Opinion: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation starts to implode

FIRST it was Rod Culleton in the west, now a Queensland candidate has bowed out before the state race even began. Watching the One Nation circus over the next few months should be highly entertaining.

WATCHING One Nation at the moment is like watching a cross-continental clown show.

In the West we have former One Nation Senator Rod Culleton battling to stave off bankruptcy in courtroom scenes which yesterday saw two former business partners carted off in a paddy wagon.

Closer to home the last notes of the fanfare which accompanied the announcement of 36 candidates who will contest the next Queensland election had barely faded away before the first of their number was forced to resign over inappropriate Tweets.

Former Currumbin candidate Andy Semple. PIC: Annette Dew

This is, of course, a team (though we use that term loosely) of political hopefuls who were “very closely vetted” in the preselection process.

Apparently though in One Nation vetting don’t actually include checking the social media feeds of aspiring candidates — an exercise which doesn’t exactly require a degree in forensic science.

In the case of (now former) One Nation candidate for Currumbin, Andy Semple, a five minute trawl through his Twitter feed would have unearthed a trove of material that many people would view as pushing the envelope of political incorrectness a bit too far.

In fact pick a topic guaranteed to get your average Right Wing Nut Job frothing with outrage — burkas, socialism, political correctness, Donald Trump, wind power, LGBTI issues, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, guns, vegans and the ABC, the latter of which he described on Twitter as “a bunch of Charlie Uniform November Tangos” — and Semple pretty much had it covered.

For example LGBT, at least according to a photo of a T-shirt Semple Tweeted with the addendum “Now that’s a LGBT cause I can get behind. Queue [sic] Pink Mafia Outrage in 3, 2, 1 ...”, stands for liberty, guns, beer and tits.

According to One Nation national secretary Jim Savage, “I became aware last night that he had tweeted something that we considered inappropriate for the standards One Nation likes to set.”

“I was the man who interviewed this gentleman and it got past me … I’ll take a kick in the backside for that.”

Watching this circus stagger about, sore backsides and all, over the next few months should be highly entertaining. Pass the popcorn.

EARLIER: And then there were three. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation could not even make it six months past the federal election before starting to tear itself apart.

Over the weekend she lost West Australian senator Rod Culleton, saying that “[he] is a pain in my backside — I am glad to see the back of him.”

“He is ...” she said, “ ... ego driven and he loves the media,” a character assessment that Hanson, a breakfast television regular and former competitor on Dancing With the Stars, is probably qualified to make.

For his part Culleton — who is wrestling with the High Court at the moment over questions about his eligibility to sit in Parliament — said he was equally happy to be shot of One Nation, lamenting “personal attacks and undermining, un-Australian behaviour towards myself and my team”.

Just in case this hadn’t spiralled far enough into People’s Front of Judea territory, at the same time Hanson is also at war with what she describes as a “rogue” West Australian branch of One Nation which she has referred to the Federal Police: “They’re a couple of ratbags, they are a breakaway, rogue group.”

Meanwhile in Queensland the official, not rogue, One Nation party has unveiled 36 “very closely” vetted candidates for the upcoming state election — which Hanson says could be held as early as February 2017.

As you might imagine this field of aspirants to the paid political class is a fairly eclectic bunch spanning all manner of professions and with the usual bunch of gripes about Islam, multiculturalism, banks, political correctness, the “left”, climate conspiracies and gay marriage.

We have former Katter’s Australian Party candidate Shan Ju Lin, who originally heralds from Taiwan, but is enough of a minority in the candidate list that One Nation voters can rest easy about their party being “swamped by Asians”.

She should be an interesting fit for One Nation. While her view that “the [Chinese Communist Party] and ISIS are Satan on earth” would seem to tick the right boxes, she is also president of the World Harmony Society, which lists one of its objectives as being to “promote universal harmony through multiculturalism”.

Let’s see how that goes.

There’s even a former candidate for ultra-right party Rise Up Australia, whose founder, Danny Nalliah, parted company with Family First some years back after making derogatory statements about minority groups, and later went on to blame the deadly Black Saturday bushfires on Victoria’s decision to decriminalise abortion.

Then we have a Donald Trump-supporting candidate for Condamine who rails about schools neglecting the basics of reading, writing and mathematics in favour of “Political Proper Gander”.

Perhaps she has a point here.

And we sincerely hope — at least for sheer entertainment’s sake — that the selection of stockbroker and budding thriller novelist Andy Semple as candidate for Currumbin is not a glitch, given he tweeted on Sunday night that “I’m stoked to be formerly endorsed as the #PHON candidate for Currumbin. Together we’ll make Queensland awesome again!”

Will trust here that “formally” got lost or fell prey to the spellcheck gremlins in the excitement of the moment, so that Semple can have a suitable platform from which to share his sometimes colourful and meme-enhanced views on burkas, socialism, political correctness, Donald Trump, wind power, LGBTI issues, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, guns, vegans and the ABC, the latter of which he described on Twitter as “a bunch of Charlie Uniform November Tangos”.

And for the record, just in case you thought Senator Malcolm “NASA cooked the books” Roberts was the only card-carrying conspiracy theorist in One Nation ranks, according to Semple “The ppl who need to wear tinfoil hats are the deniers of #Agenda 21”.

Keeping this lot united and on message during an election campaign — let alone working as a cohesive party unit in parliament if Queensland decides to go all 1998-shaped at the next election — should prove an interesting exercise.

As Hanson put it yesterday: “A lot of candidates who applied we haven’t accepted them as candidates. We are not the only political party (and) we will not be the last that has problems with candidates in parliament.”

Equally challenging will be the task of negotiating the passage of legislation with whatever One Nation bloc might find its way into State Parliament at the next election, especially given Hanson has indicated One Nation might seek Cabinet positions in return for supporting a minority government.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk — who must wake up every morning ruing her too smart by half move to reintroduce compulsory preferential voting — has categorically ruled out any deals with One Nation.

The LNP, meanwhile, has been more acrobatic with its principles, with party president Gary Spence indicating it would likely place Labor and the Greens last on how to vote cards. That leaves the very real prospect, if current polls are to be believed, of a minority LNP government relying on support of a disparate collection of far-right MPs elected on the back of the Hanson personality cult.

I do hope Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls takes a suitably rejuvenating Christmas break. 2017 could be a very long year.

Paul Syvret is assistant editor at The Courier-Mail.