Aa
  • Read, Watch, Listen
  • TJI Series
  • Community Action
  • Events
  • Zedi
Follow us and continue the conversation
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Test yourself with the TJI Quiz!

Adjust size of text

Aa

Follow us and continue the conversation

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube

Your saved articles

You haven't saved any articles

What are you looking for?

Original reporting, insightful analysis and diverse views, delivered straight to your inbox

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Your support fuels our mission to inform, entertain and inspire.

The Jewish Independent is bound by the Standards of Practice of the Australian Press Council. If you believe the Standards may have been breached, you may approach The Jewish Independent or make a complaint to the Australian Press Council in writing at www.presscouncil.org.au. The Council may also be contacted on 1800 025 712.

  • Our Story
  • Contact us
  • Our Team
  • Support us
  • Guidelines
  • Pitch your idea
  • Republishing us
  • Community Action
  • Our Awards
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • FaceBook
  • X
  • YouTube
Aboriginal FlagTorres Strait Islanders Flag

The Jewish Independent acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of Country throughout Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and strive to honour their rich history of storytelling in our work and mission.

© The Jewish Independent 2026All Rights Reserved
Website design and development by Your Creative, MelbourneTerms & ConditionsPrivacy Policy
HomeRead, Watch, ListenAustralia
OpinionAustralia

Anger, hatred and conspiracy theories: the rise of One Nation

The distrust of government and culture of grievance that took root during Covid has found a home in Pauline Hanson’s policies, with some ominous signals for Jews
Michael Gawenda
Print this
Pauline Hanson, Leader of One Nation, Addresses National Press Club

One Nation Leader speaks at the National Press Club on June 17, 2026 in Canberra (Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images)

Published: 12 August 2026

Last updated: 12 August 2026

A week ago, I watched Tony Fauci being eviscerated at a US Senate committee hearing, watched him being accused of the most terrible things, as if, for instance, the way he had run the public health response to the Covid epidemic in America amounted to mass murder.

The fury, the contempt of him, was hard to watch. Fauci refused to answer some of the questions and has now been charged with contempt of Congress. This old 85-year-old scientist may end up in jail.

It was hard to watch the way he was rendered speechless by all this hatred and all these accusations, watch as he shrunk further and further down into his chair, as if he wanted to disappear. Tony Fauci, who, at the height of the Covid pandemic, was America’s doctor/scientist who held the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

This Senate Committee hearing was like something out of a Kafka story, because for all the fury and hatred – take a look sometime at the eyes of Senator Rand Paul when he was questioning Fauci – it was impossible to know what crimes Fauci was alleged to have committed that rendered him a mass murderer.

Fauci treated like a criminal

Tony Fauci was a revered scientist before the Covid epidemic. He was in charge of the response to the AIDS virus, a virus that was killing thousands of young men across the developed world and thousands of men and women in Africa and Asia. Now Fauci has become a hated figure in the MAGA movement in America. Robert Kennedy Jr, Trump’s Health Secretary, a man full of conspiracies, is the embodiment of this hatred of Fauci.  

One afternoon, a few days after the Senate Committee hearing, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine by a 93-year-old writer who wrote that America was heading back to the America of her childhood, when infectious diseases – measles, whooping cough, polio – killed many tens of thousands of children and ruined the lives of millions of others.

It made me think about that time when I lived for two months in the Infectious Diseases Hospital in inner suburban Melbourne. The hospital was shut down some years ago, in large part because the infectious diseases that made it necessary – the wards at one time were overflowing with patients – had been controlled or even wiped out by vaccines.

I had some sort of infection which caused my eyes to swell and my throat to swell. One morning, the family friend who practised medicine on his friends but was not a doctor, said I needed to go to this hospital. I think my eldest sister took me there.

I was 14 in 1961. It was not long after oral polio vaccines had become widely available. I think children received the vaccine at school, administered by a nurse. Smallpox had been eradicated by vaccines – I still have a smallpox vaccine scar on my left arm. I don’t think there was a measles, whooping cough or tetanus vaccine back then.

I was put in a small room for a month and given penicillin injections every four hours. When my sisters and my father came to visit, they had to wear gowns and masks. Mostly, I could not see. No one would tell my sisters what infection I had. Perhaps they did not know.

After a month, I was transferred to a large ward. I could see by then. Nurses still wore masks when they came to look after me. The ward was full of iron lungs. Rows of iron lungs. The whooshing sound they made could be heard day and night. Young men and women were inside those iron lungs. When I was allowed out of bed, I would walk down the rows of iron lungs, and I would stop and talk to people.

