Another week, another scandal for Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party
Conspiracy theories, donation scandals and the risk of losing senators have dogged One Nation – and that’s just in the past seven days.
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CONSPIRACIES, donation scandals and the risk of losing senators have dogged One Nation – and that’s just in the past seven days.
Pauline Hanson and her right-wing political party have had a nightmare week with enough problems to bring any other politician down.
But the Teflon Hanson has survived similar incidents and worse, as history has seemingly repeated itself ... over and over again.
Hanson calls PM a ‘fool’ for putting One Nation behind Labor
Hanson ‘sells out’ Qld Nationals, Senators claim
LNP preference pressure builds but party elder urges ‘no deal’
On Thursday Hanson stormed from a press conference without taking questions after delivering a near 20-minute diatribe.
“You have come here baying for my blood and I will not give it to you. I am answerable to the Australian people only and they will have their say at the ballot box,” Hanson declared.
When the week began One Nation members in Western Australia were planning moves to replace Hanson’s one remaining Senator, Peter Georgiou and she’d probably thought the week couldn’t get worse. But on Tuesday morning, international media outlet Al Jazeera dropped a bombshell.
A three-year investigation initially meant to target the NRA became a shocking One Nation expose, shocking in its content and the manner in which it was executed. The hidden camera sting, using a made up Gun Rights Australia lobby group, caught Senator Hanson’s chief of staff James Ashby on tape meeting the NRA and Koch industries and boasting, in a drinking session, that for $20 million in donations “you would own” Australia’s Parliament. Senate candidate Steve Dickson said for that money they could “open any f--king door you need open”.
Dickson went further, saying it would be like “poison” for the rest of the world to look at Australia’s gun control laws.
“If we don’t change things, people are going to be looking at Australia and go ‘Well, it’s OK for them to go down the path of not having guns, it’s OK for them to go down that politically-correct path’,” he says in the secret recordings.
In any other political outfit they would have been sacked. But Hanson, after video also emerged of her seemingly questioning the Port Arthur massacre, declared she stood by the two men and went on to deny she believed the massacre conspiracy. Instead she blamed the media, the Prime Minister, Labor and “Islamist Al Jazeera” as she followed advice given to her staffers from the NRA and went on the offence. It would have been a disastrous week for any other political party but, for Hanson, controversy has never been far away
Hanson was a fish and chips store owner when she was pre-selected to run for the Liberal party in 1995 when she first made headlines, and not without good reason. She was disendorsed, shortly prior to the election, after she made comments that the government was “looking after Aborigines too well”.
Then Opposition leader John Howard was said to be “disgusted” with the remarks while the Liberal Party state director Jim Barron accepted her resignation saying Hanson “apologised unreservedly”.
Former Senator and first indigenous Australian elected to parliament Neville Bonner described her as “uninformed” and “having racist tendencies”.
But by then it was too late. Her name was on the ballot as the Liberal party candidate for the seat of Oxley and it could not be withdrawn. Hanson won with 48 per cent of the primary vote.
From a disendorsed candidate who ran a takeaway shop, she went on to impact the political agenda in Australia for the next 20 years with a maiden speech that lasted 20 minutes.
“I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians,” she said 23 years ago.
“A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united.”
A year later she had set up the political party One Nation, gathering to her advisers John Pasquarelli, David Oldfield and David Ettridge – with all of whom she would have fallings out.
One Nation would hold conventions on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane, which would be attended by as many protesters as there were people inside.
Journalists went on the attack, but it only rallied support for Hanson whose supporters saw her as an “ordinary” woman standing up for them.
Despite this popularity from sections of the community, Hanson was defeated at the 1998 election where she contested the seat of Blair. She failed again in a 2001 Senate election after National Senator Ron Boswell took the fight up to her. (Even today Boswell warns his LNP colleagues not pander to her or make preference deals. )
In 2002 the wheels came right off Hanson’s wagon when she was expelled from her own party – something which can’t happen again since she was declared president for life at last year’s annual general meeting. But from there ,her situation deteriorated. She was jailed for 11 weeks for fraudulently registering One Nation in 1997 and “dishonestly obtaining” $500,000 in electoral funds.
She always maintained her innocence, angrily declaring her conviction was “rubbish, I’m not guilty... it’s a joke”. And Hanson was right. On appeal her conviction was overturned in a unanimous deicision by three judges. Hanson left jail and, for a while, found herself in the political wilderness.
For 13 years she contested election after election, sometimes promising she was done with politics, but always returning.
In 2003 she took a run at the upper house in NSW – ironically running against her former party, One Nation, whose candidate was her now-former Senator Brian Burston. She polled just 1.9 per cent. In early 2004 she declared again she was done with politics. “I’m out of it, I’m finished. It’s over,” she said. But later that year she ran for a Queensland Senate spot and failed.
Then there was a run for the state seat of Beaudesert in 2009 and another crack at the NSW upper house in 2011, before she fell just shy of the mark in 2015 when she took on LNP stalwart Ian Rickuss in Lockyer. Over this time she racked up more than $6 million in electoral funding but has always insisted she never personally profited from this.
But it was a largely under the radar campaign in 2016 which rocketed her and three colleagues into the Australian Senate and back into controversy.
“To all my peers in this place and those from the past, I have two words for you: I’m back –but not alone,” Hanson crowed as she returned to elected Parliament 20 years after her initial entrance.
But it took just minutes for her to again to hit the headlines as she almost echoed her maiden speech in saying “we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims”, despite this group making up little more than 2 per cent of the population.
Since then she has never been far from controversy. She wore a burqa into the Senate and cast it off to make a point, something that attracted a powerful speech from LNP Senator George Brandis condemning her actions. “To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments, is an appalling thing to do and I would ask you to reflect on what you have done,” he said.
There were AEC and police investigations into Victorian millionaire Bill McNee donating a light plane to the party – or to Ashby – which ultimately turned up nothing. Ashby again made news when The Courier-Mail revealed his personal printing company Coastal Signs and Printing had been paid $10,000 from taxpayer coffers for producing printing, communications and business cards for the Hanson. Ashby said there was no conflict as it was all done at cost, so it was a saving for the taxpayer.
Another One Nation staffer, Sean Black, was convicted and jailed on rape charges. Then there were her Senate colleagues, who fell one by one.
Rod Culleton from WA quit in bitter conflict with the partyy shortly prior to being removed from the Senate for ineligibility due to both bankruptcy and a larceny conviction (which was later annulled).
Malcolm Roberts in Queensland, best known for conspiracy theories involving climate change, the UN, NASA and the “privately-owned” US Federal Reserve bank, departed as a result of the dual-citizenship crisis.
He was replaced with Fraser Anning who split from the party within an hour of being sworn in.
Then a bitter dispute grew between Hanson and long-time supporter Brian Burston who defected to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. The antagonism reached crescendo when Burston and Ashby tussled in Parliament House, which saw the Senator smear blood on Hanson’s office door and Ashby being temporarily barred from the building.
Whether this week’s scandals will damage her or the party or serve to galvanise a support base that accepts her conspiracy theories, is yet to be seen. But Hanson is dead right when she says the Australian people will have their say at the ballot box.
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