Pauline Hanson’s One Nation: A trigger-happy party
Guns have been part of One Nation’s DNA from day it was launched nearly 22 years ago.
The curious thing about guns and One Nation is that Pauline Hanson knows so little about the hardware. By all accounts, she has never owned a firearm, boasts no shooting expertise and had little inclination to speak out against Australia’s unquestionably effective ban on automatic weapons.
Yet guns have been part of her party’s insurrectionist platform from the day it was launched nearly 22 years ago, in the shadow of the Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people and spurred new prime minister John Howard to tighten gun laws with overwhelming community support.
Guns are in the DNA of One Nation, hardwired into an ethos that celebrates the right of the individual to buck the system and thumb a nose at political correctness. It mirrors Hanson’s own roller-coaster journey, starting with her disendorsement as a Liberal candidate in 1996 for disparaging indigenous welfare, One Nation’s rise and fall and long-delayed rebirth in 2016 and, now, of course, the fuss kicked up by her bumbling lieutenants James Ashby and Steve Dickson, who went to Washington last September to solicit donations from the American gun lobby.
Money problems
In one respect, this latest PR disaster should come as no surprise. Hanson’s problems always seem to revolve around money. One Nation, in all its varied iterations, perennially lacked the cash to match her political ambitions. In 1998, just when it seemed that it had arrived, with 11 MPs elected to the Queensland parliament and Hanson pursuing a strategy to expand the toehold she had gained in federal parliament with her surprise election to the house in 1996 — the Liberals had failed to rub her out in time, and her name appeared on the ballot paper as the Liberal candidate for the Ipswich-based division of Oxley in Queensland — the whole show imploded.
Hanson lost her federal seat, the party organisation fell apart, the warring state MPs in Queensland quit or were elbowed aside, and in the space of a single parliamentary term One Nation become a spent force, an object lesson in how to squander political opportunity. Yet the woman herself never went away. While Hanson shifted her aim from Aborigines to Asian migrants and then to Muslim integration in Australia, her siren call to disillusioned voters remained the same: she might not have the answers, but she certainly knew how to present the middle finger to the political establishment.
Gun manifesto
This is where guns come in. One Nation’s policy, such that it is, is a tricky accommodation of interests so that Hanson can speak to the pro-gun element of her base without causing wider offence. The 22-point manifesto was written by Dickson, also a former Liberal, who served as a minister in Campbell Newman’s short-lived Liberal National Party government in Queensland. Ironically, the policy came out during the 2017 state election campaign in which One Nation tanked yet again. Having elected four senators including Hanson at Malcolm Turnbull’s double dissolution federal election the year before, it converted a double-digit vote into one paltry state seat on her home turf.
On guns, One Nation asserts that it will “stop making criminals” of firearm owners, but, crucially, offers not a word of criticism of the ban on automatic weapons, which both Dickson and Ashby professed to support when their dalliance with the US National Rifle Association and big-time conservative donors the Koch family became public on Tuesday.
If One Nation ever got the chance to govern, it would legislate for a general amnesty for anyone wishing to surrender a gun, registered or otherwise; streamline licensing to make gun ownership less “costly and convoluted”; standardise firearm licensing nationally to a 10-year renewal; and review the regulation and categories of weapons “in consultation with all stakeholders and industry experts”.
This is hardly the hard line that the intrepid One Nation duo espoused while “on the sauce” with Al Jazeera’s undercover man in Washington or during their other covertly videoed meetings with the NRA and a Koch Industries representative. Memorably, Dickson lamented that Australians weren’t allowed to own guns with which women could protect themselves, while Ashby talked up how much the party would need to turn its agenda into action.
“What sort of numbers are you guys thinking?” asked the NSW pet food seller turned media stingmeister Rodger Muller, baiting the hook while the hidden camera whirred.
“I’m thinking about 10,” Dickson said, counting in the millions the cash he hoped to extract from the US gun lobby. Added Ashby: “No, I was thinking about 20.”
