‘I want people with a bit of mongrel’: Pauline Hanson’s Qld plan

HER party’s popularity has hit double figures in Queensland, but the Federal Government insists it isn’t worried by Pauline Hanson or One Nation’s bid to take the Sunshine State.

Mongrel needed to give voters a voice: That’s what Senator Hanson is after as One Nation rises in Queensland. Picture: Getty

SHE’S being billed as mainstream Pauline in some quarters, and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson today launches a year-long bid to dominate the Queensland State election.

“I want people with a bit of mongrel in them,” Senator Hanson said ahead of unveiling One Nation’s first crop of candidates in 36 electorates.

Senator Hanson is kicking off One Nation’s big offensive on the back of a poll showing her popularity has shot into double digits in the Sunshine State.

A recent Galaxy poll conducted for The Courier-Mail poll found One Nation was polling at 16 per cent in Queensland.

The Queensland State election, due in early 2018, but expected to be called some time in 2017, is seen by many as One Nation’s best chance to pick up seats since 1998 when it won 11 seats.

It hopes to run candidates in every seat.

And political commentators say the rise into double-digit popularity is a sign, yet again, that the political sentiment from a public turning against the major parties is fast seeing Hanson go from seen as extreme to mainstream.

It follows a week in which businessman Dick Smith came out in support of Senator Hanson’s tough stance on immigration, and added voters are “so disillusioned with our present party politics”, and that a One Nation candidates would win seats, State and Federal elections.

Ahead of unveiling the Queensland candidates, Hanson told The Courier Mail she wanted people with ‘“a bit of mongrel in them” to give regional Queenslanders a voice because “the National Party has let them down.’’

Federal Finance Minister Mathias Cormann acknowledged One Nation was a competitor to the Liberal National Party.

“We’ll do everything we can to explain why people should put their trust in us to provide good government, whether that’s in Queensland or nationally or in Western Australia, for that matter,” he told Sky News on Sunday.

“It’s not a matter of being worried, it’s a matter of the task at hand.”

That task was to explain to people how the coalition would set up strong foundations so families across the country had the best possible opportunities to get ahead, he said.

Senator Hanson and One Nation are surfing a wave of double-digit popularity in Queensland. Picture: Wesley Monts

The first round of One Nation candidates will be formally announced this afternoon.

It includes former Liberal National Party member Neil Symes, who famously went from Woolworths deli worker to member of parliament as part of Campbell Newman’s landslide win in 2012.

He lost the seat of Lytton in 2015 but will be One Nation’s candidate for the seat of Mansfield, held by shadow attorney-general Ian Walker on a margin of just 0.55 per cent.

One Nation’s first electorates are in Ipswich, then largely on the Gold and Sunshine coasts, their hinterlands and regional Queensland.

One of the new candidates is Bundaberg candidate Dr Jane Truscott, an American-born self-confessed Donald Trump admirer who chairs Queensland’s $70 million Rural Locum Assistance Program, providing regional workforce and social welfare assistance.

Dr Truscott told The Courier Mail that while some of the things that US president-elect Donald Trump has said were “socially inappropriate”, he had sparked a worldwide movement which “challenges the status quo”.

“While some of what he has said and done is considered socially inappropriate, he has nonetheless provided a political force which gives the American people a voice,’’ she said.

Senator Hanson has also moved to register Pauline Hanson’s One Nation as a party in WA ahead of the March 11 election.

But it faces an objection from One Nation WA, which previously operated as a party but has been deregistered, through the intervention of Hanson supporters in Queensland, and now exists only as an incorporated body.

Meanwhile Labor frontbencher Jim Chalmers said his party took the electoral threat One Nation poses very seriously.

“We understand that not just in Queensland but right around the country there are people who are sufficiently disillusioned with the government and with politics as usual to consider other alternatives,” he told reporters in his home city of Brisbane.

“Obviously One Nation will field their candidates, we take those candidates seriously and we will engage on the issues in a respectful way.”