Senator Pauline Hanson has described domestic violence as "wrong" but a "two-way street" during an appearance on Brisbane radio station 4BC, drawing immediate condemnation from advocates and public figures including Brittany Higgins.

Speaking on the 4BC Mornings program hosted by Gary Hardgrave, Hanson said: "It is wrong but it's also a two-way street. I'm not saying that it's just men, women can lose their cool as well." She also told listeners that women being abused "shouldn't put up with it" and "if these women are getting abused by men out there, then don't put up with it" (The Guardian).

Hanson disclosed during the same interview that she had been in an abusive second marriage and subsequently raised four children as a single mother, briefly relying on welfare payments (4BC Facebook).

Brittany Higgins, now executive director of the Vida Fund, responded on social media. She wrote: "'Mutual abuse', 'two way street', 'just leave' — normalising this victim blaming rhetoric in relation to domestic violence when 38 Australian women have already been lost to femicide is atrocious" (The Guardian).

Tarang Chawla, whose sister Nikita was murdered by her partner in 2015, called Hanson's remarks "terrible advice." The Women's and Girls' Emergency Centre went further, branding the comments "vile and shameful," with chief executive Nicole Yade saying they reflected a "victim-blaming narrative" (The Guardian).

The backlash was covered across major outlets on July 22, 2026, including by The Guardian in its live news blog, the Sydney Morning Herald, The New Daily, and Mamamia (SMH; The New Daily; Mamamia; The Guardian Live Blog).

This is not Hanson's first foray into the domestic violence policy space. In 2019, she secured a Senate inquiry into the family court system, during which she claimed women were fabricating family violence complaints to retain custody of their children (The Guardian). The One Nation policy apparatus has maintained a consistent thematic line across state divisions. One Nation WA's issues page lists "Domestic Violence" alongside gender ideology, migration and water as key policy areas, and hosts a page titled "Domestic Violence — Time to Heal" asserting that "the vast majority of men abhor domestic violence" (One Nation WA). The Victorian division has published content under the heading "Why Male Victims of Domestic Violence Need Recognition and Support" (One Nation VIC). The national website, in a January 2026 article opposing Labor's hate speech laws, referenced domestic violence courts and the claim that "no evidence is needed to prove someone is in fear" (One Nation). In Queensland, One Nation candidate for Bundamba Kelvin Brown lists domestic violence and youth crime among his stated policy focuses (One Nation QLD).

The framing Hanson deployed on 4BC rests on three familiar claims: that abuse is "mutual," that male and female perpetrators are equally common, and that women should "just leave." Frontline services and researchers have spent years working to knock these down. The "two-way street" formulation collapses a statistical reality — that domestic violence fatalities are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women — into a false equivalence. The "just leave" advice ignores the well-documented danger period around separation, which is when the risk of lethal violence frequently escalates.

Hanson's personal disclosure of her own abusive marriage complicates the picture. It is the kind of biographical detail that lends authenticity to a policy position — a lived-experience credential. But advocates like Yade and Chawla argue that personal experience does not license the spread of frameworks that, in their assessment, make the work of keeping women alive harder.

The broader context here is the pattern. Hanson's 2019 family court inquiry traded on the same underlying logic: that the system is being gamed by women making false claims, and that men are being unfairly marginalised. The 4BC remarks sit squarely in that tradition. They are not a gaffe or a misspeak. They are a consistent, long-held position, delivered on friendly radio, timed to land in a news cycle where the femicide toll is a live political issue.