Pauline Hanson tells Liz Truss Britain is worse off than Australia, and we're not far behind

Pauline Hanson has sat down with former British prime minister Liz Truss for a 29 minute interview on The Liz Truss Show, posted to X early on Friday morning under a headline built from her own words: "I love Britain but I'm fighting to stop Australia becoming your country."

Truss asked the One Nation leader which country is in worse shape. She didn't dress it up.

"Oh, Britain. But we're not that far behind you."

Liz Truss lasted 49 days in Downing Street, and she's still fighting the people who ended her

Liz Truss was Britain's shortest serving prime minister. She took office in September 2022, her tax cutting mini budget hit a wall of resistance from the markets and her own party, and she was gone in 49 days. She lost her South West Norfolk seat at the 2024 election and has spent the years since arguing that the economic establishment, not her plan, brought her down.

These days she takes that fight straight to camera through her own show, and she's a driving force behind CPAC Great Britain, the first CPAC conference ever held on British soil. She told Hanson exactly what it's for.

"The reason we're setting up CPAC in Britain is to bring together people who are fed up with Britain's decline, and fed up with the suppression of free speech. People being arrested and jailed for posting on X, which has happened."

Truss named Lucy Connolly, the Northampton mother jailed over a social media post, as a speaker: "We've got one of the people who's been in jail for posting on X, Lucy Connolly. She is going to be speaking at CPAC." Nigel Farage, who quit his Clacton seat this week to force a by election, is also on the bill.

Why Hanson is in London: CPAC Great Britain and a fact finding mission

Hanson flew out on Sunday 5 July with her chief of staff James Ashby to speak at CPAC Great Britain, which runs from 16 to 18 July with tickets selling for up to £10,000 ($14,415), the Australian Financial Review reported. It's her second CPAC speech after Mar-a-Lago in 2025, and this one comes with One Nation topping the national primary vote.

But she told Truss the trip is about more than a conference.

"I've come over here on a fact finding mission, basically, to understand where Britain is at."

What she's found has been grim. She told Truss about a visit to Luton the day before the interview.

"I spoke to one of the fellows there. He said, what do we do? We've lost our town, it's been taken over. And they're all lost, because they don't have faith in the government to do anything about it."

Hanson first visited Britain in 1977 and has family roots in London and Limerick, and she told Truss the country her grandparents came from is disappearing.

"I used to love coming over here. But I'm at a stage now where I don't want to come back here anymore, because it's not the country that I remember from 1977."

She was explicit about what that means for home.

"Because I come back here and I see what's happened, that makes me so strong and so passionate. I'm going to go back and fight for Australia even more, to ensure that we don't become like Britain has."

One person every 59 seconds: the numbers Hanson put to Truss

Hanson told Truss mass migration under the Albanese government is the engine of Australia's decline, and ran through the numbers she's been hammering at home: 1.4 to 1.7 million arrivals in four years, 739,000 in a single year, and a new arrival every 59 seconds.

"Between 2022 and 2023 we brought in 739,000 people. Of that, only 51,605 were skilled migrants. We have a construction problem because we don't have skilled tradies in Australia, and of that, only 1,800 were in the construction industry."

She said the last census recorded 872,000 people who admitted they can't speak English or speak very little, asking "how can people assimilate if they can't speak English?", and restated the monoculture position that's had the press chasing her for weeks: she's opposed multiculturalism since 1996 and hasn't moved.

Her answer is sovereignty. She wants Australia out of the 1951 UN refugee convention, which she called out of date, and out of the Paris Agreement. On people who fly in, destroy their identification and claim asylum, she didn't soften it.

"Go back to your own countries and change it. Don't think you're going to come into these countries and feed off us, and think that you're owed a quality of life which you have not worked for. I'm sorry, I don't care about those people."

She told Truss the numbers are no accident: "They can't be that stupid. Our governments have allowed this to happen. Something's going on, pulling the strings." And the economics don't stack up either: "You can't prop up an economy by bringing migrants into the country."

Truss blames Tony Blair and Keir Starmer's "cabal of human rights lawyers"

Truss's diagnosis of Britain's deportation failure was legal, not practical. She said the Human Rights Act lets lawyers block every removal, and she pointed at the men who built it.

"Bear in mind, Tony Blair was a lawyer. And who worked on the human rights act with him? Keir Starmer. There was a cabal of human rights lawyers in the 1990s in Britain who confected this system."

The pair also compared notes on what Truss calls the blob, the permanent class of officials and ideologues she says really runs Britain. Asked whether Australia has one, Hanson pointed at the crossbench: "We've got some of them sitting on the floor of Parliament. They're called the Greenies."

216,000 public servants and a promised cleanout

Hanson told Truss the federal bureaucracy has blown out to 216,000 public servants, up 50,000 under the current government, and that 80% of new jobs created in Australia have come through government. Her plan if One Nation wins power or the balance of it: "I intend to have a big cleanout."

She put numbers on the savings she's chasing, $30 billion a year from scrapping climate programs and an NDIS she says costs $52 billion a year and was heading for $100 billion by 2032. Truss compared the task to Elon Musk's assault on the American bureaucracy: "We've got a new battle now in the West. We're fighting against a group of people that have infiltrated the system."

Dirt files, shared documents and the Faruqi case still hanging over her

Hanson told Truss the establishment is already coming after her as One Nation rises. She said her parliamentary files were delivered to other government offices for the first time ever, an investigation went nowhere, and the media are digging through her past.

"They're going after staff that worked for me six years ago. They're going after my ex husband from the 1970s. I thought, oh, what are they going to go after today?"

She also raised the court fight over her 2022 tweet telling Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to "piss off back to Pakistan". The Federal Court ruled in November 2024 that the tweet was unlawful racial discrimination and ordered it deleted. Hanson has appealed, and she told Truss she's still waiting on the decision.

"This is what the lefties do. They use lawfare, they use the banking system. Islamophobic, transphobic, all these things. It just never ends. But you let it go over the top of your head, stand up again, and keep going."

Neck and neck with Labor, and a promise to wake Britain up

Hanson gave Truss the state of play at home: One Nation on 29 to 30% of the primary vote, Labor, which won the last election on about 34%, now level with her, and the Coalition collapsed to 17%. The latest Newspoll has One Nation ahead of Labor in Queensland with the Coalition third in every state, and Angus Taylor spent the week warning of an "eternity of pain" under a One Nation government while its leader was filming in London. One News is covering the campaign live on the Stop Labor, Fire the Liar blog.

She ruled out ever joining the Coalition she came from: "I have no intention of forming any coalition with them. I'm not going to come under that umbrella. I want to remain totally independent."

Truss closed by asking whether Hanson can wake Britain up the way she says she's woken Australia. Hanson's answer is the one CPAC Great Britain will get on stage next week.

"I hope I can contribute, because I'm going to shake them and say wake up, before it's too late."