Georg Betz identified Hanson as among the first populist politicians to mobilize a public following by targeting "the intellectual elite" in their messages, and that in the twentyfirst century, with "today’s army of self-styled commentators and pundits summarily dismissing radical right-wing populist voters as uncouth, uneducated plebeians intellectually incapable of understanding the blessings of progressive identity politics, Hanson’s anti-elite rhetoric anno 1996 proved remarkably prescient, if rather tame".

[citation needed] In 1971, Hanson (then Pauline Seccombe) married Walter Zagorski, a former field representative and mining industry labourer from Poland, who had escaped war-torn Europe with his mother and arrived in Australia as refugees.

Because the registration was found to be unlawful, Hanson's receipt of electoral funding worth $498,637 resulted in two further convictions for dishonestly obtaining property, each with three-year sentences, to run concurrently with the first.

[156] The prime minister, John Howard, said that it was "a very long, unconditional sentence" and Bronwyn Bishop said that Hanson was a political prisoner, comparing her conviction with Robert Mugabe's treatment of Zimbabwean opponents.

That case was distinguished as a civil suit – in administrative law, as to the validity of the decision by Electoral Commissioner O'Shea to register the party – in which proof had been only on the balance of probabilities.

Chief Justice Paul de Jersey, with whom the other two judges agreed overall, suggested that if Hanson, Ettridge and especially the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions had used better lawyers from the start, the whole matter might not have taken so long up to the appeal hearing, or might even have been avoided altogether.

Their observations, she said, demonstrated at least "a lack of understanding of the Rule of Law" and "an attempt to influence the judicial appellate process and to interfere with the independence of the judiciary for cynical political motives", although she praised other leading Coalition politicians for accepting the District Court's decision.

[166] Soon after her election to Parliament, Hanson's book Pauline Hanson—the Truth: on Asian immigration, the Aboriginal question, the gun debate and the future of Australia was published.