Thirty years ago today, Bob Brown and Pauline Hanson gave very different first speeches

On the 10th of September 1996, two very different politicians rose at the same time to give their first speeches to Parliament.  

Newly elected Green Bob Brown spoke in the Senate. The senator talked about global inequality, climate change, gun control and an end to native forest logging. He proposed stronger freedom of information, restoring foreign aid and supporting democracy around the world.  

Pauline Hanson was a former Liberal candidate who won the seat of Oxley despite being disendorsed just before the election for her comments about Aboriginal Australians.  

She told the House of Representatives that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” and said a truly multicultural country “can never be strong or united”, giving Ireland and Papua New Guinea as examples. She called for compulsory national service and an end to all foreign aid and said child support was too generous to custodial parents.  

Brown joined one Greens colleague, while Hanson sat as an independent. She founded One Nation the next year. The major political parties – Labor, Liberal and National – were ascendant. In 1996, they won 86% of the vote. It was 66% at last year’s election, and the latest polling aggregate has them at 49%.  

The Greens and One Nation have become fixtures of Australian politics. The Greens have almost always had more electoral success and many more parliamentarians than One Nation.  

There are over 40 Greens state, territory and federal parliamentarians. One Nation boasts 17. It is the first time since 1998 that it has had more than 10 parliamentarians. Polling suggests One Nation will win more seats at upcoming state elections. Whether the party will hold onto them is another question; historically, about half of One Nation’s MPs defected from the party.  

The Greens have often held the balance of power in the Senate and in state upper houses. They have at times done so in lower houses: taking ministries in Tasmania and the ACT and negotiating with the Gillard Labor Government. Ministries have eluded One Nation, but some in the Liberal–National Coalition are open to power-sharing arrangements should the minor party win more seats.  

A week may be a long time in politics, but many topics Brown and Hanson covered three decades ago remain live. Hanson’s scepticism of the United Nations found an echo in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s talk of “negative globalism”. Immigration remains contentious, even within One Nation. 

Brown’s speech, too, raised unresolved issues. Decades after his warning on climate change, Australia is still opening new gas and coal mines. Brown was concerned about “some hundreds of billionaires” while 1.3 billion people lived on less than a dollar a day. Now the world has its first trillionaire in Elon Musk. Even after the Port Arthur massacre, Brown quoted politicians who didn’t see the point of gun control. But there was more national unity in 1996 than in 2026; despite the Bondi Beach massacre, some state governments have rejected gun buybacks and caps on firearm ownership.  

There has been movement. In 1996, Brown defended Northern Territory laws that gave people the right to die with dignity. Those voluntary assisted dying laws were struck down by the federal parliament, and it was only last month that the NT finally passed new ones. It will soon be legal across Australia.  

Brown, the first openly gay member of Parliament, represented a state where homosexuality was still a crime. The Tasmanian Legislative Council was a block on reform. Brown pointed out both the upper house’s recalcitrance and the fact that no women were elected to the body. Tasmania decriminalised homosexuality the next year, and women are now in the majority in the Legislative Council.  

Brown was an early critic of Chinese repression, quoting the Dalai Lama and expressing solidarity with the people of Tibet. At the time, this marked him as a radical. Australian federal police and parliamentary staff were deployed to silence his protests against Chinese politicians. Since China cracked down on free expression in Hong Kong, more politicians across the political spectrum have spoken out.  

Brown also called for reform to section 44 of the Constitution, which bars dual citizens from standing for parliament. This would have spared much wasted time and embarrassment, when 15 parliamentarians quit or were found to be ineligible on the basis of foreign citizenships or “allegiances”.   

For Hanson’s part, the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission would be eventually realised by the Howard Government. And while foreign aid has not ceased altogether, it is very low.  

The Greens have expanded beyond environmental, social and global egalitarian concerns. The party’s focus on renters’ rights has no parallel in Brown’s speech, and the scale of its government accountability work (on truth in political advertising, an anti-corruption commission and in Senate Estimates) goes well beyond his brief mention of freedom of information.  

Much of One Nation’s concerns are unchanged. Hanson’s recent complaints about multiculturalism could have been copy-pasted from those she made 30 years ago. And if the party is less likely to scapegoat Asian Australians than it once was, it has found a new target in Muslim Australians.  

It was a quirk of parliamentary programming that Bob Brown and Pauline Hanson delivered their first speeches on the same day, at the same time, across the hall from one another. Brown and Hanson have loomed large in the Australian political imagination ever since. So far, the Australian Greens have enjoyed much more electoral and legislative success than One Nation – although that is not always obvious from the amount of media attention each party receives.  

The most profound change may be on gay rights, where the country has gone from criminalisation to same-sex marriage and widespread acceptance.  

But for all that the world has changed, Bob Brown and Pauline Hanson’s competing visions for Australia and the world are as live today as they were in 1996.