Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON) claimed it would drop the PH part of its name last October. A lot has happened to the party since, but not that. Investigations editor Ross Jones reports.
BACK IN OCTOBER, Pauline Hanson claimed her name would be dropped from that of her party: Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON).
It was all over the media, Channel Nine News, Sky, ABC — the lot!
Back then, Barnaby was about to defect to One Nation and the name change was seen to reflect the glistening horizons the party was ready to embrace.
'Pauline Hanson rebrands party to “One Nation”, stripping her name from brand amid Barnaby Joyce rumours', PHON’s website trumpeted:
'With this announcement, Senator Pauline Hanson is once again reminding the country that One Nation stands stronger than ever: one voice, one people, one nation.'
Although the major news outlets picked up the story and ran with it, none asked when the name change would happen.
And at the time of writing, mid-February 2026, it still hadn't. The AEC still lists the party name as 'Pauline Hanson’s One Nation'.
One Nation is listed as the registered abbreviation, but that’s the abbreviation – an 'also known as' – not the party name.
The machinations of PHON are deep, so who knows why they haven’t got around to formalising the introduction to society of a party capable of power?
It’s not as if the AEC is slow. Maybe not the fastest department in Australia, but they could certainly effect a formal name change within three months of application.
Changing a political party’s name is a simple process.
Three officers of the party sign an AEC form and remit $500 to the AEC. The AEC then publishes newspaper notices advising the public of the proposed change and inviting any objections to be sent to it.
If no objections are received within 30 days of ads being published, the name change gets the green light.
The whole process is transparent and is posted in pretty much real time to the AEC website.
The only thing that causes a prolonged AEC delay is if it is waiting on the return of electoral writs. The last AEC election was 3 May 2025 and, as the former Coalition will attest, that’s well over. Writs are in.
It is evident PHON has not lodged a name change application with the AEC since the theatre of October’s media announcement.
PHON has offered no explanation for its failure to submit the name-change, but ineptitude is a strong contender.
CORY, BARNABY AND OTHER ONE NEURONS
It’s a strong contender for other stuff, too, like not declaring gifts or hiring Cory Bernadi as #1 on its Legislative Council ticket for the March 2026 South Australian Election.
Bernadi is a hand grenade with its pin half out.
On the off-chance Bernadi secures a seat in the South Australian Legislative Council at the 2026 State Election, it would be a brave bet that he’d see out his full term as a PHON member.
For starters, he has a track record of biting the hand that fed him.
In February 2017, just seven months after he was re-elected as a Liberal senator, Cory gave his mates the finger, quit the party and sat on the crossbench as the only member of his just-formed Australian Conservatives.
Needless to say, his mates weren’t happy.
Christopher Pyne called on him to resign, for goodness sake!
Barnaby Joyce was dark, reported the ABC:
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said volunteers who worked for Senator Bernardi during the election campaign should be upset with his decision to leave the party.
All the people who are in the Liberal Party who handed out his how-to-vote cards will ring him up and say, “I handed out for the Liberal Party, I didn't hand out for the Cory Bernardi party,” he said. “It's not your ticket to really hand over, it's sort of ours.”
When asked what advice he had for Senator Bernardi, Mr Joyce said he should “pray, pray hard”.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Barnaby knows all about praying:
'He has been a devout Catholic all his life, though he confesses he wasn't at all pleased when his parents packed him off to the Jesuits at Riverview.'
Despite his avowed devout Catholicism, Barnaby reckons the Vatican is a shithole.
In a puff piece video with fellow "raconteur" Karl Stefanovic, where both go for the authentic hayseed look and neither succeeds, Barnaby said:
And I don’t care if you are coming from the Vatican, Central America, central Africa, or the middle of Europe, if you’re gonna turn up and ... cause problems ... then you stay where you are.
If you pine for where you came from and say, "I really want Australia to be just like the sh*thole I came from", you go back there.
While he maintains the view that most of the world is an agglomeration of shitholes, Joyce seems to have overcome his disgust for Bernadi and his treachery.
So PHON now boasts two turncoats as its main drawcards.
Naturally, Pauline's party – whatever it's called – is apparently on the rise in the polls. Makes perfect sense, but only in one nation.
Ross Jones is the author of the two-year investigation, Ashbygate: the plot to destroy Australia's Speaker, published by IA in 2015 and available HERE.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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