Hungry Lies: One Nation's Food Security Fibs

Please explain!

Yesterday I was posting some comments about how tweets on the Pauline Hanson twitter account mostly are not written by her, despite being frequently written in the first person.  Tweets signed "PH" or "-PH", the supposed signs that they are actually hers, seem to have largely dried up; after 23 in 2023 (mostly re the Voice) there were according to the advanced search function just two in 2024, none in 2025 and only two so far this year.  In the process I had a broader look at what else One Nation's social media was tweeting and came across a two-minute video for One Nation's current "Fire the Liar" campaign.  One claim, voiced in what appears to be Hanson's voice, caught my attention:

"Seven million Australians can only afford one meal per day.  In a country as prosperous as we used to be.  People are screaming out for change"

Of course, times are tough and food security is a problem for too many.  But the idea that there are seven million Australians only eating one meal a day, and doing so for purely financial reasons rather than as a chosen diet or because they are too busy working and/or parenting to eat, seems exceedingly far-fetched.  Interested to see if there was anything behind this at all, I posted the following challenge:

Many One Nation supporters on Twitter are extremely defensive if there is even a whiff of criticism of their party so I got quite a bit of abuse for this challenge.  At the printable end of these contributions were people suggesting I was loaded and overpriveleged, that I was a Labor supporter, that I did that not care about the poor, that I had never been poor myself, that I should "get out of Sandy Bay more often", and that I lived in an insular Tasmanian bubble and did not see disadvantage (ha, I'm closer to Glenorchy City than I am to Sandy Bay, and I spend far more time there at the moment).  None of these claims were even close to true and I would rather like to look some of these people in the eye and tell them the facts about these things in person, because it might surprise them, but really they do not deserve to know.  

The Foodbank report

Among those who tried to argue in defence of the claim (some honestly but most being much too confident that they had found me out), the commonest source was the Foodbank reports, which most recently found that in mid-2025 20% of households (less than in 2022 or 2023!) were experiencing severe food insecurity.  But that probably isn't quite seven million people, and crucially, unwillingly averaging only one meal per day is a far more severe level of food insecurity than the average severely food-insecure person's.  The ABS definition of severe food insecurity is:

"Generally characterised by one or more members of the household having missed meals or reduced food intake and, at the most extreme, gone at least one day without food due to a lack of money for food." (My bolding).

So a household can be severely food insecure if even one member (not necessarily all) has missed or cut down on some meals, and that might mean it has only happened now and then rather than regularly.  A person who only averaged one meal a day for economic reasons would quite likely now and then miss meals entirely, and is certainly at the extreme end of the spectrum.  The Ipsos report notes that respondents were classified according to a USDA module on food security and looking at that module makes it clear that respondents can easily tick enough boxes to qualify as severely food insecure without having ever been reduced to a single meal per day, let alone on average.

Furthermore, for many households that do qualify as severely food insecure, that status at any given time is transitory or intermittent, as shown in Fig 29.  Only 18% of severely food insecure households reported frequently being in that status for several weeks at a time.  

The Salvation Army report

Some friendlier repliers helpfully suggested that the "seven million" claim had something to do with claims about food security made in Pauline Hanson's recent National Press Club speech.  In that speech the "seven million" claim does not itself occur, but there is a lengthy passage referencing a Salvation Army report.  Here is the start of it:

"Now let’s talk about the cost of living.

The Salvation Army’s latest Red Shield Report released in May this year is not easy to read.

It reveals the plight of increasing numbers of low-income Australians who now need help just to get by.

Thousands of Australians are seeking this help every day. Organisations like the Salvos are so overwhelmed with demand they’re having to turn people away.

Of the 4,400 people surveyed:

• 19 per cent said they’d eaten food from rubbish bins in the past 12 months;

• 60 per cent said they’d eaten expired or spoiled food;

• 91 per cent said they had skipped meals and 32 per cent said they do so on a daily basis;

• 35 per cent said they survived on only one meal a day;"

But at no point does Hanson actually inform her audience of who the people surveyed were. She makes it sound like it could be an ordinary poll or perhaps a sample of low income Australians.  It is not.  The respondents were "4,400 Australians seeking emergency relief support from The Salvation Army".  This is a survey of people who are on the whole highly disadvantaged to begin with.  The Foodbank survey found that 25% of food insecure households (just over 8% of all households) had accessed help during the past year.  And those who frequently access such help would be more likely to be in the sample for the Salvos survey than those who had done so once or twice.   So the Salvos sample is most likely on average the most food-disadvantaged few percent.   (Hanson's description of what the report found is also slightly incorrect, since it actually said that 35% of respondents "reported on most days, could only afford one meal per day".)  Even on that level, the number of Australians in this category could be, say, hundreds of thousands.  Way too many but it isn't even one million on the numbers as published, let alone seven.

