August 25, 2026 — 5:00amOne of the most striking findings from the latest research into One Nation voters is who their heroes are.Their No.1, as you’d expect, is Pauline Hanson with a favourability rating of 95 per cent. But No.2 is not Barnaby Joyce or Donald Trump or any conventional political figure.One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.Luca MarinoIt’s Ben Roberts-Smith. The war hero who is awaiting trial for committing war crimes. He’s regarded favourably by nearly seven out of 10 of the people who say they intend to vote One Nation.He’s never been on any ballot paper and he’s shown no intention of standing for parliament. So why does this matter?“It tells you a lot about the attitudes of people voting One Nation,” says Bruce Hawker, the Labor Party campaign veteran who led the research.Roberts-Smith’s favourability is more than double that of Liberal leader Angus Taylor. The exact reasons for Roberts-Smith’s appeal are beyond the scope of the project, in which 1014 intending One Nation voters were surveyed online by the polling firm of the former Labor pollster John Utting and commissioned by the Labor-aligned TJ Ryan think tank.Pauline Hanson addresses the Justice for Ben event in Seventeen Mile Rocks in Brisbane on June 7. Cloe ReadBut a reasonable working hypothesis is that One Nation voters identify with the former Special Air Services corporal.They see in him the qualities they’d like to see in themselves. In demographic terms, yes, but beyond that.The research finds that most One Nation voters are Anglo-Aussie men over 50 who hold trade qualifications. That is, white men who make their living from physical performance rather than white-collar work.These One Nation supporters are not in the officer class of civilian life but, like Roberts-Smith, in the non-commissioned officer ranks. Roberts-Smith, incidentally, is 47.“They see in him the qualities they’d like to see in themselves.”But beyond that, they are likely to identify with a tough, patriotic, white guy who does his duty for his country in a struggle against an alien enemy. And feels persecuted for it. Hanson has always cast herself as a victim and spent time in prison for electoral fraud before her conviction was overturned.Nine in 10 One Nation voters say Australia is on the wrong track, primarily because of too much immigration. And their chief beef with immigration is that it’s “changing Australia’s culture and identity too much”.They’re deeply alienated, as the research puts it, they’re unhappier than the general run of the population, and overwhelmingly of the view that politicians are only in it for themselves. And eight in 10 think that “Australia needs a strong leader prepared to break the rules”.This describes Hanson’s disregard for political correctness, as well as her party’s history of regulatory laxity. And, with a civil court having found that Roberts-Smith probably committed war crimes, it would seem to apply to the image of him, too.There are several implications. One is that, as Hawker puts it, the unfolding Roberts-Smith case “will be a polarising moment for Australia”, on par with the Voice referendum.Another is that such voters are broadly anti-system and mostly beyond the reach of the major parties now. Some of the party’s more recent converts are hesitant over Hanson’s extreme views – that there are no good Muslims, for instance, or that abortion access should be restricted.But even after they’d been exposed to such extreme Hanson positions, only 12 per cent of respondents said they might possibly vote for another party, or were unsure. As Hawker says, “One Nation is starting to show signs that it has support as a right-wing populist party rather than a protest movement”.A third is that, while One Nation voters have little regard for Angus Taylor, they complicate Liberal party calculations about replacing him with Andrew Hastie, the former special forces captain who took the witness stand against Ben Roberts-Smith.And, finally, that Ben Roberts-Smith, if he’s exonerated from war crimes charges, could have a promising future in Australian politics. The reordering of Australian politics, it seems, has just begun.Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.From our partners