When Australian One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson delivered her first National Press Club address on 17 June, she was careful to insist that her quarrel was with ideas, not people.

“I am not opposed to transgender people,” she said. “I am simply saying that a transgender woman should not be allowed into woman’s sport or into a woman’s changing room.”

On immigration, she made a similar move. “We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural,” she argued, adding that “surely opposing that is not racist; it’s common sense.”

Her supporters have said that criticism of what she calls “transgender ideology” means opposition to a set of institutional practices rather than hostility towards transgender people.

And similarly, they argue that questions about migration intake, housing supply and social cohesion are all legitimate subjects of democratic contest. And they are right.

But in the aftermath of the address, I thought it worth asking, with some care, where legitimate disagreement with ideas ends and something else begins.

For that question, I turned to an unlikely pair of guides for help – Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century philosopher of duty and dignity, and Peter Strawson, the twentieth-century Oxford philosopher, who examined how people recognise one another as members of a moral community and helped bring Kant’s insights into closer conversation with the modern world.

Taking the argument seriously

To begin, I tried to take the senator’s arguments at their strongest. Her case on immigration rests on real numbers where net overseas migration to Australia has, in recent years, run at historically high levels while rental vacancies sit near one per cent and about 200,000 households remain on social housing waiting lists.

Her argument about language draws on census figures showing that nearly one in four Australians reported speaking a language other than English at home, and more than 870,000 reported speaking English not well or not at all.

Whether current intake settings are compatible with housing supply, and whether governments do enough to support English acquisition, are genuine policy questions.

Genuine grievances, real questions

So are the questions she raises about fairness in women’s sport, which involve a real conflict of interests and on which thoughtful people, including feminists she cited, disagree.

Nor is she wrong that dissent from prevailing positions on sex and gender has sometimes carried personal or professional costs. That, too, is a civic problem worth acknowledging.

None of this can simply be waved away as prejudice.

Kant, however, advises us to judge an argument by the principle embodied in its language and proposed actions, not simply by the speaker’s stated intentions. He called the underlying principle of an action its maxim.

Kant offered several ways of testing such a principle. One asks whether we could will it as a universal law. Another requires us to treat every person as an end, never merely as a means.

Applying Kant’s tests

We could apply those tests to the language of the Press Club address. Hanson did not confine herself to arguing that sporting codes should adopt particular eligibility rules.

She declared that “this transgender ideology is infecting all of society,” describing it as a “militant force” that “must be confronted,” and likened the movement to “militant Islam,” and concluded that “this whole subversive transgender insurgency must be dismantled.”

“Australians should continue to disagree as vigorously as the argument warrants. But disagreement remains democratic only while each person retains the standing of a fellow citizen rather than becoming a symbol of contamination or threat.”

Ideas are commonly described metaphorically as infectious, but when the language of infection is combined with that of insurgency and dismantlement, the ideology in question is treated as a hostile force operating through institutions and people and is something to be defeated, rather than a proposition to be rebutted.

At that point, the distinction between condemning an ideology and casting suspicion on those associated with it becomes less clear.

Such language can cast the people associated with the movement as potential threats to society who must be neutralised, rather than as fellow citizens whose claims can be contested.

Hanson’s disclaimer that she is not opposed to transgender people sits uneasily beside the maxim her imagery appears to enact.

Migrants and Muslim Australians

The same applies to her treatment of migrants and Muslim Australians. It is one thing to argue that immigration intake should fall while housing catches up, or that English-language support should expand.

But it is another thing to declare that Australia must be “monocultural,” that all Australians “must live under the one cultural umbrella,” and that migration should be restricted from whole regions on the basis of the extremism of some.

It’s a similar pattern, where a policy claim is made about intake levels numbers or government capacity, becomes an argument about the cultural legitimacy of categories of people.

Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative holds that we should “use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

When people are turned into symbols of threat for political purposes, they risk being used as a means to achieve some further end.

And here, Kant’s universalisability test exposes another inconsistency. Could Hanson accept, as a universal practice, the practice of describing political movements in the register she employs?

