Pauline Hanson was (and is) correct about the Australian Aboriginals being the most primitive people on earth at the time of settlement. This was the shared opinion by the Europeans who first observed them. Of course, we’re talking about full-blood Aboriginals untouched by European civilisation and not the reinvented white Aboriginals who have grown up and been educated in ordinary Australian society. In the Quadrant article below, Robert Hill comments.
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The Unspeakable Truth
Robert Hill, Quadrant, September 15 2026
Pauline Hanson has once again committed the apparently unforgivable Australian political sin of saying something about Aboriginal history that everyone is expected to condemn before anybody examines whether it is true.
The remarkable thing is that the controversy is not even about something she said this week. In September 2025, appearing on the Jamie J podcast, Hanson was discussing what she regards as the warping of Australian education. She recounted being contacted by a teacher from Western Australia who complained that curriculum previously devoted to Australian history and civil rights was instead being directed towards Aboriginal culture and language. It was in that context, questioning what children were being asked to celebrate and why, that Hanson asked what Aboriginal Australians had achieved over some 60,000 years and described them as “the most primitive race on Earth”. The interview sat largely unnoticed for a year. On September 14, the remarks resurfaced in the national media and abruptly became a political controversy.
That context does not determine whether her language was justified, but it does matter. Hanson was making an argument about the historical content being taught in Australian schools, not simply announcing a racial epithet without context.
The timing is difficult to ignore. These were not newly discovered words. They had been publicly available for twelve months. Yet they suddenly became a national scandal at the very moment One Nation had emerged as a major electoral force, polling in the mid-20s and challenging both major parties.
That does not establish that somebody coordinated a political hit. But it gives the affair the strong appearance of political excavation: an old recording dragged back into the light at the moment its author has become politically dangerous.
