How journalists should approach Pauline Hanson and Islam

How journalists deal with newly resurrected One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has become a signpost for our increasingly polarised media culture. The redhead from Ipswich is pilloried quite unreasonably on the ABC but lauded quite undeservedly on talkback radio and Sky News.

I have known Hanson for 20 years and was the first newspaper editor to meet and have a meal with her after her election in March 1996, with my then Courier-Mail chief reporter Tony Koch, fully six months before her September 1996 maiden speech.

The Courier-Mail’s reporting had been central to the federal Liberal Party’s decision to disendorse the then Liberal candidate for the safe Labor seat of Oxley, west of Brisbane, the former seat of 1980s Labor leader Bill Hayden.

My then chief of staff Dennis Watt had noticed a letter to the editor by the then Ipswich city councillor to the local paper, The Queensland Times. The letter was replete with resentful sentiment towards Aboriginal people Hanson felt were getting a free lunch from government. I put the story based on her letter on page one the next day and by that night Liberal Party headquarters had punted Hanson. She went on to win the seat as an independent with a swing towards her of more than 19 per cent.

I learned a lot about Hanson and the politics of rural and ­regional discontent during that period. The biggest thing I learned was not to do what Tony Jones did on Q&A last Monday night.

Big media personalities rounding on Hanson’s often naive, poorly expressed views may ­reinforce their own moral virtue, but they only drive support to her. During the 1998 Queensland election campaign, then Labor state secretary Mike Kaiser, later to lose his seat in a Hedley Thomas scoop that easily disproves Hanson’s claim on Sky News last week that she was jailed as part of some conspiracy by former premier Peter Beattie, leaked me Labor’s nightly poll track during the last week of the campaign.

It proved beyond doubt the big drivers of support to Hanson were interviews by Maxine McKew and Ray Martin that week. Both interviews were aggressive and made Hanson look foolish. But those ­interviews lifted her final week polling by about 15 per cent compared with the Sunday before election day. Queensland voters were not going to have their Pauline hectored on their TVs. Just as with Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, big media misread and misjudged the voters.

At The Courier-Mail, we took the view that we should apply old-fashioned reporting techniques to Hanson and her 70 candidates for the state’s 89 seats. Many we found had been bankrupts or had criminal records. Many had to be disendorsed before the poll.

At the next state election only three of the 11 One Nation members were re-elected, with a statewide One Nation vote of 8 per cent. Many of the things Pauline said about Aboriginal welfare were wrong, but many of our letter writers thought she was on the right track. The Courier-Mail methodically went through the ­issues for several months, in the same way this paper pursued Clive Palmer’s interests since 2013: with good old-fashioned reporting.

This is how Hanson’s views on Islam should be handled. By looking at the facts.

Fact one: most recent domestic terrorism suspects and most high-profile recruits to ISIS in Syria were born in Australia. Think Khaled Sharrouf, Mohammed ­Elomar, Neil Prakash, Muhammad Ali Baryalei.

Fact two: Islam is a religion, not a race. Muslim terror suspects in this country since 2001 have been of Lebanese, Egyptian, Afghan, Iranian, Indonesian, Pakistani and even Cambodian extraction (Prakash). Many have been young male Anglo-Saxon converts to Islam.

Fact three: All the domestic ­security services are clear a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia would make alienation and radicalisation of young Islamic males worse. Remember, this is already a community of 500,000.

How ironic then that the best funded media organisation in the country, the ABC, has both led the charge to the moral high ground against Hanson on Islam but has since September 11, 2001, had to rely on Four Corners buy-ins from the BBC to cover the radicalisation of Islamic youth in the West.

At this newspaper, Cameron Stewart, Martin Chulov, Paddy Walters and Druze journalist Richard Kerbaj began reporting on growing radicalisation from the streets and mosques of our capital cities in 2002. The Australian’s work was regularly ignored by Fairfax and the ABC and if they did mention it this was usually to make the ­“Islamophobia” charge against the paper.

Hanson is right that Islam is central to terrorism in this country and around the world. The progressive left does its cause no good with the mainstream when it refuses to engage with that fact. Think Waleed Aly. But in a fragmented media world in which too few organisations have the resources to chase and report facts, loudly trumpeted views on issues which most of the media megaphones spouting them know little about, both Hanson and radical Islam are the subjects of millions of words of ill-informed comment.

Finally, back to Hanson’s claim she was jailed because of laws changed by Peter Beattie. Those laws followed the Shepherdson inquiry into electoral rorting in the Labor Party in Queensland. Following up on work by Tony Koch, Hedley Thomas drove to then deputy premier Jim Elder’s Brisbane house and outside were parked the cars of dozens of Labor Party members who were registered, wrongly, as living at that ­address. They were Elder’s pre­selectors. Elder quit parliament, a big scalp for The Courier-Mail, and Kaiser, by then the member for Inala, had to leave too. Labor later gave him a $400,000 a year job with the NBN.

But in the conspiracy theory laden world of One Nation, ­Beattie’s attempt to clean up his party forever went down as a cynical ploy to jail Hanson. If only more media megaphones and political campaigners ­both­ered with facts before spouting raucous opinions.