Where did the "seven million" figure come from?  It's hard to tell because it seems to have not appeared anywhere else at all before the "Fire the Liar" ad.  But it seems quite plausible that some nong staffer simply took the 35% from the Salvos report and multiplied it by, say, the adult population.  Or maybe someone just handwaved and made it up.  

But their heart is in the right place ...

Oh no it isn't, and even if it was, that's no excuse.  The MO of One Nation forever has been to scare people into believing the country is going directly to hell and that only shunning an endless list of outgroups and retreating into their tedious flagtwiddling "monoculture" can save us.  (They're cherrypickers about this anyway since they want to degrade the compulsory preferential voting system that has been at the core of Australia's electoral culture for over 100 years.)  It's working particularly well for them at the moment because after COVID and then years of cost-of-living crises, voters are very discontented - the huge challenge for establishments is a general feeling that human life just isn't getting better anymore.  But I hope it is going to stop working quite so easily and move to a phase where the voters expect One Nation to get serious and demonstrate competence - because the nation has suffered far worse with a lot less of this nonsense.  I've even had One Nation supporters saying that 2026 is the worst time in our nation's history, that it is almost impossible to stay alive ... spare me.  Real concern about a problem begins with an accurate grasp of the size and nature of the problem so you know how to address it, not with a dystopian poverty porn schlock story where the problem is too large to do anything.  

And the other thing here is that anyone with the remotest grasp of social reality should hear something like seven million Australians only being able to afford to eat once per day and think "that cannot possibly be right".  While I learned more than I ever thought was out there about often dubious "one meal a day" diets in researching this article, on the whole eating one individually insufficient meal per day on a regular basis won't be good for most people.  If a quarter of Australians were really doing it, we would be constantly hearing about what the undereating epidemic was doing to our health system.  Instead we hear far more about people eating too much of the wrong stuff to the point where two thirds of Australian adults are overweight.  If a quarter of all Australians were also eating only one meal a day there would be hardly any normal eaters left!

An MP of ministerial let alone Prime Ministerial ability should be able to grasp that this claim doesn't make sense in seconds.  Pauline Hanson (if that's really her and not an AI facsimile) either doesn't realise this doesn't make sense, knows it doesn't make sense and says it anyway, or doesn't care if it makes sense because she is dependent on her staffers and can't think for herself about this stuff.  It's hard to really say which of these is worse.

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Disclaimer For Extremely Foolish People:  The author does not believe that this article will cause the electoral downfall of the One Nation political party.

"Independent Australia": The Worst Website In Australian Politics?

In an article way back in 2015 I noted that the faux-progressive website "Independent Australia" was independent of "Quality control, consistency, accuracy and editorial skill."  Has it got better since?  Well no, if a recent attempt to soothe reader concerns about the One Nation surge is any guide, it seems to have got even worse.  I've decided to write a whole piece about this trainwreck to explain how abysmal IA's standards are and why nobody should be enabling their output in any way.

The most recent case is an article attributed - I have no idea whether correctly - to a Dr Jason Foster of RMIT.  Even the qualifications of the claimed author are something IA cannot seem to get straight.  The RMIT website states that Foster "holds a PhD in Media and Communication from RMIT, focusing on the representations of history in film and other media."  IA however claimed his PhD covered "media representations, politics and national consciousness", a claim that has since, without acknowledgement of error, been removed.

Before I deal with what is uniquely bad about this article and IA's failed attempt (?) to fix it, I will pick off a number of the low-hanging fruit, many of which are common myths about elections.

1. Pauline Hanson does not have to switch to the House of Representatives to become Prime Minister.  Although it is a convention that Prime Ministers sit in the lower house there is no reason why a disruptor party would need to follow that convention. Indeed I can easily imagine One Nation - if they ever somehow won - keeping her in the Senate as PM and by so doing thumbing their nose at political class spectacles like House of Reps Question Time.   In fact, finding a way to have PM Senator Hanson would be totally on brand if One Nation somehow did win enough seats.  

