Pauline Hanson sat down at the Sky News laundromat this week, fixed her face into that haunted ginger glare she’s been workshopping since 1996, and informed the nation that Labor’s federal budget is, and I quote,

a Marxist, socialist, communist budget

Three different political systems. All in one sentence. None of them describing each other. Pauline couldn’t pick one so she threw the whole word salad against the wall and hoped Andrew Bolt’s audience of incontinent boomers wouldn’t notice she’d just collided three ideologies that historically would happily march each other up against a wall.

Top fucking work, Pauline. Marx and Stalin would have been arm in arm by your description. Trotsky lying dead at their feet, wondering what just happened.

This is the woman, remember, who built her entire brand on being a battler. Fish and chip shop in Ipswich. Second-hand everything. Single mum who couldn’t catch a break. Tells the story every chance she gets like she’s reading from a script Gina Rinehart’s PR team typed up on a Thursday.

And the dropkicks in her base lap it up because it sounds like their nan’s life, and if Pauline lived it and got rich anyway then surely they’ll get rich too if they just complain loudly enough about Asians and wind turbines.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Pauline Hanson’s estimated net worth sits somewhere between 5 and 20 million dollars depending on whose maths you trust. She owns property in Coleyville. She owns property in Cooee Bay.

She bought an investment property in Maitland in 2011 for $449,000 and sold it in 2023 for $1.1 million. That’s a tidy $651,000 capital gain on one bloody property, while every young Australian under 40 was eating two-minute noodles and wondering why they’d never own a dog kennel, let alone a house.

She’s a senator on $211,000 a year base salary. Plus a $32,000 electorate allowance. Plus the option of another $19,000 on top of that if she chucks the private-plated car. That’s nearly $263,000 a year from the taxpayer before she rolls out of bed, before the book royalties, before the Sky News appearance fees, before the rental income. Battler, my arse. The closest this woman has been to a battler in 30 years is when she sat behind one at the bowls club.

But the real diamond in the crown of Hanson’s hypocrisy is the Maitland property. She bought it in 2011 with a co-investor. She declared the rental income to the Senate every single year. Every year. Like clockwork. The income, mate. She remembered the income.

What she somehow could not remember, across three separate parliaments, was that the property generating the income actually existed. Section 3 of the Register of Senators’ Interests, Real Estate, three statements lodged in 2016, 2019 and 2022, all blank as a One Nation policy document.

Read that twice if you have to. This drongo collected rent on a property for 11 years, presumably paid tax on the rent, and yet somehow every time a Senate clerk asked her what real estate she owned, the answer was nothing. Sweet fuck all.

The property apparently existed for the Tax Office but vanished into the quantum foam every time Parliament asked her about it. The polite term for this is breach of the register resolutions. The actual term, if anyone in Canberra gave a single shit about enforcing the rules on senators, is serious contempt.

But Pauline has a defence ready, and it’s the same defence she’s been pulling out for three decades. She’s too thick to know what she’s doing. Pleads innumeracy. Can’t read forms. Gets confused by the big words. This is the woman, mind you, whose budget analysis we’re now meant to take seriously. Who has decided that Jim Chalmers handing a few hundred bucks to people who can’t afford petrol is the second coming of Joseph fucking Stalin.

Here’s what’s really going on. Pauline Hanson isn’t worried about communism. Pauline Hanson is worried about anything that might dent her property portfolio. That’s the entire ideology. Negative gearing, capital gains discount, franking credits, the whole rigged casino that’s transferred a generation’s worth of wealth from young workers to old landlords.

That’s her actual religion. Touch any of it and suddenly she’s quoting Marx like she’s read him. She hasn’t read him. She’s read maybe six books in her life and four of them were her own.

The Marxist-socialist-communist line is the tell. Real Marxists, real socialists, and real communists hate each other almost as much as they hate capitalists. A Trotskyist would knife a Stalinist in a pub queue. A democratic socialist would rather be water-boarded than be called a communist on national telly.

But Pauline doesn’t know any of that and doesn’t care, because the words aren’t descriptions. They’re a wet trigger to make her audience reach for the smelling salts. Magic spells. Say “communist” three times into a Sky News camera and Albo turns into Pol Pot.

