Pauline Hanson’s old habit of blaming the wrong side

Pauline Hanson has a gift for turning a serious public issue into a demonstration of how not to speak about it. Asked to address domestic violence, the One Nation leader said it was wrong, then promptly diluted that with the claim that it was also a “two-way street” and that women should not put up with abuse. The result was predictable: condemnation from ministers, advocates and survivors who have heard this sort of reasoning before, and know exactly where it leads.

Hanson made the comments on Wednesday during an interview with 4BC, arguing that society was under “so much pressure” and suggesting that women, like men, can lose their cool. She also said she had been through domestic violence herself and that women in unsafe homes should leave. That may sound brisk and practical in the abstract. In reality, it shifts attention away from the person using violence and onto the person trying to survive it.

Tarang Chawla, whose sister Nikita was murdered by her partner in 2015, was among the first to spell out what Hanson’s advice misses. He said his sister had tried to do what Hanson was suggesting, and it ended in her death. The point is not subtle, and it should not need repeating: the burden is not on the victim to manage the abuser’s violence into harmlessness.

Katy Gallagher, the minister for women and finance, said the remarks were ill-informed and risked sending a dangerous message that lets perpetrators off the hook. Tanya Plibersek took a similar line, saying Hanson should be supporting survivors rather than belittling them. Both responses were plain enough. Australia does not need elected officials offering moral symmetry where there is none.

Brittany Higgins, now executive director of the Vida Fund, also accused Hanson of victim-blaming. She pointed to the language of “mutual abuse”, “two way street” and “just leave”, and linked that rhetoric to the fact that 38 Australian women have already been lost to femicide. That is not a statistic to be waved away with a shrug and a lecture about pressure. It is a warning that public language matters, especially when it reaches people already trapped in danger.

The Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre was even blunter, calling Hanson’s comments vile and shameful. Its chief executive, Nicole Yade, said they ignored the gendered reality of violence, with most family violence perpetrated by men against women and children. She also said Hanson’s own experience of domestic and family violence made the remarks especially disappointing, because they offered blame instead of empathy.

There is, of course, a pattern here. In 2019 Hanson secured a controversial inquiry into the family court system, despite warnings from women’s groups that it could become a platform for men’s rights activists who believed the courts were biased against fathers. At the time she claimed women were fabricating family violence complaints to keep children from the other parent, a grievance that has been widely discredited in multiple studies but remains useful to those who prefer suspicion to evidence.

Her record on the issue stretches further back. In 2017 she told the Senate that her sons had faced domestic violence claims that were not warranted and said she felt for men going through what she described as an unjust process. There is a theme, and it is not difficult to identify: violence is recast as misunderstanding, victims are asked to carry the moral weight, and the person causing harm becomes almost an unfortunate bystander in their own story.

That is why the backlash was so immediate. Hanson did not merely make a clumsy remark; she repeated a line of thinking that has done real damage for years. When public figures tell abused women to simply leave, they are not offering courage. They are offering a shortcut around responsibility, which is always easier than confronting the violence itself.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com