Pauline Hanson on the ‘bully’ PM, her love life and why she’ll never get the Covid jab
In an explosive interview Pauline Hanson has blown the lid on her political alliances, revealed why she’ll never back down on her Covid-19 stance, and given new details about the special man in her life.
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Pauline Hanson fixes me with that flinty stare and digs in.
“I will make the decision what goes in my body,” she says.
“I won’t be told by anyone else that I have to have this vaccination. I will take the risk.”
It is not the message health authorities want the public to hear from a federal politician. But Hanson has been dog whistling her way through Australia’s public discourse for 25 years now and not even a global pandemic is going to make her come to heel.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Pfizer or AstraZeneca, she’s not having a Covid-19 jab. She’s not keen on masks, either, and only wears one at airports. Hers has a golliwog motif.
As for state border shutdowns due to Covid-19 outbreaks, they are “over the top”.
“Those people who are vulnerable, then you go and lock yourself away,” she says. “You don’t lock up the majority of people.”
She admits most Queenslanders felt differently in the lead-up to last year’s election, which is one reason Pauline Hanson’s One Nation polled so poorly.
“Queenslanders wanted to be kept safe,” she says. Does the populist politician wish she’d read the people better?
“No, I’ve made my statement; I don’t change my point of view.”
And that’s Hanson in a nutshell. She hasn’t softened over the years, she says, and is “very strongly opinionated”.
Changing her mind is not easy. Many have tried since the right-wing Hanson hit Australia’s political landscape with a win in the 1996 federal election. But she is resolute.
On an inquiry into the past and ongoing injustices against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: “I called it years ago an Aboriginal industry and it’s still an Aboriginal industry,” she says.
On man-made climate change: “Not to the extent that they carry on and say it’s man-made climate change, I don’t believe that.”
On the media: “My life with media has been one of hell.”
It hasn’t been easy for the media, either.
I covered the early days of One Nation and the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. I was there when One Nation had its stunning 11-seat Queensland election win in 1998 and covered Hanson’s unsuccessful campaign to stay in federal parliament three months later; a lurching, chaotic affair with half-baked policies and little detail run by the political novice and the two men who launched the first incarnation of One Nation with her, David Oldfield and David Ettridge. Those two are long gone from Hanson’s orbit, the first of many former loyalists to fall from her favour.
The media butted heads with Hanson and One Nation back then as it tried to hold the campaign and policies – remember the flat-rate 2 per cent Easytax? – to the same standards as other parties. But that was missing the point.
Hanson was something new; a true populist, the anti-politician, who had tapped into the deep-seated concerns and biases of those who felt left behind. Her power was not in policy but highlighting faults, perceived or real, in “the system”. She was the lightning rod for dissent long before former US president, Donald Trump.
Hanson’s been written off many times.
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She’s been booted out of her own party, jailed, released on appeal, and lost more elections than she’s won. But in 2016, with a campaign calling for royal commissions into Islam, climate science and the banking sector, she snagged a seat in the Senate for the first time, bringing three others with her in the double dissolution election.
Two of those Senators, WA’s Rod Culleton and NSW’s Brian Burston have gone after disputes with Hanson, while another elected in 2017, Queenslander Fraser Anning, once a close Hanson friend, only lasted a morning in the One Nation Senate team before turning Independent. One Nation has seen a lot of division.
But Hanson remains. “David Oldfield, Ettridge, Burston, Fraser, the whole lot of them, Culleton, where are they now?” she says.
“They’ve walked away. I never have.”
STRONG VIEWS
It’s Hanson’s 67th birthday when we meet at her Scenic Rim property called Serendipity. It’s also the start of National Reconciliation Week.
She’s not too fussed about either.
Her birthday “is just another day” and she is not swayed by reinvigorated calls for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, part of the consensus-driven 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.
“They’ve got a voice in parliament,” she says, citing a handful of Indigenous parliamentarians. “They’re a voice for the Aboriginal people.”
Unprompted, she adds: “There’s about 750,000, 800,000 who actually identify as Aboriginal. Whether they’re actually Aboriginal, that’s another thing.”
