Turns Out Half Of Australia Actually Supports Pauline Hanson’s Key Policy
Australia is split right down the middle on the question of a Muslim ban.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party might have only secured four percent of the vote at this year’s federal election, but it turns out plenty more people agree with one of her most well known policies. A new poll published by The Guardian has found that 49 percent of Australians support a ban on Muslim migration.
No, that’s not a typo. Just under half of all Australians endorse Pauline Hanson’s policy (borrowed from Donald Trump, of course) of banning Muslim migration. 60 percent of Coalition voters support the ban, but so do 40 percent of Labor voters and 34 percent of Greens voters. Yep, one-third of Greens voters support a ban on Muslims, according to this poll.
The poll suggests that it’s not just a fear of terrorism driving these attitudes. While 27 percent of people who support a ban nominated the “threat of terrorism” as a justification, 41 percent said they were concerned that “the Islamic community doesn’t integrate into Australian society.”
The results are pretty similar to polling out of the US, showing 50 percent of Americans support a ban on Muslim migration. So far, no major political party in Australia has embraced Hanson’s policy, though she has attracted high-profile support from Sonia Kruger and some Liberal MPs.
The company who conducted the Australian poll, Essential Media, told The Guardian that they were so surprised by the results they actually “ran a second check to validate them” and “on both cycles the numbers were the same.”
The poll results show that Australia is split right down the middle on a political issue that wasn’t even on the agenda until Hanson popped up again. Luckily we’ve got political leaders willing to stand up to conservatives… right?