Pauline Hanson is the only major Australian political figure currently prepared to treat the United Nations as a problem rather than a permanent fixture. While the Coalition and Labor continue to implement, expand, and defend the web of UN-linked treaties and norms that constrain domestic decision-making, One Nation has repeatedly stated that Australia should audit those commitments, exit those that no longer serve national interests, and restore the principle that Australian governments answer to Australian voters rather than to unelected international processes.
The immediate trigger is practical. A High Court majority recently held that the NSW Independent Planning Commission failed its statutory duty when it did not adequately consider Scope 3 emissions, the downstream combustion of Australian coal in the countries that buy it, for a major mine expansion. Scope 3 accounting draws on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the reporting frameworks associated with the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. The Coalition signed Australia up to Paris; Labor has embraced the resulting constraints. Hanson has been direct: the Liberals put the country into these arrangements, so there is little reason to trust them to extract it. At CPAC she announced that a One Nation government would call a Royal Commission into Net Zero. More importantly, the party has flagged the legislative steps that actually matter: scrapping Net Zero targets, removing Scope 3 requirements from planning law, and exiting Paris. One Nation NSW has already indicated an omnibus bill to that effect.
Hanson has long argued for a broader audit of the international treaties Australia has signed and the effect those treaties have on sovereign capacity. This is not rhetorical. UN processes generate permanent administrative and advocacy ecosystems. What begins as a reasonable principle, such as considering gender perspectives in peacekeeping under Security Council Resolution 1325, can harden into identity-politics machinery that treats the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights as outdated Western universalism. The UN's original post-war purpose of securing a rules-based order against aggression has been diluted by blocs that prioritise relativism, anti-Western grievance, and expansive social and environmental agendas. Australia continues to fund and implement these frameworks even when they conflict with energy security, industrial competitiveness, or basic majoritarian democratic accountability.
The major parties show no serious intention of leaving the UN or conducting a rigorous treaty audit. The result is a structural democratic deficit: voters elect a government that then operates inside constraints set by bodies they never chose and cannot easily remove. When those constraints rest on contested climate modelling, expansive human-rights interpretations, or institutional capture by activist networks, the gap between public preference and policy outcome widens. One Nation's position is that membership should be conditional on demonstrated benefit to Australia, not treated as an irreversible commitment. The party has called for withdrawal from the UN, the WHO, and the Paris Agreement, arguing that the money and sovereignty lost outweigh any residual diplomatic advantages.
Whether Hanson and One Nation can deliver depends on electoral arithmetic and the party's capacity to convert polling strength into governing competence. What is already clear is the alternative. The Uniparty has spent years talking about practical outcomes while embedding Australia deeper in the very arrangements that raise energy costs, complicate resource development, and shift decision-making away from Canberra. Hanson is the only figure currently offering a coherent alternative: test the treaties, exit those that fail the test, and reassert that Australian policy is made by Australians. For voters who regard the present accumulation of UN-derived constraints as costly and unaccountable, that remains the only offer on the table.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/10/can-pauline-hanson-save-us-from-the-united-nations/