2. Hanson would not have to run in "her own seat" of Blair (which I believe is no longer where she lives anyway).  A candidate can run for the Reps wherever they like (more's the pity) and there has already been widespread speculation that Hanson could contest Wright or Capricornia.  But even if Hanson did run in Blair, the argument given as to why she would struggle is wrong.  Firstly she would eliminate the LNP candidate and benefit from preference flows from them provided the LNP did not recommend preferences to Labor, and secondly Legalise Cannabis preferences would not flow as even nearly a block to Labor.  (There is considerable overlap between LCP and ON voters and very few LCP voters follow how to vote cards, so preference flows above the 60s and 70s from them are rare).  

3.  If Hanson ran and failed for the Lower House even that would not necessarily stop her becoming PM.  The party could in theory arrange for an incumbent to resign from the Senate then reinstate Hanson via the casual vacancy.  (This said if Hanson couldn't win her pick of seats in Queensland, her party wouldn't be winning the election anyway.)

4.  Nobody cares that Allegra Spender "only beat Liberal candidate Ro Knox by 129 first-preference votes" because we have preferential voting in this country and Spender's actual winning margin was 18,457 (58.3-41.7) after preferences.  Though if Redbridge's polling had been overly focused on Spender's seat in a way that mattered, that would only suggest One Nation were likely to do better nationwide than claimed, not worse.

5. "Nor is Farrer some magical One Nation win — Labor did not even bother to post a candidate." Sheesh, Labor has not got a 2PP over 45% in Farrer in a regular election in its 77 years of existence; if they had run in the by-election they would have embarrassed themselves even more than they did in Fadden and probably not even made the final three.

6. One Nation have not said they want to abolish preferential voting.  Rather, they want to switch from compulsory to optional lower house preferencing.

Where the article really goes beyond even extraordinary levels of clueless clutching at straws is in its attempt to discredit pollsters who have found One Nation to be capable of forming a solid Opposition bench for at least fifteen earth minutes.  Some now edited sections contained these errors (thanks to Leo Puglisi of 6 News for posting screenshots, of course Puglisi knew this was nonsense while IA's journalism PhD apparently did not):

The DemosAU claim was hilarious given that the DemosAU poll having One Nation on 13 seats was in fact from October-November 2025 and published nearly seven months after the election.  That bit's gone and replaced with a correction, but not what any outlet with any class would also include - an apology to the pollster.  

However as concerns the Redbridge claim, it has been replaced with this:

This is not only false, it is worse!  Redbridge did conduct polling of the seats of Wentworth and Parramatta in 2022, but everything else about those polls is wrong.  The polls had a combined sample size of 1735 (who would pay for an issue seat poll with an n of 3000, let alone two?) and not only did they not predict anything about One Nation success at any election, but One Nation was not even listed as a party.  And anyone who clicks on the link can see what the 2022 poll actually is - a commissioned issue poll about LGBTIQ+ issues.  

The 2025 poll the correction has invented doesn't exist! The "poll" that put One Nation on a median of 53 seats and potentially as high as 59 was a Redbridge/Accent MRP model released in May 2026.  And the sample for that MRP was nationwide.   And 6015 is hardly an "only" in sample size terms - it is actually a massive sample - though some connoisseurs believe MRPs ideally should have even 10,000.

It's hilarious that an Independent Australia article accuses the mainstream media of not doing a deep dive when the article itself has merely tried a backflip in the shallows and hit its head on a rock - which is what IA have been doing frequently on polling themes for over a decade now.  This repeats what happened in 2015 when they "corrected" their article only for it to still be wrong, though in that case at least they didn't add new false content.

This article is so bad that it would be charitable to Foster - if he is indeed in even a loose sense the author - to assert that he wrote it using a heavy dose of AI rather than making all these mistakes himself and putting them to print with such disregard for the reputations of pollsters and such inability to read their reports.  But I don't know.  Certainly this sort of mangling of facts and linking to irrelevant sources is something AI has form for, but maybe there are humans who can do this badly too.  It is staggering if a lecturer in anything, let alone journalism, would actually produce an article this bad, with or without AI.  Is it possible the article is misattributed and was actually written by some other Jason Foster who IA merely thinks is the journalism lecturer?  

This article is merely the dirtiest tip of a large iceberg of poll denial and copium I am seeing in the wake of One Nation's recent numbers (because that worked so well with the Voice, didn't it?).  It was way worse than Chris Wallace's Conversation piece the same day which tried to compare recent One Nation polling with the herded 2PP poll values seen before the 2019 election, and that is saying something. (Pollsters all agree that One Nation is going up, but in fact the estimates they are getting for the One Nation primary are slightly more dispersed than random, not much less as with 2PP estimates in 2019, so there simply isn't any herding at the moment.)