It’s an echo of the letter to the Queensland Times that catapulted Hanson on to the national stage in 1996. She was the fish and chip shop owner from Ipswich, the one-time, short-term local councillor who’d won Liberal Party preselection to run in the “safe” Labor seat of Oxley.
She wrote of how governments “shower” Aboriginals with money, facilities and opportunities “no matter how minute the indigenous blood is that flows through their veins and that is what is causing racism”.
Hanson was labelled racist and the Queensland Liberals apologised. Hanson did not.
As the media spotlight got hotter, the Liberal Party disendorsed her. The ballot papers had been printed, though, so Hanson ran as an Independent with the Liberal Party by her name. She won the seat with the biggest swing in the nation and a juggernaut was launched.
The racist label followed Hanson, bolstered by her maiden speech in which she said, “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians”.
“I challenge anyone to say anything that I’ve said that is racist and define the word racist to me,” she says at a follow-up interview.
“It’s that you believe your race superior to another. Questioning or debating an issue is not racism.”
Australia is not a racist country, she says, dismissing the recent ABC Australia Talks survey which found 76 per cent of respondents believed there was a lot of racism in Australia.
“Not at all,” she says, reflecting the views of polled One Nation voters who were far less likely to agree with the proposition.
If any One Nation members – the number of which she will not disclose – were shown to be racist, she’d get rid of them. “They’re not welcome in the party.”
But people with far-right racist views do come to listen to her speak. Hanson addressed a rally held by the anti-Islam group Reclaim Australia in 2015, despite some in the crowd sporting swastikas. She has no regrets.
“To talk at a rally and talk about Australian values and what I stand for is totally different to standing before someone who, one or two in the crowd might wear an emblem of that type,” she says.
Such tortured language and curious logic is a hallmark of Hanson’s style.
Her first adviser, John Pasquarelli, the man who identified the raw power of Hansonism, described her delivery as “poorly constructed, barely fluent and convoluted in the extreme”.
Pasquarelli did try to get her media training back in 1996. She went once.
“Why change me?” she says. “It’s worked. This is who I am.”
We’re sitting in the loungeroom of her comfortable home, a ranch-style place with wide verandas, gardens she tends herself and a pool that is part of her exercise regimen. There’s a large naive portrait of her on the wall; she’s dressed in white, surrounded by insets of Parliament House, an Aborigine standing on one leg, and a castle with a “1” in the middle.
She’s in vibrant red in another large photograph taken around the time she was on the TV show Dancing with the Stars in 2004. How’d she go? “Runner-up,” she says. “Bec Cartwright won. Thirty years younger than me.”
Another reality TV star, the one who became US president, Donald Trump, is someone Hanson admires. “I think he was great for the US,” she says.
She does not believe Trump incited the Capitol Hill riots nor lost the election. “No, I don’t,” she says.
“What I’m hearing, they’re doing an investigation into that about the watermarks on the voting paper and I think corruption does happen. I think it happens here and I think it happens over in America.” The Republican-led watermark investigation is occurring in one Arizona county.
On the Australian political scene, Hanson nominates Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, as someone she respects.
“Peter Dutton will be a future PM of this country,” she says.
She’s not as keen on the incumbent, labelling Scott Morrison “a bully”.
“My personal relationship with Scott Morrison is not very good at all,” she says.
“I think he’s become arrogant; I think he’s a bully.”
She likes Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, but says he’s not PM material.
“As people say, Two-way Albo. I don’t think he’s decisive.”
Michael McCormack, the former National Party leader, is a nice fellow but weak and she likes the party’s new leader Barnaby Joyce but “is not happy with him”. “I’ve been doing a lot of what the Nats should have been doing.”
It frustrates her, she says, that “weak, gutless politicians” are too tied to their political masters and parties to make change. Asked what she’s learned about politics over the past 25 years, she reprises the story of how her late father, Jack Seccombe, had told her when she got thrown out of the Liberal Party that she shouldn’t have spoken out because she’d never change anything.
“I was very naive,” she says. “So, I suppose it’s been a challenge in a lot of ways (but) I think you can make a difference. And I think I have made a difference.”