You had to put a finger on a hole in their throat so that they could talk. Only heads protruded from the lung. They could see me through a mirror above their head. I would talk to my neighbours when the nurses opened the lung to wash the young man or young woman inside twice a day.

Who cares, you might ask. That was a different time, an ancient time. But history does not always remain history, another long-vanished place. Things that you think are in the past can simply be lying dormant. Nothing is so ancient that it is gone forever, that it cannot return, slightly altered, but just as devastating in its effect.

Vaccination rates falling

Vaccination rates of children for the most common infectious diseases – measles, tetanus and whooping cough – have been falling in Australia for three years, so that the rates are now below the level which is required for mass immunity. They have fallen even further in the United States. Outbreaks of measles infections have become commonplace. Children have died.

The iron lung sits there in my mind, a great foreboding on this cold winter morning, as I stand there, at the entrance to Acland Street, St Kilda, on my morning walk. I look down the street past the empty tables outside the cafes and bars. There are few people on the footpaths. On this bitterly cold morning, in every sheltered spot along the street, in the doorways of shops, in the small arcades, lie the homeless people of Acland Street, some of whom have considered this street their home for many years.

Protest against mandatory vaccination in Melbourne, November 27, 2021 (AAP/James Ross)
Protest against mandatory vaccination in Melbourne, November 27, 2021 (AAP/James Ross)

Standing there, I wonder how many of the homeless here and across Melbourne, died of Covid. Some did, I know that because some of the homeless in Acland Street disappeared and never returned. And I remember that day, March 29, 2020, when Dan Andrews announced that Melbourne was to go into lockdown two days later. I walked with my dog Rocky that morning – I think it was on a Saturday – and on Acland Street, the outdoor tables of the cafes were crowded with people who, it seemed to me, were laughing and shouting and drinking and eating as if there was no tomorrow. And in a sense, there was no tomorrow.

They were young, much younger than me.  It struck me then that they were going to be forced into lockdown in the main, to save old people. It was clear even back then that Covid was a threat to old people and a much lesser threat to children and young adults.

The first lockdown lasted 43 days. It changed the lives of most Victorians and most certainly the lives of people who lived in Melbourne. Marvellous Melbourne, once the world’s most liveable city, was a dark-feeling, menacing ghost town.

Anger at lockdowns has not dissipated

Looking back, after the many lockdowns that followed, it is clear to me that Melbourne – and Victoria – has not recovered from the pandemic. Too many Victorians were deeply wounded by the lockdowns. Forced into unbearable lives. Too many went crazy with conspiracy theories that often involved the Jews.

There was great anger and great hatred. And looking back and looking at where we are now, that anger and hatred has not dissipated. It is there in our politics, in the rise of One Nation, in the hatred, the vicious, scary hatred of Dan Andrews, who has become a sort of metaphor for the politicians who destroyed the lives of millions of people for no good reason during the pandemic. Dan Andrews, who was once regarded by many Victorians as a saviour, a literal lifesaver and who won a landslide election, in Victoria in 2020, that nearly wiped out the Liberal Party.

I know, I know, the Victorian government is on the nose.  It has been in power for 12 years. It has been gripped by corruption scandals involving Victorian unions. It has been captured by woke madness in the public service, in semi-government institutions and even in the courts. And it has left us with an eye-watering level of debt.  

All this is true, but none of this accounts for the hatred and the anger that pervades Australian politics and Australian civic life, especially, but not only, in Victoria. It’s not just that many people are angry with the failures of governments – and there have been many – and want to throw them out. It’s the widespread belief that governments are run by secret groups of powerful, evil people who run the world to benefit themselves and their allies at the expense of the lives of ordinary decent Australians.

Covid conspiracy theories abound

At the centre of this hatred and anger lies this worldview: a large number of people have come to believe – or believed from the start – that the Covid pandemic, far from being a serious, unprecedented, threat to humanity, was a fiction created by malign actors – including scientists like Tony Fauci and politicians like Dan Andrews – acting in the interests of shadowy groups of powerful people out to control the world.

The Covid pandemic may be over, but the number of people who feel like their lives were devastated during those pandemic years for no good reason, is not declining. It is growing. It is growing among the people who are turning away from the major political parties and turning instead to One Nation. Pauline Hanson understands how they have suffered and are still suffering at the hands of these evil people, these shadowy controllers of our world. She too has suffered at their hands.

