Progressive groups shift strategy: avoid personal attacks on Hanson, focus on economics

Progressive campaigners and union organizers in Victoria have been given a stark instruction: stop attacking Pauline Hanson personally. The directive came from strategists at GetUp and the Trades Hall Council, the peak union body in the state, as both groups prepare for the November Victorian election and attempt to counter One Nation's growing electoral momentum.

The strategic shift marks a significant departure from recent practice. GetUp spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertisements during the Farrer byelection that directly targeted Hanson and her deputy, Barnaby Joyce, linking them to Donald Trump. The approach failed. One Nation won the seat comfortably. That loss prompted GetUp to commission research from the polling firm Redbridge, which revealed something counterintuitive: personal attacks on Hanson's character were not persuading voters to abandon her. Instead, they were reinforcing the very narrative she had cultivated—that she was an outsider being attacked by the establishment.

The new strategy rests on a different theory of persuasion. During training sessions conducted over Zoom and in person, GetUp strategists told campaigners that when they attack Hanson directly or call her racist, they inadvertently confirm what her supporters already believe about her. "Going after Pauline Hanson personally and calling her a racist, or going after her character, although very tempting, just confirms what people already believe: that she is an outsider and the establishment is attacking her," one GetUp strategist explained to hundreds of members on a Thursday night call. The instruction was simple: "As best as you can, I know it's hard, don't make it personal."

Oscar Kaspi-Crutchett, a senior researcher at Trades Hall, acknowledged the tension this creates for activists. Many people drawn to opposing One Nation do so precisely because they see Hanson's racism as central to her politics. Ignoring it entirely felt impossible. But Kaspi-Crutchett argued for a different framing: rather than treating racism as a character flaw, campaigners should present it as a deliberate political strategy designed to manufacture conflict between groups that have no actual disagreement. "It manufactures differences between groups which have none," he said.

The retraining also extended to how campaigners should discuss Hanson's relationship with billionaire Gina Rinehart. GetUp had previously run advertisements describing Hanson as a "wannabe billionaire" who flew around in "mummy Gina's" private plane. That line of attack, the research suggested, should be abandoned. "It can be effective if it is raised organically by the person you're speaking to but leading with it reads as a standard partisan attack, which triggers the same defensiveness as going after her character directly," GetUp told its campaigners.

Instead, the new approach asks campaigners to listen for economic grievances buried beneath surface-level concerns about immigration, crime, or cultural issues. Kaspi-Crutchett described this as listening to "the beat, not the lyrics." A voter might begin by talking about Bill Gates or some other conspiracy theory, but the underlying dissatisfaction was often material: a child unable to afford a house, stagnant wages, deteriorating working conditions. Those were the conversations worth having. Kaspi-Crutchett noted that One Nation's greatest vulnerabilities lay precisely in the areas where the labor movement had the highest public trust—working conditions, entitlements, maternity leave. Campaigners were instructed not to fact-check conspiracy theories but to respectfully redirect conversations toward economic ground where Labor could actually compete.

The shift reflects a broader acknowledgment that the political landscape had changed. One Nation had not merely maintained its support; it had surged, winning recent byelections in Farrer and South Australia. Senior state and federal Labor figures, speaking anonymously, conceded that GetUp's personal attacks on right-wing figures in previous elections—including Peter Dutton during the 2016 and 2019 federal campaigns—had not been productive. Even GetUp's decision to unfurl a banner behind Hanson during her National Press Club address in June, despite its focus on her wages record, had caused disquiet among Labor ranks because of its cartoon imagery of cash.

Kaspi-Crutchett made a final point about credibility. The politicians who once persuaded voters against supporting Hanson had lost their standing with the people she was targeting. "A nurse on the doorstep can do infinitely more than a legion of cabinet ministers and press secretaries," he said. "The trust has been exhausted." In June, Luke Hilakari, the head of Trades Hall Council, had publicly rebuked 23 state Labor MPs and candidates for having "zero conversations" with constituents in the previous two weeks, demanding they "work their ass off" to stop One Nation. The new training represented an attempt to fill that gap—not with politicians or paid advertising, but with one-on-one conversations grounded in the economic concerns that actually moved voters.