LIGHTS, CAMERA...
A camera and lighting are set up behind Hanson’s lounge, her makeshift studio enabling her to disseminate her views to whoever wants to hear them.
Nowadays, she uses social media extensively, claiming the mainstream media doesn’t want to give her a platform.
She left a regular spot on Channel 7 in 2019 after Sunrise host, David Koch, asked if she felt complicit in the Christchurch massacre, suggesting right-wing white extremists were “egged on” by One Nation’s immigration and Islamic policies. Channel 9’s Today program dumped her last year after she called residents in the Melbourne Covid-19 lockdown tower drug addicts who should have learned English before coming to Australia. She boycotts the ABC but is regularly on News Corp’s Sky News.
She remains steadfast on her hard line on immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, nominating speaking out on these issues as the biggest change she has affected in the Australian political landscape.
She claims, with reason, that former Prime Minister, John Howard, changed his policies on immigration and Aboriginal affairs because of her. “I believe I gave him the courage because of the public support I had to actually deal with immigration,” she says.
She does not bend when it comes to the Murugappans, the Tamil family seeking asylum who until last week had been in detention on Christmas Island since late 2019 after being taken from their home in Biloela in March 2018.
“I know they’ve got a lot of support from the community … but there is a process,” Hanson says. “Unless you follow that process, that’s why we had these 50,000 boatpeople who wanted to come here to Australia and you can’t have it. You’ve got to set strong boundaries.”
She hasn’t followed the case closely, arguing her job as a Queensland Senator is to represent Australian citizens and permanent residents. The two girls were born in Australia.
When I probe further, Hanson says, “I think I’ve given you your answer”.
Ten days after our interview, news breaks that now four-year-old Tharnicaa Murugappan had contracted pneumonia and a blood infection, leading to renewed protests over the family’s detention. The family has been reunited in Perth, with the parents and oldest girl issued with three-month bridging visas while Tharnicaa receives treatment and legal proceedings continue.
Hanson has been back in Parliament five years now, her longest stint in Canberra.
She says she is not just humoured by her colleagues for her vote but has their respect. The travel to Canberra is tiring, “But when you get outcomes, that’s the satisfaction I receive.”
What’s the best outcome she’s had since her return?
“I was able to get funding for a little girl to have some treatment here in Australia which saved her life,” she says, adding six other children have since had the treatment.
“There’s a lot of other things that I have achieved but to give life back to so many young children ...”
Some of the other things are her part in convincing former PM, Malcolm Turnbull, to override a plan to take over scores of grazing properties in central Queensland’s Shoalwater Bay area as part of a defence expansion.
And she claims credit for getting through a mandatory code of conduct for the sugar industry which she says the then Nationals leader, Barnaby Joyce, had failed to act on for 18 months.
She also rates her successful, controversial push for a family law inquiry, of which she was deputy chair. “I was instrumental in getting more … registrars into the court system,” she says.
Labor and the Greens opposed the inquiry, saying there had been other inquiries with other recommendations that needed to be acted on. They also objected to Hanson’s comments that mothers lied about domestic violence to disadvantage fathers in custody battles. She maintains, despite claims to the contrary by domestic violence prevention advocates, that the number of false allegations is “quite high”.
She wants people who make false allegations prosecuted.
Under parliamentary privilege in 2019, Hanson disclosed that the ex-wife of one of her sons had taken out a domestic violence order against him and had alleged he had sexually abused his son. Hanson said it was false and he was not charged.
“I’m not in parliament for my own son and his things,” she says. “I’m representing a lot of parents who support my view and are grateful I’m prepared to speak out on their behalf.”
Hanson also helped the government pass its corporate tax cuts for businesses with a turnover of up to $50m. She rejected uncapping the $50m limit.
But One Nation abstained from a vote on the $158bn personal tax cuts that was passed in 2019 with the support of Senate crossbenchers, Jacqui Lambie and two Centre Alliance senators. Commentators argued Hanson had been sidelined and was outmanoeuvred by Lambie, who voted for the cuts in return for the scrubbing of Tasmania’s $157m public housing debt.
