# Capture — how can you tell

- **Claim filed:** “You say, ‘Well, there’s good Muslims out there.’ How can you tell me there are good Muslims?”
- **Who:** Pauline Hanson, Sky News, mid-February 2026 (ISIS-brides discussion)
- **URL:** https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-18/pauline-hanson-partially-apologises-for-muslim-remarks/106357130
- **Date on page:** 18 February 2026
- **Publisher:** ABC News
- **Title:** Pauline Hanson issues partial apology for suggesting there are no 'good' Muslims
- **Captured:** 2026-08-14
- **Method:** saved HTML (`abc-apology-2026-02-18.html`)

## Verbatim (ABC, 18 February 2026)

Sky News, Monday night, return of wives and children of Islamic State militants:

> I've got no time for radical Islam. Their religion concerns me because of what it says in the Koran. They hate Westerners. That's what it's all about.

> You say, 'Well, there's good Muslims out there.' How can you tell me there are good Muslims?

The ABC headline and dek frame this as “suggesting there are no ‘good’ Muslims.” Same page: two days later she told the ABC she **did not believe** there are no “good” Muslims, and named a non-practising Muslim woman who stood for One Nation.

Qualified apology:

> if she “offended anyone out there that doesn't believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a caliphate”

Then: “In general, that is what they want — a world caliphate. And I am not going to apologise.”

On the same ABC interview she used **18,000 people on ASIO’s watchlist** as the reason “we don’t know who these people are.”

## Same quotes, Guardian, 18 February 2026

`guardian-2026-02-18.html`  
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/18/pauline-hanson-comments-australian-muslims-ntwnfb

Chris Kenny, Sky, later that week: would she accept that the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims are “good people”?

> I don’t know that. Chris, can you guarantee it? When we’ve got 18,000 people on Asio watch list, how do I know who these people are?

Matt Canavan heard the slogan, not the question mark: “of all those Australians who are Muslim, there’s no good people among them.”

## The census meter

ABS, *Religious affiliation in Australia* — `abs-religion.html`  
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia

2021 Census: Islam **813,400** people, **3.2%** of Australia. That is a count. It is not a watch list.

## Police, July 2026

ABC, 31 July 2026 — `abc-police-2026-07-31.html`  
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-31/pauline-hanson-one-nation-hate-speech-police/106981544

Police: the February comments **do not meet the threshold** for a charge under the new hate-speech laws. The ABC’s own lede still restates the slogan as “there are no ‘good’ Muslims.”

## What this file does not do

It does not file “Hanson is a racist.” It does not file “there are no radical Islamists.” It files the slide from a question in an ISIS-brides interview to a national slogan that dropped the question mark — and the slide from an ASIO figure she cited to a census of 813,400.