Her own movement has been labelled as hateful and divisive by opponents, and she objects, with feeling, that the media may scrutinise her party but has no licence to delegitimise it. That objection is sound.

But it is sound as a universal principle, or not at all. A speaker who claims for her own movement the standing of a legitimate participant in democratic contest, while describing another movement as an infection to be dismantled, appears to rely on a principle she could not apply universally.

Scapegoating is, in this sense, parasitic in that it claims the protections of argument while denying its targets the standing of legitimate participants.

Strawson and moral community

In Peter Strawson’s essay “Freedom and Resentment,” he argues that moral life is constituted by the reactive attitudes: gratitude, resentment, indignation, forgiveness and trust.

These attitudes are how we hold one another responsible, and their reach defines the boundaries of the moral community.

Crucially, Strawson observed that we suspend them when we stop regarding someone as a fellow participant in moral life and begin treating them as an object to be managed or controlled.

Rhetoric of infection and insurgency can produce that shift, moving whole categories of people from the realm of persons, with whom one argues, into the realm of problems about which things need to be done.

The grievance behind One Nation

Strawson also illuminates the grievance from which One Nation draws much of its strength. Hanson told the Press Club that many Australians are frightened to speak, that they feel demonised and condescended to, and that civil debate is paralysed.

Within limits, this describes something real, and it describes it in Strawsonian terms. To feel that one’s concerns cannot be voiced without contempt is to feel excluded from the moral conversation, and people who feel excluded may follow whoever promises to readmit them.

The problem of the Press Club speech is that it answers one form of exclusion with another. A healthy polity keeps all citizens within the moral conversation, from transgender people to the parent with doubts about school programs, to recent migrants, to young people priced out of housing.

Each is entitled to recognition, capable of accountability and worthy of being addressed as a fellow citizen, rather than assigned the status of an infection.

Disagreement versus scapegoating

Here, then, is a workable line between disagreement and scapegoating, and it does not depend on agreeing with either side.

Legitimate disagreement identifies a policy, practice or institution and proposes a remedy proportionate to it: an eligibility rule, a curriculum change, a lower migration intake or a funding decision.

Scapegoating on the other hand attributes a diffuse social problem to a category of people, characterises them through images of disease, invasion or subversion, and proposes remedies directed at their levels of participation rather than conduct.

It becomes about dismantling a movement, removing officials or requiring a population to cease being culturally “other.”

On this test, a parent who questions a school program, for example, or a senator who wants to lower migration are both engaged in valid forms of democratic contest.

But a speech that describes a movement associated with fellow citizens as an infection and pledges to dismantle it has arguably crossed to the other side of the line, whatever disclaimers accompany it.

Institutions that hold the line

Kant argued that political institutions matter because human beings combine rational capacities with selfish inclinations. Law, procedural fairness and equal protection exist to hold our conduct to standards our impulses will not reliably meet.

The Senate’s censure procedures, the Australian Human Rights Commission (whose leadership the senator has pledged to remove) and the ordinary machinery of accountable government are, in this sense, Kantian instruments because they require political actors to recognise in practice the equal standing that rhetoric may deny.

Public opinion is also less easily divided into hostile camps than political rhetoric aimed at dividing them sometimes suggests. Research published in 2025 found that four in five Australians supported protecting LGBT+ people from discrimination, even as many specific policy questions remained contested.

One question for the coming political season is whether public institutions will continue to distinguish between vigorous disagreement and rhetoric that treats groups of citizens as threats.

Australians should continue to disagree with anyone about anything as vigorously as they believe the argument warrants. But disagreement remains democratic only while each person at the table retains the standing of a fellow citizen deserving of respectful engagement rather than becoming a symbol of contamination or threat.

A politics of dignity is not a refusal to argue, but the condition under which argument remains possible.

• Dr Tom Keating is a Melbourne-based writer and social researcher. His writing is concerned with public policy.
• First published in Eureka Street. Republished with permission.