NOTE: Recently, Queensland Coalition (LNP) Senator Matt Canavan penned an opinion piece in News Limited papers in which he sledged Senator Pauline Hanson. After this post below was published, Matt put on quite the show of rage. Let's be clear. One Nation will defend ourselves when attacked, we don't apologise for that, and we’ll keep asking others on our side of politics to focus on Labor's poor record rather than obsessing over how many MPs or party branch members choose to join One Nation.

Senator Hanson’s response is as follows:

Hypocrisy used to be seen as a bad thing, especially in politics. 

Writers, philosophers and statesmen going all the way back to ancient Greece have derided hypocrisy. François de La Rochefoucauld, a moralist and author during France’s classical era, famously said “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”.

I wonder if Nationals senator Matt Canavan has ever read de La Rochefoucauld’s work.

Canavan is no fool, so I expect he would agree with the observation the Australian Senate is full of hypocrites. They’re led by those who were the loudest in their manufactured outrage when I went into the Senate this week wearing a burqa.

For the few minutes I was wearing it, my sympathy for women around the world forced to wear this garment deepened. I could barely see anything.

That’s what burqas are for: to confine women. It’s not about making it hard for women to see, but to make sure women are not seen.

Those senators who were loudest in their confected outrage were all women. They were women who defended other women being made invisible and irrelevant. They were women who have happily and proudly worn the symbols of terrorism in the seat of Australian democracy with no censure or sanction. They were women who proudly support a ban on senators bearing the symbol of our own nation, the Australian flag, in the Australian parliament.

The Senate should be a forum for fearless debate on issues Australians care about. By moving a ban on the burqa and other face-coverings, I was doing precisely what many Australians expect of me. When I was denied the opportunity to represent the views of Australians on this issue, I decided to put on that awful garment of oppression to expose the Senate’s hypocrisy.

For this I was censured by the Senate, with only five senators opposed to it. Canavan wasn’t one of them. Let me make it clear I don’t regret my actions for a minute. I won’t stop fighting for women’s rights that other women ignore for the sake of twisted ideology or convenience. Condemnation of my actions has been completely drowned out by overwhelming support from so many Australians who stand with me.

Canavan’s own hypocrisy is manifest in his failed attempt to distance the Nationals from their complicity in the net zero disaster they have inflicted on the Australian people.

Perhaps Canavan blames me for the defection of many National Party members to One Nation, or the loss of the Coalition’s support from voters to One Nation. Perhaps he might serve the Australian people better by accepting the simple truth the Nationals have only themselves to blame.

 For more than three years, Canavan was a minister in the Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments and in all this time no effective action was taken to stop net zero or the rollout of renewables crippling our economy, shutting down businesses, hurting farmers and impoverishing Australian households.

Nothing was done to lower immigration to sustainable levels. And nothing the Coalition has said about these issues gives Australians any confidence things will change for the better. Australians still don’t know where the Coalition stands while it remains committed to Paris and makes half-hearted gestures to only slightly lower immigration numbers.

Australians have always known exactly where I stand on net zero: One Nation utterly opposes it and would dismantle it and get Australia out of the Paris Agreement. Since the election it’s One Nation which has been setting the agenda on net zero and high immigration with a defeated, desperate and divided Coalition trailing in our wake.

Australians opposed to net zero and high immigration are looking for leadership the Coalition can no longer provide, and that’s the best explanation for the rise in One Nation’s support at the expense of the Coalition this year.