What the Sky News laundering operation is desperately trying to keep off the chyron is that Pauline Hanson is one of the most successful property investors in the Senate. She’s been on the public teat for the best part of two decades. She’s been to Mar-a-Lardo. She rides in Gina Rinehart’s private jet.

She has a property developer for an ex-partner. And she has the absolute brass neck to look down the barrel of a camera and tell pensioners on Centrelink that Labor is the elite coming for their wealth.

The wealth, Pauline. What wealth. The pensioners watching you don’t have wealth. You do. You’re the one who flipped a Maitland pub for over a million bucks. You’re the one with two properties in Queensland and a quarter-million-dollar Senate salary and book royalties and Sky News money.

The pensioners are eating Home Brand peas because Coles jacked the frozen veg again last quarter. They are not the bourgeoisie, you wanker. You are.

And here is the part that should make every working Australian’s blood reach a rolling boil. Pauline Hanson is, when you actually do the maths, one of the single biggest welfare recipients in the country. Her salary is taxpayer-funded. Her electorate allowance is taxpayer-funded. Her travel is taxpayer-funded.

Her staff are taxpayer-funded. Her office is taxpayer-funded. The negative gearing tax break propping up her property portfolio is taxpayer-funded. The capital gains discount that turned her Maitland flip into an even fatter cheque after tax is taxpayer-funded. The solar rebate on her Beaudesert acreage is taxpayer-funded. The parliamentary pension she will collect every fortnight until she carks it is taxpayer-funded.

She is, by every meaningful measure of the word, a public dependent. A woman who has not held down a real private sector job in two decades and whose entire wealth-building strategy has been to vacuum up every single taxpayer subsidy this country offers, while telling everyone else that the government is the enemy and the dole bludgers are the problem.

But the welfare cheque she really doesn’t want you to know about is the one written by the Australian Electoral Commission. Australia’s election funding rules pay any party or candidate $3.39 for every first preference vote, the moment they clear 4 per cent in an electorate. The catch is that to actually win a House seat you need around 25 per cent.

So if you are sitting at 10 per cent in the polls, you cannot win a thing, but you can carpet bomb the country with no-hope candidates and harvest the public purse just for clearing that 4 per cent threshold. Which is exactly what Pauline did. At the 2025 election she ran 147 candidates for the House of Representatives.

None of them won. Not one. She still walked away with $2.98 million in taxpayer money. Total One Nation take from the 2025 election across both houses: 6 million dollars. For losing 147 fucking times. And next election, after a quiet Labor-LNP stitch-up, the rate jumps to 5 bucks a vote. A 47.5 per cent pay rise in public funding, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

This isn’t new behaviour. Between her 1998 loss and her 2016 Senate win, Pauline Hanson ran for parliament nine times and lost nine times. In 2004 she lost the Queensland Senate with 4.54 per cent of the vote. Just barely clearing the AEC threshold.

Roughly $200,000 to a loser. In 2007 she lost the Queensland Senate again under Pauline’s United Australia Party with 4.19 per cent, scraping over the threshold by less than 0.2 per cent. Roughly $213,000 to a loser. The losses didn’t matter. The losses were the bloody point. Each campaign was a coin toss on whether she could clear that magic 4 per cent and trigger the taxpayer-funded poker machine.

And we haven’t even mentioned that in 2003 a Queensland District Court jury convicted Pauline Hanson of electoral fraud for dishonestly obtaining $498,637 from the AEC.

Half a million dollars. She did 11 weeks in prison before the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction. Read this carefully. The Court of Appeal did not find that she hadn’t taken the money. They found the proof of intent wasn’t strong enough to convict. She walked on a technicality. The racket she got hauled into court for in 2003 is the exact same fucking racket she is running today, 22 years later, at industrial scale.

And what does this welfare queen want done with welfare for everybody else? She wants to gut it. She wants Centrelink slashed for migrants. She wants pensioners means-tested harder.

She wants drug testing for the dole. She wants the cashless welfare card rolled out wider so a single mum in Logan can’t buy a packet of fucking smokes without the government’s permission. She wants every Australian who actually needs a hand made to crawl over broken glass for it, while she’s got both hands, both feet, and her ginger head buried in the public trough up to the shoulders.

