Politics & Power Quote by Pauline Hanson

Hanson’s line is a classic populist move: name a fracture, imply it’s engineered, and cast yourself as the one willing to “say it.” The phrasing looks diagnostic but functions accusatory. “This nation” claims the whole country as a single body, while “being divided” shifts blame away from voters and onto an unnamed hand. Division becomes something done to Australians, not something Australians participate in. That grammatical passivity is the point: it creates a villain without the responsibility of specifying one.

The real bite sits in “the present system.” It’s a foggy target that can mean government policy, multicultural institutions, the media, anti-racism frameworks, or social services - whatever the listener already resents. The ambiguity is strategic. By refusing to name the mechanism, the claim becomes immune to rebuttal: you can’t fact-check a mood. It also invites a sense of betrayal, suggesting that elites are incentivizing conflict, not solving it.

Context matters because Hanson’s politics rose alongside debates over immigration, Indigenous rights, and “political correctness,” where race talk could be framed as both taboo and omnipresent. The subtext is an inversion: anti-racist or pluralist policies are recast as the true racialisers, while the speaker positions herself as defending a coherent national identity against imported categories. It’s an argument that sounds like unity but smuggles in a hierarchy: if the “system” stopped “encouraging” black-and-white thinking, the implied default is a nation that doesn’t have to reckon so loudly with its own racial history.