In fact, for all the panic following the second post-Budget ON surge, there are valid reasons to be cautious about whether One Nation will keep this form together all the way to the election, or exactly how many seats it will win them if they do.  On the other hand, they could go a lot higher.  (No sympathy here for Bernard Keane who on May 5 declared One Nation's rise had peaked at an aggregated 25% because they had maxed out the angry white male cohort; since his article One Nation's primary vote has gone up in all 17 national polls released by nine different pollsters and they are now on 28%.)  Having too strong a prior in any direction about where all this is going because of bad arguments and wishful thinking is a recipe for disaster.  

Independent Australia has a serious claim to be the very worst website in Australian politics. If anyone supports or enables said website, and they have got this far in this article, I do hope that they will now stop.  

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UPDATE SATURDAY: Gorn!  As of this afternoon the article has been DELETED.

(A feeble nonapology - they should be apologising explicitly to Redbridge and DemosAU for the false slurs against their polling and explaining what steps they have taken to prevent a recurrence.)

Begging For Debunking: A Silly Article Re Stafford Preferences

It was as sure as night follows day, as sure as daylight savings fading the curtains (oh wait) that the Stafford by-election result would see the Queensland right again beating the drum for optional preferences.  On cue we have an op ed by Morgan Begg from the IPA in the Courier-Mail trying to argue that compulsory preferential voting is some kind of aberration that has saved Labor's seat with the aid of obscure leftoids.  Begg's arguments contain a remarkable number of errors, but are also typical of the misguided and poorly debated push to return to full OPV in Queensland.

Begg is probably not responsible for the headline but for starters compulsory preferential voting is hardly an "Absurd Qld voting quirk".  Rather it is the standard form of preferential voting as it exists federally and currently (with very minor differences) in four states - and as it has existed federally, continuously, for 108 years.  (OK between 1984 and 1996 we did have a federal savings provision which allowed for a voter to deliberately exhaust their preferences, but few voters knew about that). 

Pre And Post Budget Federal Poll Roundup

2PP Aggregate 52.4 to Labor vs Coalition (term low, -0.8 since last week)

Shadow-2PP 52.9 to Labor vs One Nation (-0.6 since last week)

Labor would win election"held now" but most likely with only a small majority

This is my usual annual post about federal voting intention polling after the Budget, plus a summary of what's been happening in the months leading up.

The briefest summary of what happened in the months leading up is "not much".  In terms of my Labor vs Coalition two-party preferred aggregate, Labor dipped down to the high 52s in mid-January (off not a lot of polling at the time) but got back above 54 during Coalition leadership tensions in early February.  Since Angus Taylor replaced Sussan Ley Labor's 2PP has bobbed around the 53s with no real evidence of signal.

EMRS: The State Where No Party Has Votes

EMRS Lib 25 (-4) ALP 24 (+1) ON 19 (+5) GRN 14 (-1) IND 16 (+1) others 2 (-2)

Seat estimate off this poll if election "held now" Lib 8-9 ALP 10 ON 8 Grn 4-5 IND 4 others 0

The funniest thing about this week's EMRS poll is that it was taken before.  Before we found out on Friday that, in proof of assurances that TT Line couldn't possibly be insolvent because the government could just keep throwing it money, the embattled shipping company would be flicked a lazy half a billion dollars to keep it afloat.  Or perhaps I should better say, adrift.  Before we found out, also on Friday in federal budget week, that TasInsure, a "state-backed insurance company" floated out of nowhere in the 2025 election campaign in a desperate attempt to talk about anything at all except the stadium, had gone to the great bus mall in the ground and was being refashioned as a watchdog-shaped object.  And perhaps most significantly of all, before whatever lurks in this week's state Budget.

Stafford By-Election: Prospects and Live

Stafford (ALP 5.32%)

Luke Richmond (ALP) vs Fiona Hammond (LNP) and others

Cause of by-election: death of Jimmy Sullivan (ALP/IND)

ALP retain with c. 4.4% swing to LNP

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Monday:  Not much more to see

Casey Briggs has tweeted that he understands there are not more than (and probably less than) 2000 postals to come, so further changes to the current 51.2-48.8 margin will be in tenths of a percent if that.

Sunday: Excuses excuses...

