Seventeen minutes into Pauline Hanson’s first address to the National Press Club, a yellow banner slowly unfurled behind the stage.

“I opposed a pay rise for workers while I took a $100,000 pay rise for myself,” it read, alongside an image of her wearing eight-bit sunglasses – a staple of online “thug life” memes.

The crowd gasped. Security moved quickly. The poster was removed and Hanson continued, with little more than a wry grin and a shake of the head.

For Paul Ferris, the banner was never the central point.

Amid the lampooning, blacklisting and condemnation since, the GetUp acting chief executive believes Australia is making the same mistake that reshaped politics across Europe and the United States: underestimating populism until it is too late.

Ferris returned to Australia last year after more than a decade working on left-wing campaigns in Sweden, including for the Swedish Greens and the Reform Society, convinced that Australia was not immune to the forces reshaping Europe.

“This isn’t an Australian phenomenon,” Ferris says. “You only need to look at recent elections in the US; you only need to look at what’s happening in the UK; you only need to have spent some time, as I have, looking at what’s been happening politically in Europe for a number of decades now to realise that this is real, and this isn’t going away anytime soon.”

His diagnosis is that Australia, and much of the mainstream media, has treated Hanson and One Nation as a circus act rather than a serious political force.

That Press Club “stunt”, he says, had method and strategy.

“Our research is pretty clear that, in particular, on Pauline Hanson’s record on workers’ rights and industrial relations, when some of her newest and softest supporters see that record, they really don’t like what they see,” he says. A police investigation into the incident means he’s hamstrung about what he can say.

“If you sort of look past the noise of the coverage and the noise of the discussion about GetUp specifically, there is a powerful message there, which did reach millions of people who are not going in and closely examining the parliamentary voting record of politicians and parties.”

The stunt has re-energised GetUp’s activist base. More than $1 million in donations has flowed in since, its highest monthly total since 2022, while it added 1500 new monthly donors — the highest growth in more than a decade. It attracted more than 10 million views across social media channels.

That belief now underpins GetUp’s biggest strategic shift in years.

Research commissioned after the Farrer by-election, where GetUp spent $600,000 on an anti-Hanson message to no avail, found 48 per cent of One Nation voters had settled on their vote in the first weeks of the campaign, before GetUp had run a single advertisement.

For Ferris, the finding confirmed something he had already come to believe.

“I think we’ve passed the era where an election is won during the course of an election campaign itself,” he says. “It is about the ground that’s laid in the years leading up to an election.”

Instead of concentrating spending during six-week campaigns, GetUp wants to spend the next two years prosecuting One Nation’s parliamentary record on wages, healthcare, cost of living and workers’ rights.

“The question at this point isn’t whether or not to engage with One Nation,” Ferris says. “It’s what that work looks like.”

Whether that strategy succeeds may determine more than GetUp’s own future.

Barnaby Joyce, the star One Nation recruit, has ridiculed and mocked the organisation’s tactics and missteps for years. He called them “dopey” for wasting resources targeting conservative MPs without luck. When they announced they’d fight the Farrer by-election, he could barely hide his delight.

“No one takes GetUp seriously as being, sort of, a discerning, balanced view,” Joyce said at the time. “When they hear GetUp, they go ‘here goes a whole heap of bile’.”

After the Press Club protest, he went further, asking what if the banner had been a bomb?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the interruption as “counter-productive”, adding politicians should be free to make a speech without stunts.

Former Labor campaign strategist and MP David Feeney was even more critical. In a discussion on the Socially Democratic podcast, he called GetUp a “bunch of amateurs” who are “no use” to the progressive movement.

“This is a bunch of lefties sitting on a couch trying to justify their existence so that some idiot continues to send them $20 a month,” he said. Feeney said the stunt had generated sympathy for Hanson. But his co-host Jessie McCrone, a long-time senior aide to former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, disagreed.

She says: “There would have been a debate in GetUp whether they go with a ‘you’re a racist, Pauline’ message and I frankly think that it’s good they went with the economic one.” She says it was “elegantly done” and “not some Trot with half her head shaved and, like, a nose ring, storming the stage to do it.”

For much of the past two decades, GetUp has become one of Australia’s most influential progressive campaigning organisations, mobilising supporters on issues from the Iraq war, climate policy and marriage equality to refugee rights.

GetUp’s fortunes shifted after 2019, when it threw enormous resources into defeating Coalition MPs while campaigning against the proposed Adani coal mine. Scott Morrison’s surprise election victory triggered a reckoning.

Donations fell sharply, staff numbers shrank, leadership changed and organisations such as Climate 200 eclipsed its influence.

According to GetUp’s latest corporate filings, reported by The Australian last month, donations dropped to $4.1 million in 2024-25, down from almost $6 million the previous year and well below the $12.4 million raised before the 2019 election.

Ferris says it’s a critical moment for the organisation’s future and he rejects the suggestion that silence is a viable alternative.

“We expect to lose as often as we win,” he says. “But … the alternative of being silent and not holding One Nation to account doesn’t feel like an option at this point.”

Ferris, who will head back to Europe next year, remains unrepentant. He says the organisation is confronting one of the defining political questions facing democracies across the Western world: how do you challenge a populist movement without strengthening it?

He says progressive politics has been slow to recognise that campaigning has changed.

When One Nation announced it had raised millions of dollars, some questioned whether the figures were believable, including Albanese.

“I didn’t doubt for a moment that those fundraising numbers were real when they started rolling in,” he says. “I think it was short-sighted, clearly short-sighted, of people, including the prime minister, who questioned that and didn’t believe that the momentum is real.”

For Ferris, dismissing One Nation’s momentum is precisely the mistake many European political parties made with populist movements.

“People are struggling,” he says. “People are fed up. People are losing faith in the major parties because their standard of living is going backwards because they can’t afford to buy a home.”

He says GetUp’s strategy is built on the belief that those frustrations are real, but many One Nation supporters have only a limited understanding of the party’s parliamentary record.

He says factual contrasts, rather than ideological attacks, are the most persuasive messages.

Ferris has hired new campaign staff, launched a “Fightback Fund” targeting One Nation, expanded its digital operation and recruited former journalist David Sharaz, the partner of Brittany Higgins, to help reshape its campaigning and media strategy.

The appointment has attracted media criticism and Sharaz has been permanently banned from the Press Club after the incident, but Ferris rejects the idea that he has to defend his hire.

“David’s just one of about 10 people who’ve joined the GetUp team over the last six to nine months,” he says. “I hired him because I think he’s good at what he does, and his values align with GetUp, from my point of view.”

At the same time, Ferris says the organisation will target a “disappointing” Labor government and continue campaigning on issues including freedom of information reform, gambling reform and media regulation.

His critics say GetUp’s ways risk becoming the perfect foil for the very movements they seek to stop. Tony Barry, a former Liberal strategist and director of the RedBridge Group, says in an attention economy, it’s never been more important for campaigners to properly understand why voters with opposing views hold those positions.

“If you can diagnose the problem correctly, you almost have the solution,” he says. “In recent campaigns, GetUp has made the mistake of ‘insider and outsider’ framings, which often fails to build a bigger coalition of voters.” The Press Club stunt only helped to reinforce that insider bias that One Nation voters typically shared, he says.

Ferris says the Victorian election, where GetUp plans to campaign strongly, may put that theory to the test.

“There’s the scenario of One Nation being the party that wins the largest number of seats in the Victorian state election,” he says, “in the sort of progressive bastion of this country”.

“I think at that point anyone who hasn’t already connected the dots and realises that this is real is suddenly at that point not going to be able to sustain that illusion any longer.”

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Rob Harris is the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect via email.