Why Victoria's Campaigners Are Told to Avoid Personal Attacks on Hanson

Progressive campaigners and union volunteers in Victoria have been told not to personally attack Pauline Hanson or call her a racist before the November state election.

The instruction came in two separate training sessions, one run by Victoria's Trades Hall Council and one by the progressive campaign group GetUp. Activists were asked to hold one-on-one conversations with One Nation supporters and to treat their economic concerns as legitimate. Trainers warned that insults could push those voters closer to One Nation, The Guardian reported.

Trades Hall Council is the peak body, the central organisation, for unions in Victoria. Its senior researcher, Oscar Kaspi-Crutchett, helped lead the union briefings. GetUp held parallel sessions for its own campaigners.

The shift follows GetUp's campaign in the Farrer byelection, a special vote to fill a vacant seat. GetUp spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads that personally attacked Hanson and deputy leader Barnaby Joyce, including ads linking the pair to Donald Trump. The ads had little impact. One Nation won Farrer.

GetUp's reset draws on research by polling company Redbridge, carried out after the Farrer result. The message to campaigners is direct. Character attacks will not work in Victoria.

GetUp also cautioned activists not to lead with attacks on Gina Rinehart over her ties to Hanson. Leading that way, campaigners were told, reads as a standard partisan attack. This is a change in emphasis. After Farrer, GetUp published ads describing Hanson as a "wannabe billionaire flying in mummy Gina's private plane."

Victoria votes in November to elect the next Victorian Parliament. Voters will choose members for both the Upper House, which reviews laws, and the Lower House, which forms government. The Electoral Amendment Act 2026 changed timelines and processes for state elections.

There is fear that Victoria could deliver a hung parliament, where no party wins enough seats to govern alone, with a large bloc of One Nation seats joining with the Coalition, ABC reported.

Jacinta Allan is the Victorian premier. Pollster Simon Welsh has warned that any move to replace Allan before the November poll would be a "disaster", The Conversation reported.

The broader context here is a tactical reassessment after a high-profile loss. Farrer indicated that heavy spending on leader-focused negative advertising can leave One Nation support intact while reinforcing a perception among its voters that progressive opponents are dismissive of their motives. The Redbridge work appears to have given both GetUp and Trades Hall an empirical basis for a persuasion model built around listening, economic grievance and volunteer credibility rather than moral confrontation.

Looking at what this means for November, the test will be discipline across two different organisations. Union and GetUp volunteers will need to sustain individual conversations without reverting to shorthand about racism, Trump or billionaire influence as an opener. National messaging will still seek contrast on wealth and influence, but the guidance suggests that contrast cannot be the entry point. Whether respectful engagement can peel away economically driven support, or simply limit further movement to One Nation in outer-suburban and regional seats, will shape Labor's ability to avoid a parliament in which One Nation holds balance-of-power leverage.