Pauline Hanson Wants LGBTQIA+ People ‘Behind Closed Doors’ — History Shows We’ll Outlast Her

There are some people who have been famous for so long that it becomes difficult to imagine an Australia without them taking up an irritating amount of oxygen, popping up every few years with another inflammatory opinion, another reminder that somehow, we are still having versions of the exact same arguments years later. Pauline Hanson is one of those people.

She has been particularly inescapable lately, as One Nation enjoys another surge in attention and Hanson herself embarks upon what feels like a national reunion tour of her greatest hits: immigration, multiculturalism, trans people and, because apparently we’re dragging material out of the 1996 archives now, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

This week, Hanson was asked about her infamous comments from 30 years ago, when she told 60 Minutes she didn’t like Mardi Gras because it promoted something she considered “not natural”, and three decades of social change, marriage equality, enormous shifts in public attitudes and generations of LGBTQIA+ people living openly and proudly apparently haven’t moved the dial all that much.

“I still don’t like the gay Mardi Gras,” she told News24, before adding that people’s sexuality should be kept “behind closed doors” rather than being “out there with the gay Mardi Gras”.

It’s infuriating, obviously, but more than anything I find it incredibly fucking tired, because queer people have spent an awfully long time being told to keep ourselves behind closed doors. The closet was quite literally built around that demand: you can exist, but quietly; you can love somebody, but perhaps don’t mention it at dinner; you can be queer, but please don’t make anybody actually look at it – and for the love of god don’t put on some glitter and shut down Oxford Street once a year.

Mardi Gras exists, in no small part, because a generation of LGBTQIA+ people in the 70s decided they were extremely fuckin’ done with that arrangement.

Pauline Hanson has been saying this sh*t for decades

Hanson’s fixation on LGBTQIA+ people isn’t new, although the target has mostly shifted, and there is something almost grimly fascinating about looking back through the archives and realising just how often the language being used today is basically the same language with a slightly different coat of paint.

In a 2008 interview with Star Observer, Hanson said she could not accept same-sex marriage, and essentially inferred it was a slippery slope, eventually leading to – *clutches pearls* – same-sex couples raising children.

In 2013, she returned to much the same argument, saying what people did “behind their own closed doors” was their business while opposing marriage equality, adoption and IVF for gay people. Sound familiar?

During the marriage equality debate, Hanson remained opposed to changing the definition of marriage, saying it would lead to polygamy and child marriages, and, when the legislation ultimately passed the Senate in 2017, she did not cast a vote.

But as broader public acceptance of gay and lesbian people grew, and railing against two fellas getting married became a considerably less useful political hill for her to die on, the focus increasingly shifted towards trans people.

In 2022, Hanson unsuccessfully moved for a Senate inquiry into puberty blockers which included references to “peer contagion” and so-called rapid onset gender dysphoria, returning to the issue again in 2023, and then in June this year she used her first-ever address to the National Press Club to describe the movement for trans equality as a “transgender insurgency”, a “militant force” and an ideology “infecting all of society”.

It was vicious stuff, particularly at a time when trans and gender diverse Australians are already dealing with an increasingly hostile political environment, but it was also depressingly familiar: pick a marginalised group, inflate their existence into some enormous threat to the Australian way of life, get everyone arguing about it, generate headlines, repeat.

Which brings me to the thing that has been giving me a strange little crumb of comfort: it ain’t gonna be forever.

Online search data tells a pretty interesting Pauline Hanson story

I was poking around Google Trends this week — as one does when they work in digital media and have apparently decided staring at graphs is a perfectly normal way to spend an afternoon — and searched for Pauline Hanson in Australia from 2004 to now.

But it is is fascinating, and oddly comforting.

Because rather than showing a politician whose public relevance has steadily grown over the past two decades of dedicated work throwing people under the bus, Hanson’s online search interest looks more like a heart monitor after six Red Bulls: long stretches sitting relatively low, suddenly interrupted by enormous spikes around major moments of controversy, followed by equally dramatic declines.

We can see a massive peak around 2009, another huge surge around 2016–17, further jumps around 2019 and 2022 and, right at the end of the graph, the enormous rise we are living through now in 2026.

Again and again, the line comes crashing back down.

That does not mean Hanson isn’t politically dangerous, and I don’t want to accidentally drift into the comforting-but-useless idea that if we simply ignore One Nation they’ll eventually disappear on their own – they won’t. One Nation’s current prominence matters, Hanson’s rhetoric matters, and the normalisation of attacks on LGBTQIA+ people — and righgt now, particularly the trans and gender-diverse communities — has real consequences.

But it does mean we should resist the feeling that somebody who is dominating the headlines today will therefore dominate Australian politics forever, because Hanson’s own history tells us something quite different.

What goes up can come back down — but not by magic

There is something strangely reassuring in that graph when you zoom out and look at the whole thing, because every enormous spike that must have felt completely overwhelming to the people living through it eventually comes back down again, while many of the communities Hanson has spent decades campaigning against have continued living, organising, changing minds and winning things we were once told Australia would never accept.

Same-sex marriage, which Hanson opposed, is now simply marriage. Mardi Gras, which she condemned as “not natural” in the 90s, remains one of Australia’s most recognisable cultural events, brings enormous numbers of people onto Sydney’s streets every year and has outlasted countless moral panics about what gay people supposedly represent. Hanson herself now acknowledges marriage equality is “acceptable”, even while apparently remaining deeply troubled by the existence of sequins on Oxford Street.

And none of that progress happened because queer people politely accepted the instruction to retreat behind closed doors and waited patiently for everyone else to become nicer to us.

It happened because people organised, protested, marched, wrote things, pissed people off, had horrible conversations around dinner tables, challenged their families, built organisations, knocked on doors, campaigned and, crucially, voted — which is why the lesson I take from that search data isn’t that we can sit around waiting for Hanson’s latest spike to collapse all by itself.

If you are frightened by One Nation’s resurgence, find out who is running in your electorate and contact them and find what they actually believe, talk to your family and your mates, support the queer organisations doing the exhausting work of fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights, make sure the people around you are enrolled properly and, when the opportunity comes, turn up and vote.

Pauline Hanson won’t dominate the headlines forever; very few politicians do, and two decades of Google searches suggest that every time public attention around her has shot spectacularly upwards, sooner or later it has fallen again.

What matters is what the rest of us do while the line is up there. So get angry – but when you feel overwhelmed, remember: what comes up, must come down.