“It’s called negotiation,” Hanson says.
“They go to whoever they think they’ll get the votes first and then they’ll go and negotiate with others … that’s why they bought her vote with that $150m deal to Tasmania.”
Later, I get a call from James Ashby, Hanson’s chief-of-staff, who was present at the second interview and had requested, and received, the recording of the first.
He wants to clear up what Hanson has achieved for Queensland. It would be “the easiest, simplest” thing for One Nation to get money for Queensland out of the government in exchange for its vote, he says.
Instead, Hanson and fellow senator, Malcolm Roberts, concentrate on improving legislation, which saves the country money.
“She’s not interested in how much money you’re going to spend on Queensland but how we can improve it in other ways,” he says.
Late last week in the lead-up to the passing of controversial superannuation bills, Hanson circulated an amendment which would have benefitted high income earners over 67. Labor accused Hanson - who earns $211,000 and a 15.4 per cent super contribution – of betraying her “battlers” and trying to give herself a pay rise. The amendment was withdrawn.
FAMILY TIES
Photographs line the mantlepiece above Hanson’s fireplace; her late mother, Nora Seccombe, a group shot of family and friends done up in their finery on a cruise, and one of her with her partner’s late father.
She smiles when I say I haven’t heard much about her partner.
“You won’t be hearing about him either; we’re not going down that path.”
He is Tony Nyquist, a former property developer and real estate agent from NSW.
“I’ve kept him very secret,” she says of their 12-year relationship. “I can keep them longer than a couple of years,” she jokes.
There’s another photo of Hanson in Vanuatu in 2010 with son, Steven, from her first marriage to Walter Zagorski and her daughter and son, Lee and Adam, from her subsequent marriage to Mark Hanson. Her oldest son, Tony Zagorski, is not there. Hanson has no contact with him but will not explain the rift.
The split has occurred since November 2003 when the two Zagorski boys wrapped their arms around their mother protectively as she walked out of prison after her three-year sentence was quashed.
She’d been jailed 11 weeks earlier, along with Ettridge, for fraudulently representing the status of One Nation membership to secure the state registration of the party and, as a result, falsely obtaining two election reimbursement cheques from the Queensland Electoral Commission totalling $498,637. She’d already been kicked out of One Nation in 2002 after bitter internal battles.
Hanson maintains her jailing was a political stitch-up, blaming the then federal minister, Tony Abbott, for setting up a trust fund to pay for legal action against Hanson and One Nation, and the then Premier, Peter Beattie, for changing electoral laws.
“Both Liberal and the Labor party were in bed together with this to get rid of me,” she says. She’s since forgiven Abbott.
Her first night in maximum security was traumatic, with Hanson shaking uncontrollably and being sedated with pethidine. She didn’t like being asked about her feelings by a young psychologist and has not sought counselling since. She refused contact visits with all but her father because of the strip searches.
“It was invasive, it really was,” she says.
“That upset me, having to go through the strip search.”
But she soon got into the rhythm of prison life and says, “I didn’t have any trouble from anyone who was in there”.
One of her prison mates was Valmae Beck, the now dead killer who, with her husband Barrie Watts, was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of 12-year-old Noosa schoolgirl, Sian Kingi, in 1987. Watts has recently applied for parole.
People have “had a go” at her for being friendly with Beck but Hanson hits back.
“You haven’t worn my shoes, you have no idea of the situation, what it’s like to be in there,” she says.
“I spoke to her, by all means, as I spoke to everyone.”
Hanson, who believes in the death penalty, says she told Beck if she’d harmed her daughter, “I’d be the one that pulled the trigger”. Beck’s reply? “Nothing. What could she say?”
On release from jail, Hanson said she’d have “rocks in my bloody head” to return to politics. But by 2004, she ran, unsuccessfully, as an Independent for a Senate seat, with a variety of subsequent campaigns for Queensland and NSW Parliament and Senate spots. She even launched a new party, Pauline’s United Australia Party. But come 2013, she rejoined One Nation as a rank-and-file member and was leader by November 2014.
She says she took “total control”.