One Nation announced its new Victorian leader a week ago. According to the polls, One Nation is at around 22 per cent support in Victoria, with the state election just a few months away. It is not far behind Labor, which is a few points behind the coalition. One Nation could well hold the balance of power after the election.

So who is the party’s new Victorian leader? His name is Warren Pickering. He grew up in Gippsland and, according to The Age, worked as a bricklayer before serving in the army. His service included a period in the Middle East. He is a self-described conspiracy theorist who believes the Australian government is controlled by a cabal of “foreign globalists”.

More often than not, the term globalist has been used as a euphemism for Jews, and there is significant evidence that there was a rise in Jew-hatred during the pandemic.

He has been opposed to vaccines since 2017 – long before the pandemic – and was heavily involved in the anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination freedom movement. After the coming November election, Pickering could be the leader of a party that could decide the composition of Victoria’s new government.

That’s the state we are in.

You might also like
  • Tame apologises – but with little grace
    Deborah Stone
  • Safety not just security: the last word to the Royal Commission
    Yehoram Ulman
  • At home where we are: Salzberg, The Sound of Music and the value of ‘here’
    Andrew Wirth
logomark.67a07ee3
We believe in the free flow of information

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, by using our Creative Commons licence

You might also like

    Generation Change: Rachel Moshel
    Generation ChangeInterviewArts & Culture

    Rachel Moshel: Creating a space for Jewish art and joy

    Gideon Cohen
    Woman with land and houses behind her
    NewsAustralia

    Australia to increase sanctions against West Bank settlements

    Deborah Stone
    Apple & rotten core Rosh hashanah
    EditorialAustralia

    Facing a new year with the knowledge life can be better

    The Jewish Independent

About the author

Michael Gawenda

Michael Gawenda

Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning more than four decades, Michael has been a political reporter, foreign correspondent in London and Washington, and was editor and editor in chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004. He has won numerous journalism awards including three Walkley awards.

More from the author

OpinionAustralia

Battle of the books: The five books of Michael

FeatureWorld

Strangers connected by the indefinable bond of Jewish peoplehood

OpinionAustralia

Muslim Vote and antisemitism envoy are both artefacts of identity politics

Comments3

  • Avatar of Mark Ian

    Mark Ian21 August at 01:14 am

    Australia and New Zealand had long lockdowns as this contributed to a mortality rate multiple times less for its population than other developed countries with advanced medical systems .
    West Australia which had a shutdown and a border “siege “ had nine Covid deaths in 2020-2021 and zero Covid deaths in
    2021-2022 .
    In the United Kingdom there were 149,000 deaths in 2020-2021 dropping to 31,000 in 2021-2022 as vaccines were rolled out .
    The population of the UK was 67 million one hundred thousand . The Population of Western Australia two million seven hundred thousand .
    The UK is 24 times the population and had 16,555 times the deaths .
    There were also early intervention monoclonal antibodies and an early dose of an antiviral ( which probably. saved Trump when he caught COVID in October 2020 )
    In addition the Morrison
    Liberals gave huge packages of support for the lockdowns such as Jobkeeper and Jobseeker amounting to 213 billion dollars .

  • Avatar of Ian Grinblat

    Ian Grinblat13 August at 09:55 am

    Michael,
    You need to place greater trust in the democratic process even though it often over-corrects before finding stability.
    Fauci was deeply involved in research, banned in the US, into developing super viruses. Now he is a frail old man. The two facts are not incompatible.
    Dan Andrews was dictatorial- to take just one pre-COVID example, voluntary assisted dying. This ‘first among equals’ would not even allow discussion of VAD because if his religious faith, until his own father died in horrible pain. I don’t think that VAD is an obvious good, but I sure as hell see no democrat in Dan Andrews.
    Pauline Hanson cannot deliver. If her party has a balance of power after the election, it will last only until the next election.

  • Avatar of rosie hersch

    rosie hersch13 August at 07:38 am

    God help us if Warren Pickering wins in Victoria. Firstly he is an anti vaxxer so many children will die because their parents will believe him and no immunize their children ( shades of Robert Kennedy USA). Secondly he will be very bad for Jews as he is insinuating in his rhetoric that Jews run the world with his global theories. And immigrants beware- he will be ruthless. It will be a very dark day if he gets to power. Pray he doesn’t. Pray thatPauline Hanson does not have power as she will run this country like Trump runs the USA and we all can see how that is working -not!!!