Pauline Hanson courts British right during UK visit

Pauline Hanson’s UK trip ended with a policy paper on mass deportations in her suitcase.

In a Guardian column, Jack Jacobs describes how the One Nation leader—an Australian senator who has built her brand on opposition to immigration and Islam—used a “fact-finding mission” to Britain to meet figures on the British right and collect ready-made talking points. According to the piece, Hanson was photographed with Nigel Farage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in London, toured Tower Hamlets with Robert Jenrick, and met Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain at the home of Australian-British singer Holly Valance.

The itinerary matters because it turns domestic politics into an import business. Jacobs reports that Lowe handed Hanson Restore Britain’s paper “Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics”, which proposes removing roughly 1.8 million illegal immigrants in the UK within three years through a “hostile environment” approach combining voluntary returns and forced deportations. Hanson, the column says, responded with enthusiasm and has expressed strong support for mass deportations for illegal immigrants in Australia.

Jacobs places this in a broader pattern: British culture-war entrepreneurs have become exporters, while politicians elsewhere shop for narratives that arrive prepackaged for television and social media. Hanson’s trip was partly shaped and documented by Channel Seven’s Spotlight, the column notes, giving the exercise the feel of content production as much as policy development. The same package includes familiar villains and civilisational language: Jacobs cites former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, warning that sustained mass migration from “culturally different countries” could dilute an “Anglo-Celtic core culture and Judeo-Christian” ethos.

The column also sketches why these imports travel well. One Nation is gaining support at the expense of Australia’s Liberal party and sits second in polls only to Labor, according to Jacobs. For a challenger party, a politics built on high-salience promises—border crackdowns, deportations, denunciations of multiculturalism—requires less governing capacity than the slow work of housing, infrastructure, or productivity reform. Britain offers a large catalogue of slogans, influencers and templates for “hostile environment” enforcement, alongside a media ecosystem that rewards confrontation.

Hanson’s own history supplies the continuity. Jacobs recalls her 1996 claim that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” and her argument that immigration problems began after the end of the White Australia policy under Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1973. The UK meetings add a new layer: Hanson also met Tommy Robinson, Jacobs writes, a figure whose profile has been built through repeated court cases and online mobilisation.

Hanson returned from Britain with a deportation blueprint and a camera crew close behind.