The key distinction is not simply whether a party attacks elites. Many parties do that. The question is whether the party claims to speak for a single authentic people whose will is being blocked by corrupt elites, outsiders, courts, bureaucrats, media, corporations, or international bodies.

One Nation and the populist structure

One Nation fits the classic structure of right-wing populism because its political message is built around a binary: ordinary Australians versus a detached ruling class. In this framing, the political, media, corporate, academic, and bureaucratic elites are not merely wrong; they are portrayed as having betrayed the national community.

This is why phrases like “forgotten Australians” or “ordinary Australians” matter. They are not just campaign slogans. They imply that there is a real national people whose voice has been suppressed by a managerial class that governs through migration policy, multicultural bureaucracy, international treaties, corporate lobbying, and social change.

Nativism and the protected in-group

Right-wing populism usually adds a second layer: nativism. The “people” are not defined as a broad civic population made up of many communities. They are defined through a narrower national-cultural identity. That is where One Nation’s long-running focus on immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism, Islam, India, globalism, and foreign ownership becomes important.

In One Nation’s worldview, national sovereignty is not just about borders or laws. It is about protecting a culturally recognisable Australia from elites who, in this telling, allowed the country to be diluted, sold off, or made subordinate to outside interests.

Why the Greens are usually classified differently

The Greens also criticise elites, especially fossil fuel companies, property interests, banks, media monopolies, and major-party donors. But that does not automatically make them populist in the same sense. Their core model of society is different.

The Greens are therefore better understood as a progressive, ecological, social-democratic, and institutional reform party. They can use anti-elite rhetoric, and at times they can sound populist when attacking corporate power. But their ideology does not usually rest on a single, exclusive national people whose will must override pluralism, courts, treaty obligations, expert bodies, or minority protections.

Not Allies but ideological friendship

Pauline Hanson and the Chinese Communist Party are not natural allies and there is no indication that Beijing would agree with One Nation’s immigration politics. The point is more specific: modern PRC ideology places heavy emphasis on sovereignty, national revival, civilisational confidence, social order, and the recovery of a people’s cultural inheritance after a period of humiliation and foreign pressure.

That is where the overlap sits. Populism, at its strongest, is not only anger at elites. It is also the resurfacing of a people’s cultural memory: the claim that ordinary citizens have been cut off from their own inheritance by globalised elites, bureaucrats, corporations, universities, media institutions, and foreign pressure. The People’s Republic has built much of its own legitimacy around a related story of national revival, cultural continuity, and resistance to outside domination.

For that reason, Beijing might not treat a Hanson prime minister simply as an anti-China figure. It may judge her by behaviour more than rhetoric. If a Hanson government criticised China less than Liberal or Labor governments, avoided moral lectures about China’s internal system, and concentrated mainly on governing Australia — borders, cost of living, energy, manufacturing, migration, and national sovereignty — Chinese officials would have a strong incentive to engage her pragmatically.

The focused point is this: Hanson-style populism could become easier for Beijing to deal with if it turned inward toward Australian cultural restoration and practical national governance, rather than outward toward constant criticism of the Chinese government.