# Pauline Hanson **Pauline Hanson** is the Australian populist politician who founded [[One Nation (Australia)]]. A Liberal Party candidate disendorsed before the **March 1996** federal election over remarks about Indigenous Australians, she won the Queensland seat of Oxley anyway as an independent — the sequence that made her a national figure and demonstrated that the disendorsement itself was an electoral asset. She launched One Nation on **11 April 1997** in Ipswich, Queensland, with advisers David Ettridge and David Oldfield. For this vault she is an early data point in a pattern that became familiar two decades later: a candidate expelled by a mainstream conservative party for saying what the party's base wanted said, who then converts the expulsion into an independent constituency the party must later bargain with. ## See Also - [[One Nation (Australia)]] - [[Australia]] - [[Australian History Hub]] - [[White Australia Policy]]