I’m frustrated and fed-up: why Pauline Hanson is feeling the chill in Canberra
The Labor government neither wants nor needs the two votes Pauline Hanson can deliver in a congested Senate. The One Nation leader hates being out in the cold.
When Pauline Hanson sprang to life in the Senate on Thursday, no one was more surprised than her opposite numbers in the supposedly genteel upper house. The word on the One Nation Leader had been that she was miserable, perhaps on the way out, not coping with the “new dynamic” of being sidelined under Labor.
But here she was, the political pugilist of old, heckling and hurling insults at Lidia Thorpe as the Greens defector delivered her bombshell allegations of being sexually harassed by expelled Liberal David Van. Thorpe responded with a profanity directed at Hanson. Cue the outrage. The voluble Queenslander was back where she has always liked to be: the centre of attention. Because if there is anything she hates – really, really hates – it is being ignored. And that has been the order of business in federal parliament since the change of management 13 months ago.
Labor neither wants nor needs the votes of Hanson and her wingman in the Senate, Malcolm Roberts, despite the numbers stacked against it there. To pass legislation that’s contested by the Liberal-National opposition the government must secure the support of the 11 Greens and at least two other members of the crossbench. In the circumstances, you might think One Nation’s brace of votes counted for something. Unfortunately for Hanson they don’t. The salad days when she could get the prime minister on the phone at will or have a pet cause indulged are long gone. Labor’s go-tos on the crossbench have been ACT independent David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and her sidekick Tammy Tyrrell, elected on the coat-tails of the colourful Tasmanian last year.
The roster is rounded out by Thorpe and fellow Victorian Ralph Babet of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, both of whom could expect to receive a cheery call from a Labor number-cruncher ahead of the One Nation duo. Hanson detests being out in the cold. The dejected figure she cut on the Senate floor has been the talk of the chamber.
“She just looks like she doesn’t want to be there,” says a figure from one of the major parties. Others describe her as being uninterested, “going through the motions”. A Labor senator insists the brush-off isn’t personal: “It’s not the case that we’re hostile or mean to her. We just don’t give her anything and I don’t think she has adjusted to the new scenario.” Inevitably, it has led to chatter that Hanson is weighing her options.
Having turned 69 last month, she’s the second-oldest woman in the upper house behind Senate president Sue Lines and makes no bones about being unhappy with her lot.
“Why should I enjoy the dynamic when you’re not involved in it,” Hanson tells Inquirer, addressing the questions about her future for the first time.
“Your vote means nothing … and they say, I’m just not interested. Well, I’m frustrated, I’m fed up and they are a bunch of bloody hypocrites. They have no respect for the fact that I’m an elected member of that parliament.
“So, yes, I’m disgusted with the Labor Party in the way that they’re handling the Senate … I think people deserve a lot more than what they’re getting out of their members of parliament.”
Which brings us to James Ashby, Hanson’s chief of staff, the man she once described as her adopted son and who has been with her since she bounced back into parliament in 2016, defying her reputation for torching colleagues and staff. “Not exactly the actions of someone ready to check out,” he noted wryly after Thursday’s performance.
Hanson watchers have long believed she will hand over to him during the remaining five years of her current term, which would take her to 74 if she saw it through. Slim and dapper, 44-year-old Ashby has commanded her loyalty for longer and more completely than anyone else to be pulled into her fiery orbit. But lately he has made a point of raising his own profile, kicking along the speculation that Hanson was thinking of going sooner rather than later.
How else to explain his increasingly frequent appearances on Sky News as an after-dark commentator? The conventional wisdom is that a political adviser is past the use-by if they become the story – a dictum that has never applied to Ashby, it must be said. The former commercial radio announcer has been a lightning rod for controversy since he went to work for Peter Slipper, then Speaker of the house, more than a decade ago. Allegations by the younger man that he had been sexually harassed by his boss triggered a series of legal actions that destroyed Slipper’s political career and saddled Ashby with a bill of more than $4.5m.
At One Nation he feuded with one-time party grandees who fell out bitterly with Hanson; was fined after the Australian Electoral Commission investigated whether undeclared political donations went into a light aircraft that he piloted on the hustings; earned Hanson’s wrath for being ensnared in a sting by cable news service Al Jazeera exposing his clumsy bid with a colleague to woo millions from the US gun lobby; and got banned from Parliament House in 2019 over a physical altercation with One Nation senator Brian Burston, to name just some indiscretions.
Ashby says his stepped-up public presence is in part to repair that “reputational damage” and to ease the load on Hanson. The media “don’t want to speak to people like Malcolm”, he explains, while the party’s standard-bearer in NSW, Mark Latham, is “for obvious reasons” on the outer since making a homophobic slur against NSW state MP Alex Greenwich, prompting the openly gay independent to sue for defamation when Latham refused to apologise. Hanson has disowned the former federal Labor leader.
“I’ve never had a reason to shy away from what I did all those years ago, and if I had a second chance I would probably do things differently,” Ashby says. “But Pauline and I discussed the fact that if anything it’s just about … trying to rescue my reputation that’s been damaged over the years. That’s the only reason I do it.”
