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.)
