By George, a high-profile recruit no replacement for Hanson herself

A quarter-century since the launch of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, its eponymous leader says she still has at least six years’ fight left.

Maybe more.

“Don’t write me off yet,” the populist right-wing firebrand told a room of journalists in Brisbane on Wednesday.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson announces the party’s Senate candidates for the 2022 federal election, George Christensen (right) and Raj Guruswamy.  Credit: Matt Dennien

Amid an at-times combative press conference, Hanson and her senate-mate Malcolm Roberts sparred with media over questions about the party’s latest disaffected Liberal National Party recruit: George Christensen.

The announcement, that Christensen would occupy the essentially unwinnable third place on the party’s ticket, was the headline-setter among a grab-bag of Hanson’s key talking points targeting what she said was a growing number of Queensland voters fed up with the major parties.

Opposition to government vaccine mandates and building more coal-fired power stations were there. As were calls to reduce immigration numbers until homelessness and unemployment were addressed, cost of living pressures, Labor’s stance on China, family courts, and what Christensen himself described as the “religion” of climate change.

Hanson — who is up for re-election on May 21 — also claimed credit for the federal government’s pre-election budget decision to reduce the fuel excise for six months. “It was only because of One Nation,” she said.

The livestream run by Hanson’s long-term jack-of-all-trades staffer James Ashby for her more than 430,000 Facebook followers often cut to a second camera aimed at journalists — something no other party does — whom Roberts would also ask for their names.

Several commenters on the stream refer to one of the reporters by name. During questioning of Christensen about previous trips to the Philippines being subject to an Australian Federal Police probe, Ashby used a still camera to take photographs of another.

Hanson bristled at the suggestion Christensen’s chances of an upper house seat, which ABC election analyst Anthony Green said would require the party to at least double its highest-ever statewide vote, were largely non-existent.

Christensen conceded the fact himself, before Hanson commandeered the podium. “If the Libs could win three [Senate] seats at the last election, don’t underestimate the support of One Nation,” she said.

Christensen elaborated, saying it was important to get people like Hanson into the Senate as “sentinels” with a potential incoming Labor government, and that about 30 per cent of people in his Mackay-based electorate supported minor parties at the 2019 poll.

“If the only job that I do is helping Pauline get back in there in the Senate and maybe bringing a friend along with her in [fellow One Nation Senate candidate] Raj Guruswamy, then that’s the job done,” he said.

The right wing of Queensland’s six-seat Senate contest is packed with high-profile figures including Hanson, former LNP premier and Liberal Democrats hopeful Campbell Newman, and billionaire businessman and United Australia Party chairman Clive Palmer.

On Wednesday Hanson also announced the party would run candidates in all 151 lower house seats.

Christensen, who has been positioning himself for a future as a political player outside parliament, also denied he was making the run for the $105,000 resettlement allowance he would gain if he were to lose. He told News Corp earlier on Wednesday he was already “highly likely” to get the taxpayer-funded payout.

He also told a fellow conservative online media figure he was approached to consider One Nation late last year by Hanson. But he told the press conference an earlier shift would have broken a contract with voters who elected an LNP MP — though the party was now “beyond repair”.

But he harboured no hard feelings for his former LNP colleagues, many of whom he said he considered friends. Including Matt Canavan, who labelled him “cowardly” on breakfast television. “We’ll work it out between two blokes,” Christensen said.

Queensland Labor Senator Murray Watt said the move was also about the public funding One Nation would get if Christensen lifted the party’s vote. “And you pay,” he wrote on Twitter, addressing all and sundry.

At one stage, after issuing a direct plea down the lens of Ashby’s camera to her followers for their vote, Hanson was asked whether she saw Christensen as a potential successor to lead the party when she left politics.

Hanson gave an emphatic no.

“I’m not focusing on anyone else at the moment to take over the leadership of this party until I find that I am not capable of leading it any more,” she said.

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.