A protective Hanson jumps in: “We don’t have a lot of One Nation people beside us, OK. So James is … you know, with my team and the fact is it’s another face speaking the policies and objectives of One Nation.” She doesn’t resile from the praise she has heaped on him – albeit tempered by the occasional brickbat, such as putting him on notice over his “stupid remarks” to the undercover man from Al Jazeera – and in comments sure to set tongues wagging she backs Ashby as having the “talent and the potential” to be a senator.
“I would certainly endorse him for that position,” she says. As for her own future, Hanson won’t commit to serving the full term to 2028. “Whether I actually stand again for that next Senate election, I’ll decide that at the time,” she says. “Whether I do the full term or not, I don’t know … But I will say this: I think James will make a fantastic senator. I think he has got the people at heart, as I do, and I would never, ever, hand over, particularly as a senator, to anyone unless I knew that they would carry on the work I have tried to do for the people of Queensland.”
This being One Nation, it would be a mistake to see Ashby’s ascension as a fait accompli were she to depart early and create a casual vacancy for him to fill – nothing is ever straightforward in the Hanson party. For a start, there’s the thorny matter of that monster legal bill. Ashby has been battling to have the commonwealth pick up his costs with an “act of grace” payment on equity grounds given that Slipper’s legal expenses were funded. His application was refused by the federal Finance Department, a decision that was twice upheld at judicial review. Last year, a bench of three Federal Court judges dismissed his latest appeal with costs. Ouch.
Ashby won’t say how he could cover such a financial hit. In any case, the role of chief of staff to Hanson affords “plenty of scope to influence positive change without the responsibility of being a member of parliament”. He tells Inquirer: “It’s not something I’ve even discussed with my partner or family – and not a discussion I intend to have anytime soon. There are no financial impedances should I ever choose to go down that path.”
Yet as he and Hanson well know, personal bankruptcy is a constitutionally enshrined disqualifier to entering parliament. One Nation learned that lesson the hard way when Rod Culleton, the West Australian elected to the Senate alongside her, Burston and Roberts in the 2016 double-dissolution election called by Malcolm Turnbull, was unable to defend a bankruptcy action in court and was booted from parliament.
By then, Culleton had fallen out spectacularly with Hanson, storming out of the party to set up his own outfit. Burston would follow suit in NSW, running unsuccessfully for re-election under Palmer’s banner in 2019 before suing Hanson for defamation for claiming on national television that he had sexually abused a female member of his parliamentary office staff and assaulted Ashby without provocation in the Great Hall of parliament. A Federal Court judge awarded Burston damages of $250,000 last October, an order Hanson is now appealing.
She is also auctioning a set of her hand-knit jumpers through the One Nation website to raise cash to defend a separate defamation claim brought by Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi, who was told by Hanson to “piss off back to Pakistan” during a willing social media exchange following Queen Elizabeth’s death last year.
There’s never a dull moment – except it seems in parliament. The cold shoulder from Labor is in stark contrast to the treatment Hanson received under Turnbull, who needed One Nation’s votes in the Senate. Hanson delighted in flaunting her access to the prime minister. On a swing through north Queensland, she once told a group of bemused sugarcane growers that she would get Turnbull on the phone to hear their concerns. She dialled the prime minister’s office and was put straight through.
Scott Morrison made her co-chairwoman of a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, an issue that became personal after one of her adult sons was denied child custody. But she clashed with ScoMo – a bully, she would harrumph – over her “pro-choice” decision to reject the Covid-19 vaccine and his unwillingness to let her wheel whoever she pleased into his presence. The temerity!
The irony is that Hanson professed to have a better working relationship with Anthony Albanese at the time: they had bonded on a visit to India in 2017 with a parliamentary delegation and by her account he honoured a commitment that his door would be open to her while he was opposition leader.
Yet in the top job, Albo has kept his distance.
Hanson says she has given up trying to book appointments with him and on Labor more generally. “I’ve got to be honest with you: I have no time for just about all the Labor ministers, I don’t have respect for them. I don’t like the policies and I don’t like the direction they’ve got this country going in,” she fumes.
The list of grievances is long and involved. Her relationship with Penny Wong, the leader of the government in the Senate, is non-existent, she complains. Her staff was cut from eight to six when Albanese purged the parliamentary entitlements of crossbenchers and only one of those positions had been restored after pushback from the minor parties and independents. One Nation’s requests for briefings on the government’s legislative agenda routinely go unanswered.
Rejecting Hanson’s claims, a spokesperson for Wong says the Foreign Mnister sat down with her after the last election to discuss how the new government would work with the One Nation senators. “While there are clearly differences of opinion, the meeting was professional and Senator Wong remains open to constructive engagement.”
For now, Hanson insists she will carry on as only she can. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got too much of a voice,” she says. “I’m constantly pulled up by people saying, ‘Keep going, Pauline, you’re speaking for us, don’t give up.’ ” That must be a comfort in the chilly new political climate she confronts in Canberra. But is it enough to keep her there?
Settler-colonial ethos is our least worthy export
Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. It was easy, but unfair.
What have our universities become?
A lurch towards activism and a focus on funding have desecrated our universities. They should once again become safe spaces – for the getting of wisdom.