Joe Hildebrand: Why One Nation politician Steve Dickson really went down

One Nation candidate Steve Dickson survived his trip to the US so how could he be undone by a drunken visit to a strip club?

In the early 1990s the Victorian premier Jeff Kennett was a lightning rod for left-wing hatred.

The hard line Liberal juggernaut was demolishing schools and opening casinos, mowing down homes for motorways and mowing down trees for motor races.

As a young student socialist probably nobody hated him more than I did — indeed when I was an editor of the Melbourne University newspaper I composed an entire editorial of the words “I hate Jeff” written over and over again.

What can I say? Twitter hadn’t been invented yet.

But even in the fog of my contempt I remember him saying one thing that shone out as a beacon of profound truth. Quizzed by a journalist on his virulent unpopularity among much of the electorate, Kennett — who had once been ridiculed as an opposition leader — was sanguine.

In politics it doesn’t matter if people don’t like you, he said. It’s when they don’t respect you that you’ve got real problems.

Sure enough, when Kennett went up for re-election after the most brutal phase of his premiership the much-anticipated backlash to the so-called “Kennett Revolution” never materialised. He was despised but he wasn’t dismissed. He might have been seen as a cold-blooded tyrant but he was no longer seen as a clown.

The motley bunch of misfits who are currently assembled under the One Nation banner would probably be the country’s most formidable political force if they were more aware of such political history, but of course history has never been a strong suit for simplistic populist parties, which is why they always end up becoming it.

It is why, for example, One Nation’s Queensland senate candidate Steve Dickson survived his trip to the US to cut deals with the American gun lobby but was brought undone by a drunken visit to a strip club.

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A screenshot obtained from Nine's A Current Affair that shows One Nation senate candidate Steve Dickson in a US strip club.

As many commentators have observed — including my podcast co-host Sam Dastyari, who resigned his senate seat for far less — the bid by Dickson and Pauline Hanson’s political Rasputin James Ashby to seek multimillion-dollar donations from the National Rifle Association was a far more heinous and dangerous act than Dickson’s slobbering gropefest at one of Washington’s less salubrious nightspots.

But in politics it is better to be bad than to be mad. As atrocious as that was, it was not terribly inconsistent with One Nation’s hard right values, nor its hard right base. In fact, the gun-toting, Trump-voting crowd they hung out with were just like One Nation activists with different accents.

And as it was set up and exposed by a combination of Al-Jazeera and the ABC it was easy for Hanson to spin it as a Muslim-left wing conspiracy to bring her down — a narrative that fit perfectly with her most ardent supporters’ existing world view.

Stills from episode 2 of Al Jazeera's three-year investigation titled 'How to Sell a Massacre'. They track a trip to Washington DC by James Ashby (pictured) and Steve Dickson.

Rodger Muller was hired by Al Jazeera to escort the pair while he played the part of an Australian gun lobby organisation.

As I facetiously remarked at the time, I didn’t think it would cost them a single vote. Or, more specifically, that it would only consolidate One Nation’s rusted-on base while the vast swath of voters disenchanted with the LNP and Labor would simply find another populist vessel in which to place their brick bats. Sure enough, that turned out to be Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

But Dickson’s strip club antics were a different kettle of fish. Not only were they grotesque, they were also pathetic. As embarrassing as One Nation’s other NRA “negotiations” appeared on camera, they at least had a paper-thin fig leaf of rational intent to mask them — a small kernel of compos mentis amid the craziness.

Steve Dickson’s excellent erotic adventure, by contrast, had nothing resembling a rational political thought. It wasn’t deliberate, it was just dribbling. It was sad, pathetic and piss-weak.

And to address another complaint by the other side of politics, this is why it killed off a second tier state leader of a third tier political party when a federal leader of a major political party also got dragged to a US strip club and went on to become prime minister.

Queensland Senator and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson (centre), flanked by party officials James Ashby (left) and Steve Dickson. Picture: Dan Peled

Not only was Kevin Rudd not enraptured by the US gun lobby, not only was he not caught on camera, but there is no shred of evidence nor any allegation that he behaved in the creepy, lecherous and hypocritical way that Dickson did.

Let’s not forget that in her maiden speech Pauline Hanson warned that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians. In Dickson’s strip club video he brags that he personally had been swamped by Asians. That’s not just gross, it’s also way off-message. If a party is going to be racist, the least it can do is be consistent.

And that is the message of this sorry and sordid fiasco, by which I am not just referring to One Nation’s predictable implosion but the whole Australian political landscape.

You can get a long way in politics by being good and you can get a long way by being evil, but it’s hard to get anywhere once you are caught being a fool.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten. Continue the conversation @Joe_Hildebrand

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Why One Nation politician Steve Dickson really went down