“When I came back to the party … I set the ground rules. It will work this way because I wasn’t going to be white-anted again and that’s why we’ve been successful the second time around.”
On international issues, Hanson believes China is of grave concern and Australia will need support of allies to counteract its might. She supported the Morrison government’s call for an inquiry into the origin of Covid-19 which sparked the latest round of trade sanctions.
She says Australia needs to find other markets or “start up your own manufacturing base here”.
“I’m all for turning it around, being self-sufficient as best we possibly can be. It doesn’t mean to say, as people try to say, I want to shut Australia off from the rest of the world, that’s just stupid comments … You make yourself self-reliant. That’s exactly what Morrison said last year when it started out; ‘We must look at building our own manufacturing industries’. What has he done? Nothing.”
As for human-made climate change, she dismisses the 97 per cent of scientists in the field who believe it is happening as acting on self-interest. “These scientists now have jobs that they never had before,” she says.
“Look, they’re talking about temperature rises in the next 100 years by two per cent. The weather bureau can’t even get the weather right in 24 hours.”
Hanson is not the first to confuse climate with weather.
“So you’re telling me I’m going to listen to them, what it’s going to be like in 100 years’ time. I’m sorry. I don’t believe them.”
She says she doesn’t deny climate change, just the extent of the human role in it. She offers this thesis.
“Climate change does happen and in relation to the sun, the moon and this is where the planet is situated. That’s what I believe in.”
NOT FINISHED YET
James Ashby is hoeing into a supermarket chicken in Hanson’s kitchen as his boss poses for photographs.
He joined Hanson’s team in the lead-up to her 2016 campaign, a return to politics after launching legal proceedings against his former boss, the then Speaker Peter Slipper, for sexual harassment. The charges were later dropped.
He’s also the man who was embroiled in the explosive media sting by the Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera, in 2019. Ashby and then One Nation state leader, Steve Dickson, went to the US with Hanson’s knowledge for meetings with the powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, and its sponsors. They were caught on hidden camera in strategy talks with NRA representatives who want Australia’s gun laws watered down. He was also filmed saying that if One Nation could get $10m from US gun lobbyists, the party could win eight Senate seats.
Why has Hanson kept Ashby on?
“My interpretation of it was, they were drunk. They kept asking them questions, ‘Well what would you do if you had the money, what if you got this money?’. Of course, eventually if you keep pushing someone, you’ll get an answer out of them.” The duo did appear to be drinking in some of the footage discussing money, but not all of it.
Hanson says the story was obviously a “beat-up” because One Nation has not changed its gun policies nor taken money from the NRA.
It appears to have lost money recently though. One Nation last year invested $500,000 into Mayfair Platinum, the troubled company behind a now-scrapped billion-dollar redevelopment of Mission Beach and Dunk Island. Liquidators and lawyers have said the chances of investors retrieving funds are slim. Ashby says One Nation is “hopeful” of recovering the money.
Hanson retreats from earlier statements that she knew nothing about the investment. “At the time I said (that) but there has been minutes of it that I actually did sign off on that.”
Was she mislead?
“No, not mislead, probably I didn’t understand the company that was going to … That was my mistake to do that because I relied on the others at head office to investigate that properly.”
There’s still about $1.8m in the One Nation war chest, according to Australian Electoral Commission declarations. One Nation is planning a strong presence at the next election, contesting Senate and lower house seats.
Hanson will run for the Senate again, likely vying against the Liberal National Party’s Senator Amanda Stoker who was relegated to third spot on the LNP ticket in her party’s preselection. Stoker is unproven in elections, says Hanson, with her Senate spot “gifted” to her when George Brandis left.
The Greens and Katter’s Australian Party are also contenders, although of KAP, Hanson asks: “Have Katter’s ever won a Senate seat?”
Still feisty. Still here. The seam of discontent and resentment that Hanson tapped into in the 90s is still here, too, and she plans to mine it for as long as she can.
“I don’t intend going anywhere for a while yet.”
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Originally published as Pauline Hanson on the ‘bully’ PM, her love life and why she’ll never get the Covid jab
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