Pauline Hanson: ‘I get a lot of compliments’
IT’S been 22 years since her infamous maiden speech, and now Pauline Hanson has a few choice words for her detractors.
Stellar
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PAULINE Hanson gets straight to the point. As she prepares for her photo shoot with Stellar, she wants to make a few things abundantly clear. For starters, she does not want the make-up artist’s recommended foundation touching her face. It won’t suit her, she insists, and she’d rather use her own. And no, she is not going to be contoured. “I am very fussy with my hair and make-up,” she explains.
As with so much else in her life, the 63-year-old Senator makes no apologies for the opinions she holds, or the choices she makes. “When you get to my age you can be bossy,” she tells Stellar. In the past she has let make-up artists have free rein. “It didn’t suit me. Why waste their time and mine? Of course I know what I want. I haven’t got to this age without knowing what I want.”
Hanson is one of the most recognisable figures in Australia — and one of the most divisive. The flame-haired barmaid-turned-fish-and-chip-shop-owner from Ipswich transformed herself, and the nation’s politics, when she was elected to Federal Parliament in 1996. As the new member for Oxley, in Brisbane’s southwest, she launched into a maiden speech that saw her condemned as a racist. “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians...” she famously pronounced. “They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course I will be called racist, but if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country. A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united.”
Back then, she was an Independent elected in a former Labor stronghold after being disendorsed by the Liberal Party over her comments about Indigenous people and multiculturalism. She lost her seat at the next election two years later, but that was just the start. Since then, she has founded a political party (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation), spent 11 weeks in jail before being exonerated, starred in the inaugural season of Dancing With The Stars and stood unsuccessfully nine times as a candidate in federal and state elections in Queensland and New South Wales. In 2016, she was resurrected, winning a Senate seat in her home state. At that election, One Nation won nearly 10 per cent of the vote in Queensland.
Two decades later and out of the political wilderness, Hanson has no intention of toning down any of the rhetoric. She says she doesn’t care what other people say about her. She has very few friends in Parliament. Even as she walks through the halls of power, she says her fellow politicians don’t even glance her way or bid her a greeting. Once again, she reminds Stellar, she doesn’t care.
Hanson has long been used to it. From her first stint in Canberra in the mid-’90s, her colleagues shunned her. “Even now, the majority of the Greens and Labor Party won’t even say hello when passing,” says Hanson. “Does it worry me? No. It shows the type of people they are.”
Besides, Hanson says she didn’t come back to Canberra to make friends. She believes she is there to work for the people who facilitated her return — the voters.
So who is Pauline Hanson — in her own words? “A very proud Australian,” she replies. “A person who is passionate about my country and my home: Australia. I am a fighter; I won’t give in easily. I stand my ground and I stand on principles and morals. I am prepared to do a hard day’s work. I like honesty and integrity.”
With the wisdom of 22 years in public life to guide her, Hanson says that she would still not change a thing about that controversial maiden speech. In fact, she says, she would include even more of the opinions that garnered global headlines and caused a stir. Initially, the plan was for her to give a speech written by her then principal advisor John Pasquarelli. But the day for delivery kept getting put off and with time, Hanson realised that speech didn’t fully reflect what she felt.
“I woke up one morning and I had all this going through my head and I wrote it on A4 paper by hand and I went into the office,” Hanson recalls. “I called my secretary and I said, ‘Listen to this.’ She actually got emotional. I said, ‘That’s my maiden speech’ and she said, ‘That’s you.’”
Hanson says Pasquarelli questioned why she had written a new speech. But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “John did have input into it, but he didn’t write it.”
When she first started, after being thrown out of the Liberal Party and the uproar caused by her maiden speech, she went to see her father. He was blunt in his assessment: “I don’t know why you opened your mouth. You will never change anything.” She snapped back, “You know, Dad, I am not going to know unless I have a go.” He told her politics was a dirty game. “I didn’t understand what he was talking about,” Hanson says now. “Then I gained the support from the people. The public support was absolutely outstanding. They backed me because they wanted someone to express what their thoughts are.”
She is not polished. Nor is she slick. And she appears to have changed very little since first entering the political fray. When it is suggested that is a deliberate tactic, she tells Stellar, “I won’t be easily led — put it that way.”
