The<\/span> leader of Australia’s far-right One Nation party criticised the country’s living standards in a June 2026 speech at the National Press Club, drawing praise from supporters who shared snippets of the remarks online. But one video circulating on social media, in which Senator Pauline Hanson laments children going to school hungry, lacks context. The percentages she mentions do not represent the entire country — they come from a sample of 4,400 people who had sought help from the Salvation Army’s emergency\u00a0services<\/span>.<\/p>\n “Thirty-five percent of parents said their children had gone to school hungry,” Hanson says in a clip<\/a> posted June 18 on Facebook by conservative influencer George Mamalis<\/span>.<\/p>\n “How can we hold our heads up? How can we as members of parliament who were supposed to represent the people of this nation allow that to happen?”<\/p>\n Text over the footage, which accumulated more than 2,200 shares, says: “This is leadership”.<\/p>\n Hanson cites other figures in the video, including 59 percent of parents saying their children had missed school because they could not afford transport costs and 84 percent saying they went to bed early to keep warm<\/span>.<\/p>\n “Just disgraceful. And yet this Albanese Labor government cannot help our own people here but keeps bringing in more into the country and floods this country time and time and time again,”<\/span> Hanson says in the clip, referencing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his ruling Labor Party.<\/p>\n Screenshot of a Facebook post taken on June 24, 2026, with an orange X added by AFP<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n For years a political outsider, Hanson’s One Nation<\/a> surged in 2026 to become the country’s most popular party,\u00a0according to opinion polls<\/a><\/span> (archived\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n The video shared online stems from<\/span> a wide-ranging, nearly hour-long speech<\/a> to Canberra’s National Press Club on June 17. Hanson assailed “radical Islam”, pledged sweeping cuts to government spending and denounced\u00a0multiculturalism<\/a>, calling instead for Australia to be “monocultural” and to “live under one cultural umbrella” (archived\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Hanson also lambasted the Labor government for its immigration policy, which she blamed for the country’s societal woes<\/span>.<\/p>\n Social media users on X<\/a> and TikTok<\/a> also shared<\/a> her speech, praising Hanson and her “big heart” for pointing out the figures on food insecurity.<\/p>\n “This is what Australia needs — a leader who puts Australians and their needs first,” one commenter said.<\/p>\n However, the one-minute video omits the fact that Hanson had earlier<\/a> disclosed in her speech that the figures were from the Salvation Army’s latest Red Shield report with a sample size of 4,400 people (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n And what Hanson did not mention in her speech is that the people surveyed for the report were those who had sought help from the charity — a vulnerable group not representative of the entire Australian population<\/span>.<\/p>\n