Please Explain: Pauline Hanson, One Nation and the Media’s 30-Year Dilemma

Thirty years ago, Pauline Hanson exposed a fault line in Australian politics that never really went away.

This week, following Hanson's first National Press Club address and amid signs One Nation is enjoying its strongest political moment in years, Fourth Estate asks what the media got right, what it got wrong, and whether we've ever truly understood the Australia that keeps bringing Hanson back.

Joining Tina Quinn are broadcaster Raf Epstein, award-winning journalist David Leser, whose landmark Good Weekend profile Pauline Hanson's Bitter Harvest remains one of the defining accounts of Hanson's rise, and veteran political reporter Margo Kingston, author of Off The Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip, one of the most influential books written about the One Nation phenomenon.

Together they revisit the journalism that shaped Australia's understanding of Hanson — from Tracey Curro's famous "Please Explain" interview to Maxine McKew's forensic Lateline interrogation — and ask what those moments can tell us about her resurgence today.

We also hear from Crikey's Charlie Lewis and Nine Political Editor Charles Croucher, who were both in the room for Hanson's National Press Club appearance.

Why has Hanson endured? What does her resurgence tell us about Australian politics, the media, and the voters journalists still struggle to understand? And three decades on, how the hell do we cover her going forward?

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