Steven Miles has been quoted offering a bizarre excuse for his party's poor result, claiming it was due to One Nation not running and saying "We will never know what the result would have been if they had run and not directed their supporters to vote for the LNP,".  Stafford is one of One Nation's worst seats in the state, had they run I estimate they would have got about 8%.  Most of their voters would have preferenced the LNP anyway.  Care of the 2017 election we have a window on what happens when One Nation recommends preferences to the LNP in some seats and Labor in others - the flow difference was around 10-12%.  So for an open ticket, half that.  This argument if it works at all isn't worth half a percent, it might be worth a tenth of the swing if that.  In fact not all One Nation voters would have even been aware that their party recommended (not "directed") its voters to vote for the LNP, so probably even less.  And some of those who were aware would not have obeyed.

Miles has also referred to Fiona Hammond's local profile, but that was already present in the baseline since she was the candidate last time.  Indeed her time as a councillor was more recent then.  

Another excuse quoted by The Australian is “Right-of-centre voters, after the deal with One Nation, weren’t left with many alternatives in a field of nine candidates, and so we have seen a splintering of the vote amongst other left-of-centre parties.’’  But in fact there were four right wing candidates (up one from 2024) and the three minor righties between them got a 0.3% swing on the combined One Nation and Family First primary from 2024.  It is true that Labor's primary suffered from the extra competition on the left - but that does not explain half of the primary vote swing against Labor flowing through to 2PP swing as well.  

Farrer By-Election Live

Farrer (Lib vs IND 6.2%, Lib vs ALP 12.9%)

Raissa Butkowski (Lib) vs Michelle Milthorpe (IND), David Farley (ON) and others
Cause of by-election resignation of Sussan Ley (Lib)

CALLED (7:46 pm) Farley (One Nation) gain from Liberal

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Live comments will appear here from 6 pm - once counting gets going from around 7, refresh every 10 minutes or so for latest comments.

Monday 11th: We don't quite know the flows by party yet but what we can track is the proportion of Coalition voters whose votes would need to be switched by a different HTV recommendation for the Coalition parties' decision to preference One Nation to have decided the seat. Currently that number runs at 33.6% (this is Liberal and National combined).  As noted below, while normally it's quite feasible that an HTV decision would carry that much weight, in this case I think probably not.

Although David Farley has obviously won Farrer very easily the mathematical proof that he has done so will require a distribution of preferences meaning he's a fortnight or so from taking his seat.  See here.

The Urban Myth That "Sack Dan Andrews" Was A Labor Front

Does this look like a Labor front to you?

Group ticket voting in Victoria has again been in the news a lot lately - see my latest article about whether abolishing it would assist One Nation.  With this latest discussion has come a resurgence of a longrunning online urban myth concerning the shortlived Sack Dan Andrews party (or more formally Restore Democracy: Sack Dan Andrews Party) in the 2022 Victorian election.  The myth is that this party was set up to harvest the votes of people who hated former Victorian Premier Andrews and channel these votes back to Labor.  The reality is that while there is a disputed claim that Sack Dan Andrews (SDA) was a siphoning attempt of some sort, Labor gained no benefit from it anyway, and it had nothing to do with the party.  This article explores the reality of this short-lived party's preferences and its actual impact on the election in detail.  For those on twitter I also have a shorter version of events on a thread here.

Would Scrapping Group Ticket Voting In Victoria Help One Nation?

On this website I have frequently covered Victoria's ongoing failure to repeal the use of Group Ticket Voting in state Legislative Council elections.  Victoria is now the last state that still has this system, which has been scrapped everywhere else after being gamed by preference-harvesting.  In the current cycle the Electoral Matters committee in an outstanding report recommended the scrapping of Group Ticket Voting way back in July 2024, and the government has still not responded officially to that recommendation.  The clock is ticking in terms of time for the Victorian Electoral Commission to implement the changes required to move to a different system, and the Commission has said the decision must be made by August.  After recent issues involving service delivery by state electoral commissions I suggest the sooner the better.

Last week there was reporting by the Guardian this week that one Labor MP had said current Premier Jacinta Allan "had appeared reluctant to [scrap GTV] as it would benefit One Nation."  Separately I understand that the view that scrapping GTV would benefit One Nation is also espoused by some Labor lower house MPs.  Irrespective of who actually holds that view, this article is to explore this claim.  

The Guardian's article does not say why anyone holding this concern might hold it, and in the absence of any actual claimed mechanism it is not that easy to counter.  However there are at least three well known myths about how Group Ticket Voting is supposedly bad for One Nation in the modern age.  Here they are and here is why they are wrong.