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.