This is the textbook ratbag move. Every accusation is a confession. Every projection is autobiography. When Pauline Hanson screams “communist” at Labor, what she is really screaming is please don’t look at me. When she screams “elite,” what she means is please don’t notice I am the one with the property portfolio.

When she screams “welfare cheat,” what she means is do not audit my Senate disclosures. When she screams “lazy migrants,” what she means is do not ask how I built 20 million dollars off government salary and government tax breaks. It is projection all the way down, mate. Projection from a woman whose entire career is a 30-year hallucination of her own victimhood.

And the real punchline, the one that should have every working Australian launching their remote at the telly, is that Pauline Hanson’s actual policy positions, the ones she goes quiet on when the cameras are off, are stuffed full of corporate giveaways and tax cuts for the wealthy that would make a Liberal Party fundraiser blush.

Cut the company tax rate. Gut environmental regulation. Hand it all back to the mining barons who fly her around. That’s her real budget. Not communism. Plutocracy with a fish-and-chip-shop accent.

So next time you see her on Sky (Aussie Fox News) bellowing about Marxism, pretending the country is being run by blokes in ushankas named Vladimir, remember the Maitland property.

Remember the $651,000 profit she made while you couldn’t scrape rent together. Remember the three parliamentary statements she filled out and “forgot” to mention she was a landlord. Remember the solar panels on the Beaudesert roof paid for in part by the taxpayer she calls a sucker. Remember the private jet. Remember Coleyville. Remember Cooee Bay.

And then remember that the entire Sky News operation, every single host they roll out night after night, exists for one reason. To make sure people like Pauline keep what they have harvested from the public purse, by convincing people like you that the bloke trying to help is the real thief.

That’s the gig. That’s always been the gig. And until enough Australians cotton on, it will keep being the gig.

Pauline Hanson is the leopard that never changes its spots. Doorstopper from 2016 with ALP Senator Murray Watt

IFAL ~ Gman

IFLA AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY

Drongo: An idiot, but a specifically Australian flavour of idiot. Comes from a 1920s racehorse that never won a race. Implies someone who keeps trying and keeps failing in embarrassing ways. Pauline-coded.

Dropkick: A useless person. Worse than a drongo because there is an implication of moral failure as well as stupidity. A drongo is incompetent. A dropkick is incompetent and a bit of a scumbag.

Ratbag: A scoundrel, a troublemaker, a person who behaves badly and seems to enjoy it. Less harsh than calling someone a crook. Used affectionately for friends, savagely for politicians.

Wanker: A self-important tosser. Literally someone who masturbates, but in Australian English it is almost never literal. It means someone too full of themselves to be tolerated.

Brass neck: Audacity. Hide. The ability to do something shameless and not even flinch. Pauline Hanson lecturing pensioners about elites is the platonic ideal.

Battler: An ordinary Aussie doing it tough. Working class, scraping by, getting up every day and having another crack. Politicians spend their entire careers pretending to be one. Almost none of them are.

Centrelink: Our government welfare agency. Where you go to get unemployment payments, pensions, disability support, single parent assistance. Imagine the DMV crossed with food stamps and run by people who hate you.

Cashless welfare card: A debit card the Australian government tried to force welfare recipients to use that locked them out of buying alcohol, gambling, or sometimes even cash withdrawals. Sold as helping the poor. Functioned as humiliating the poor.

Mar-a-Lardo: What we call Donald Trump’s Florida bin chicken sanctuary, on account of him being a walking heart attack and the place being a tacky shrine to bankruptcy.

Cark it: To die. Same family as “drop off the perch.” Used for politicians we are politely waiting on.

Sky News: Australia’s 24-hour Murdoch laundromat for right-wing grievance, owned by News Corp and operating as a softer-spoken cousin of America’s Fox News.

The after-dark lineup of Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, Paul Murray and Chris Kenny exists to launder culture-war talking points into respectable-sounding television, and to give Pauline Hanson somewhere to shout about communism with no follow-up questions. Effectively the in-house broadcaster for One Nation, except Pauline does not have to pay them and they do not have to declare her as a sponsor.