Hanson still chooses and buys her own clothes and takes advice from no-one on that front, either. “I get a lot of compliments from everyone. People ask: ‘Who is dressing you?’ I dress myself!” If shop assistants seek to sell her something that doesn’t suit her, she tells them exactly where to go.
Same for those who want to peg her as a racist. “I don’t agree,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I am calling for equality. Criticism is not racism; people need to understand that.”
Her new book Pauline Hanson: In Her Own Words compiles all of her major speeches up to earlier this year; Hanson says that reading the full text of what she has said throughout her career allows people to make up their own minds, minus the whir of media spin.
“I think it’s very important for people to understand who I am, what I want to achieve. Sometimes it is called tough love. If you really care about something and you want to know the answers to it, sometimes you have to be tough. You have to say it the way it is.” She elaborates and asks: “Do you want me to put a spin on it so it makes you feel good? Or do you want someone to say: ‘This is how it is’? Do you want some answers? These people who criticise me don’t know me, they have never spent time with me. They don’t understand me.” And at this point, she says, she is too old to let other people’s opinions bring her down. Her own do the job just fine. “I am my own worst critic, so I am not going to have some Joe Blow criticise me. I can do it myself.”
When Stellar catches up with Hanson, she is in Rockhampton as part of a tour of the region, during a non-sitting week in Canberra. As she moves around the city, Hanson makes time for anybody who stops her and wants to chat. A limousine driver who is waiting to pick up a bride for a wedding makes a beeline for Hanson in a hotel lobby; during their talk, she tells him it was One Nation that finally forced the major parties to change their policies.
Hanson left school in year 10. At 12, she was working as a waitress in her father’s cafe at night. By 17, she’d had her first child and was married. She has had two failed marriages, four children and now five grandchildren. But her family is rarely photographed with her. Nor is her partner, real-estate agent Tony Nyquist. She says they are proud of her, but she doesn’t wish upon themthe type of scrutiny she faces.
Asked to name the highest and lowest points of her life, Hanson answers without hesitation. The high point was getting elected. The low came in 2003, when she was convicted of electoral fraud and sentenced to three years in jail. She served just under three months before the conviction was overturned on appeal.
“It was a harrowing experience,” says Hanson. “It was an injustice. My freedom was taken away from me. I was found guilty of something I never did. It was really hard to take because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong.” After the conviction, she endured a strip search. As she was taken to the watch house to spend her first night in custody, she cried. “Of course I did,” she admits. “It is funny where life takes you. I was very, very down. Very depressed. My whole world fell apart. I couldn’t believe it.”
She says she used her time in jail to help other prisoners. She talks of securing a new trial for a woman on a life sentence; of an Aboriginal woman whom she helped to get housing on her release from jail. Hanson speaks of them with affection. But minutes later she is decrying the fact punishment in our country is too lenient — and that we need to be tougher on criminals, that jail should be harder for them.
Hanson appalled many when, in August last year, she wore a burqa into the Senate for Question Time. She says she’d been thinking about it for about eight months and did it to prove a point about national security and social cohesion. Later that day, she moved her private member’s bill to ban the garment in the whole of Australia.
She says she was shocked by the emotional reaction of then Attorney-General George Brandis, who, to widespread applause, choked back tears as he accused her of ridiculing the Muslim community by donning the garment. Hanson remains steadfast in her belief she did the right thing that day. “Brandis’s answer was really over the top,” she says. “I feel a lot of people are pandering to Muslims in this country... I got a lot of support from the public after that, tremendous [support] whenever this issue was raised.” Indeed, while Hanson was condemned by all sides of politics for her stunt, a poll by the Nine Network’s Today show revealed that 61 per cent of viewers agreed with her.
Hanson is now almost two years into her six-year term as a senator. If her big return to politics had never eventuated, she says, she would likely be living a quiet life on her property. She loves her garden. If and when the time comes to bow out of the public service for good, she muses that she might set up her own fashion design and clothing business. She already knits jumpers, and likes to sew. It is hard not to imagine that she already knows exactly what she would want her first line to look like.
Pauline Hanson: In Her Own Words (Wilkinson Publishing, $29.99) is out on Tuesday.