Pauline Hanson's Luton warning: what Tommy Robinson showed her is on its way to Australia

Pauline Hanson walked through Luton this week, the English town Tommy Robinson calls the roughest in Britain, and came home with a warning she's been repeating for almost 30 years. What's happened there, she says, is already on its way here.

The One Nation leader spent ten days in the United Kingdom and Europe on what she called a fact finding mission. The centrepiece was a walking tour of Robinson's hometown and a near hour long podcast with the British activist, filmed for his own channel. Standing on a Luton street, Hanson didn't hide what she made of it.

"I'm just gobsmacked, because I wouldn't think that I was in England. I definitely don't want Australia to become like this. This is not Great Britain to me, and that's why I'm going to protect Australia."

Hanson said that on camera during the tour. It's the through line of the whole trip, and of her career: watch where a country ends up, then decide whether you want to follow it.

What Tommy Robinson showed Pauline Hanson in Luton

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, grew up in Luton and walked Hanson through it. He's told the same story for years. He was born there in 1982 when the town had one mosque, and says it now has more than 40. He pointed out a spot where he says an extremist group once ran a weekly street stall, recruiting in the open. Some locals stopped to take selfies with him. Others confronted him, one telling him he wasn't wanted and calling him racist. Staff at an Islamic centre the pair visited declined to be filmed or to answer questions.

Robinson has a criminal record of his own, including jail time for contempt of court, and that history is exactly why sitting down with him carries a risk for any mainstream politician. Hanson did it anyway.

The grooming gang crimes behind the warning are a matter of public record

Robinson built his profile on Britain's grooming gangs scandal, and the hard facts of that scandal aren't in dispute. In Rotherham alone, an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay found that about 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. The victims were mostly white, working class girls. The report found the perpetrators were predominantly men of Pakistani heritage.

Authorities looked away for fear of being called racist

The most damning part isn't the crime, it's the cover up. Jay's inquiry found staff were nervous about identifying the ethnicity of the offenders for fear of being labelled racist. A separate five year investigation by the police watchdog found officers had ignored the abuse for fear of inflaming racial tensions. One complainant said he was told by an officer that the town "would erupt" if it became known that South Asian men were abusing underage girls.

Baroness Casey found the word "Pakistani" tippexed out of a case file

In June 2025, a national audit led by Baroness Louise Casey found the institutional failure was still there. The ethnicity of offenders went unrecorded in two thirds of cases, and in one file Casey found the word "Pakistani" had been tippexed out. then prime minister Keir Starmer, who'd spent months resisting calls for a full national inquiry, reversed himself within days and ordered one.

Robinson's charge is that none of this was an accident. He argues councils and police simply surrender to a community that votes as a bloc, and that Britain's Labour Party worked out it could hold these towns by looking the other way. That's his claim. The official record of concealment, now three inquiries deep, is not.

Pauline Hanson traces it home to a Labor prime minister

In the podcast, Hanson drew the line straight back to Canberra. She said Australia's immigration troubles began in 1973, when the Whitlam Labor government removed the last of the White Australia policy, and argued that post war European migrants had assimilated in a way she says later arrivals have not.

"They opened up and got rid of the White Australian Policy, then they started bringing in the different migrants. We had a lot of people come out after the Second World War. Italians, Germans, Polish, and these people, but they integrated into the system."

The politics of that are pointed. It was a Labor government that began dismantling the old system, and it's a Labor government running the record migration intake of recent years. Hanson's argument is that both ends of the problem wear the same colours.

The NDIS claim Labor won't go near

Hanson went further, claiming some migrant communities come to Australia to access welfare and to "rip off" the National Disability Insurance Scheme, though she conceded some Australians rort it too.

"It is quite known that in the Muslim streets, you've got quite a lot on that street who are on the NDIS scheme."

That's Hanson's claim, not a finding, and it lands on a scheme Labor built and now can't seem to control, one costing taxpayers north of $40 billion a year. She also said Sharia law was operating in Australia, with some men taking multiple wives while drawing welfare, and that an opposition leader had told her nothing could be done about it.

Karl Stefanovic was sacked for less

Hanson knew the danger of being seen with Robinson, because she'd just watched it play out. Karl Stefanovic lost a 21 year career at Channel 9 after interviewing Robinson on his own podcast, an episode that was scrubbed offline within a day and which Hanson's team reposted in protest at what they called censorship. Stefanovic later fired back at Anthony Albanese over it. Hanson's chief of staff James Ashby said Channel 7's Spotlight program had organised the Robinson meeting; Seven sources dispute that.

Thirty years of saying it, and the polls are moving her way

None of this is new ground for Hanson. She ran a fish and chip shop in Ipswich before she ran for anything. She won the Queensland seat of Oxley in 1996 and used her first speech in Parliament to warn about immigration and to say ordinary Australians were being talked over. She was jailed in 2003 over an electoral fraud charge that was later quashed on appeal. She built One Nation, lost control of it, rebuilt it, and outlasted almost everyone who wrote her off.

Now the establishment is edging back toward her. One Nation has been climbing in the polls. At a conservative conference in London, former British prime minister Liz Truss told delegates they might be looking at "a future Australian prime minister." Tony Abbott, who helped bring the case that once sent Hanson to jail, is a man she now describes as a friend. And she's floated her daughter Lee, who narrowly missed a Tasmanian Senate seat, as a possible successor, while insisting she doesn't believe in nepotism and that Lee would have to earn it.

Hanson's case comes down to one line. Britain saw the warning signs and looked away for 20 years. She says Australia is being handed the same choice now, with a lot less time to get it right.