Rage farming

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:03:29 +1000

Rage is a product. Pauline Hanson has been selling it for thirty years, but she is no longer the only one running the operation. The buyers have got bigger, the money is flowing from further away, and the press is helping them do it.

The playbook

The model is simple. Carrick Ryan can walk you through it in a few minutes. His YouTube clip is well worth watching.

First, dial up the anti-immigration rhetoric and stoke the genuine anxieties of people who feel left behind.

Second, package the resulting public momentum - the rallies, the polling, the voting bloc - as a tradeable political commodity.

Third, sell that commodity to billionaire donors and foreign interest groups in exchange for the funding needed to scale the party, grow your power and execute an agenda that has nothing to do with the people whose anger you harvested.

The voters are the raw material. The donors are the customer.

Ryan is a former federal agent turned political commentator, known for analytical work on security, disinformation and the far right. He is not prone to hyperbole. When he describes this as a deliberate extraction operation rather than a political movement, it is worth paying attention. His warning is direct:

“If you choose to empower Hanson, you need to know that you are voting for an Australia that will look like Trump’s America.”

The same machine, running globally

We have watched the same machine run in the United States. Elon Musk - who at various points has claimed Trump owes his election to him - has turned his money, his platform and his appetite for chaos into global political leverage. He has inserted himself into British politics, taken the side of the fascist AfD in Germany and run a sustained campaign against Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. It is not surprising, then, that One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has pledged to abolish that office. Musk, encouraged by others in the same orbit, will turn X/Twitter on Australian politics. X/Twitter is a cesspit, but it still makes news.

The pattern repeats everywhere you look.

In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer - by most accounts doing a competent job of governing a difficult country - is being quietly undermined by a coordinated social media campaign against his leadership. In Canada, the Alberta separatist movement is being supercharged by social media accounts run out of India, Pakistan and Indonesia, as CBC has documented. Many of the people pushing Alberta independence are not Albertans. They are people in other countries who have decided that a fractured Canada serves their interests.

ABC’s Media Watch laid a lot of this out. Their episode on One Nation included this:

We must dispense with any nostalgia for the politics of the past—social media has done it in, along with the default primacy of the professional press which, ironically, only increases the pressure on it to report the story of politics that politicians like Pauline Hanson would rather we not.

We are being systematically manipulated by actors who are often not who they appear to be and who have no stake in our wellbeing. That should be said plainly and often.

The media is not helping

Back home, thirty years around Parliament have not made Hanson better informed or sharper. Her positions on immigration, Indigenous affairs and climate are exactly where they were in 1996, just louder. The operation has been successful precisely because she does not need to be right. She needs to be angry, and anger is a renewable resource.

The Liberal Party is dissolving, and the press is staging a coronation for a fringe candidate - treating One Nation’s polling as though it represents a serious governing alternative rather than a rage extraction machine dressed up as a party. Clive Palmer outspent every other party combined in 2022 and bought himself a single senator. Expect more of that next time, with money flowing in from more directions and through more proxies than any disclosure regime will catch.

“If it bleeds, it leads.” That’s the old press adage. By tradition the mass media should be writing the obituary of the Liberal Party, because that is what is actually happening. Instead they have skipped that part, set about discrediting Labor, and floated the loony idea that Pauline Hanson will be our next Prime Minister.

The preferred-Prime-Minister polling driving these headlines is nonsense. Australians do not elect a Prime Minister. We elect a local member, and the majority in the lower house decides who governs. “Preferred PM” is a meme dressed up as data, a headline-grab from a desperate press.

You can see the effect in the comment threads. “Albanese will be gone by Christmas, Pauline will be PM.” Clueless. But fire up enough people with anti-government rhetoric and the cluelessness stops being harmless. Brexit was that. So was the rise of Trump and the decline that has followed in the US.

What Australia has going for it

The United States had no institutional defence against a man who simply refused to play by the rules. Courts moved slowly. Norms evaporated. The question is whether Australia is any better equipped. The honest answer is: probably not much.

What we have that the Americans arguably didn’t is a compulsory preferential voting system that structurally disadvantages fringe parties, and a broadly functional public broadcaster. Neither is invulnerable. Both are under sustained attack.

Whether the good sense of Australian voters is enough to see through it remains the question that should be keeping us up at night - not who leads in a poll that decides nothing.

Sources:

Carrick Ryan — Who are One Nation? — YouTube
Facebook accounts from India, Pakistan and Indonesia push Alberta separatism — CBC
Operation One Nation - 8 June 2026 — ABC Media Watch

Rambling Rows

Rage farming

The playbook

The same machine, running globally

The media is not helping

What Australia has going for it