‘A pleasant surprise’: The niche party challenging Pauline Hanson in Qld

Armed with only a small band of volunteers and a Queensland war chest considerably south of $20,000, the Legalise Cannabis Australia party – headquartered at Nimbin’s Hemp Embassy – is not without hope of a spectacular Senate upset.

The upstart micro-party is seeking to snatch the sixth and final Queensland vacancy from right-wing warrior Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party (PHON) has bled votes in its traditional Queensland heartland and suffered an upper-house swing against it of 2.5 percentage points.

Legalise Cannabis Australia have performed well in Queensland.Credit: AP/supplied

By Monday evening, PHON had 7.7 per cent of the primary vote and remained in prime position, but the vagaries of senate preference flows has left the door ajar for lead LCA Senate candidate Bernie Bradley, a 52-year-old criminal defence lawyer from Noosa who, unlike some of his party colleagues, does not even use marijuana at all.

He said his tilt at politics was inspired by almost 30 years’ worth of case studies in the courts, providing an example of one client who was caught growing cannabis and extracting its CBD oil to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

“He was so anxious he couldn’t leave the house [before using the oil],” Bradley said. “He still takes it [legally], but it’s expensive – almost prohibitively so – for something you can grow yourself in the backyard.”

Queensland’s lead senate candidate Legalise Cannabis Australia. Bernie Bradley, said he was inspired to run by his experiences as a defence lawyer.

The party has so far polled about 80,400 – or 6.4 per cent – of Queensland’s first-preference upper-house votes. This is about 23,000 more than Clive Palmer and his United Australia Party, and more than double the vote of former premier Campbell Newman of the Liberal Democrats.

“It’s a pleasant surprise, of course, given we had extremely limited resources,” said Bradley, who described his personal politics as “somewhere between Labor and the Greens”.

“My view is it might tend to reflect that this is no longer the sort of fringe issue that probably once was, and I think a part of that is medicinal cannabis being available in Queensland, which has taken away some of the stigma.”

LCA, formerly known as Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP), has increased its Senate vote across the nation, challenging – and in several instances, beating – PHON and UAP. It has scored primary counts of three percent or more in Queensland, Victoria, NSW, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where it has two members already sitting in the state’s upper-house.

Bradley said his campaign in Queensland consisted mostly of volunteers waving corflutes at busy intersections and train stations. His mate Frank also zip-tied corflutes to a trailer and towed it about 5000 kilometres across the state.

He believed his third position on the Queensland Senate ballot paper and the party’s striking marijuana leaf logo also helped secure votes from a constituency disillusioned with the two major parties and unsure of other micro-parties with benign-sounding names but hiding extreme policies. There is nothing ambiguous about Legalise Cannabis, he said.

“I think it’s close enough that there remains some hope,” he said. “I just don’t know what the other parties might have done in terms of preferences. This could take weeks. My life just goes on.”