Loving the Stranger

A faith-framed response to Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech, 17 June 2026.

The faith of this country’s churches was born among foreigners. Israel went down to Egypt as a family of migrants and came out a nation of freed slaves, a people who knew from the inside what it was to be the outsider with no land and no kin to shield them. Out of this memory the law gives one command and gives it again and again, more often than almost any other. ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:21, NRSVue). The stranger the Torah keeps returning to is the foreigner who lives and works among you, the person with the least protection and the most to fear. Everyone who first carried this faith had once been a foreigner like them. No one in the story gets to despise the outsider, because every one of them had been the outsider first.

On 17 June 2026, Pauline Hanson asked the country to do the opposite.

At the National Press Club, she gave the fullest account yet of One Nation’s program. The stranger is the problem. The migrant, the Muslim, the person who prays, speaks, or loves differently. Fewer of them, she said, and the country would be more itself. One Nation surged to the front of the polls this year and has since eased back, but it remains the most popular party of the right. This is no voice from the margins. It is a serious bid for how we should live together. It deserves a serious answer.

These articles propose an answer, and a response. It is not contempt for Pauline Hanson. Scripture does not allow us to despise her, and the argument does not need it. Each one takes one of her central claims, tests it against the evidence, and weighs it against the tradition she invokes when she calls this a Judeo-Christian country. Where in our view she is right, and on some things she is, we say so. Where we consider she is wrong, we show why, with the figures and with the word. The aim is not to win. It is to tell the truth about the stranger, because the tradition she claims has already made up its mind about them.

Everyone in this story was once the outsider.

Five claims, and the answer to each.

One. Australia must be one culture to survive. It never was, and Genesis to Revelation never asked it to be.

Two. Migrants caused the housing crisis. The shortfall was built by policy, not by newcomers.

Three. Many languages will break us apart. At Pentecost the Spirit spoke in every tongue at once.

Four. The migrant is a cost. Ruth gleaned in the field and became an ancestor of kings.

Five. Cohesion needs sameness. We are bound by justice, not by uniformity.

And beneath all of them lies one further question. If the stranger is not the threat, who gains when we are taught to fear them?

The face in the mirror is the stranger’s face.

A companion set at Society Ethics Business makes the same case for boards and policymakers, in the language of governance and ethics, with evidence. These articles make it in the language of faith. Same spine, different room. Read whichever speaks to you, or both.

Each article carries its own sources, so every reference is yours to weigh. Behind them all sits Hanson’s own speech, which you can read in full at The Nightly. We quote her plainly, because the case does not need her words twisted to answer them.

Start where the tradition starts, with the stranger we are called to love. She says they are the threat. The witness of scripture, and the evidence of this country, say otherwise.

Where were all the important people?

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Biblical quotation from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue), with Australian English adjustments.