It’s worth remembering that they walked away empty-handed, leaving Al Jazeera with its deserved scoop and the flint-eyed operatives of the NRA and Koch Industries no doubt scratching their heads. Let’s face it, two hard-drinking, colourfully spoken Australians from a fringe party Down Under were hardly likely to impress the God-fearing titans of the US political Right. More so now, after they gave the world a glimpse of what actually happens behind the scenes of the gun lobby.
Hanson herself was lying low yesterday, reportedly getting over a tick bite to her face, not to mention the embarrassment of One Nation being taken to the cleaners by the Arab cable news service. She hit social media to echo the outrage of Ashby, her chief of staff, and Dickson, formerly the head of the state campaign in Queensland and No 2 on the Senate ticket, at being duped by Muller.
“A Qatari government organisation should not be targeting Australian political parties. This has been referred to ASIO,” she tweeted.
“After the full hit piece has been released, I’ll make a full statement (and) take all appropriate action.”
Unfortunately for Hanson, there appears to be more grief to come.
In the second instalment of its expose How to Sell a Massacre, airing tonight on the ABC, Al Jazeera says it has her voicing support for watering down the gun laws.
“I have to actually take these baby steps and I have to actually get more people elected to parliament, which I will after this next election,” she says in a secretly videoed exchange.
“Get more people elected. And then these are things that can be looked at.”
Election hopes
One Nation will go to the polls supremely confident that its leader’s place in parliament is secure — but that’s only because she’s not up for re-election at the regulation half-Senate election Scott Morrison is expected to call for May 11 or 18. Hanson’s best hope is that her Queensland running mate from 2016, Malcolm Roberts, gets back into the Senate. (He will top the One Nation ticket, ahead of Dickson in the unwinnable No 2 spot.)
But the steps that have led up to this, typically, take some explaining. Roberts’s political odyssey is in the long tradition of One Nation putting its best foot forward, only to take aim and fire with unerring effect. After he was disqualified from the Senate for holding dual nationality, Roberts was replaced by the next in line on the 2016 ticket in Queensland, Fraser Anning, who jumped ship on the day he was sworn into parliament. Anning went on to join Katter’s Australian Party, made a splash by using them term “final solution” in his first speech to parliament and was booted by KAP over his serial racism. His disgraceful comments on the Christchurch mosque attacks underline why he will soon be history.
Roberts is no certainty, either. The final Senate spot in Queensland could come down to a lineball tussle between the Greens, One Nation, KAP and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, with the intriguing prospect that Palmer himself will be the candidate despite his insistence that he will run for the Townsville-based house seat of Herbert. One Nation’s chances of getting back the Senate spot in NSW held by defector Brian Burston, now with UAP, or returning Peter Georgiou in Western Australia seem as distant as its long-held ambition to break back into the House of Representatives.
The latest Newspoll has One Nation’s primary vote on a lowly 7 per cent, though this is a national average and its support in the Queensland heartland would be closer to the 13.73 per cent achieved at the last state election. Will the Al Jazeera debacle hurt it? Party co-founder David Oldfield doubts it. He turned Hanson on to guns back in 1997, working to bring the Sporting Shooters Association and gun clubs into the fold: “It was really an ideological issue for us.”
Rights fears
The proud owner of a 0.357 calibre Magnum handgun, Oldfield says the gun issue plays to One Nation supporters, not because they want semiautomatics back on the shelves but because they are worried existing gun rights will be stripped away, and that’s the thin edge of the wedge.
David Ettridge, another figure from the early days with Hanson, puts it this way: “I think it’s deeply entrenched in the Australian psyche that … we don’t like government, we don’t like controls and we don’t like anyone telling us what to do, what to think and how to enjoy life.”
Journalist Kerry-Anne Walsh, author of the 2018 book Hoodwinked: How Pauline Hanson Fooled a Nation, says she was not surprised One Nation had looked to the US gun lobby for funding. Rumours of One Nation’s interest in a tie-up with the NRA had been around for years.
“They wanted to get close to the NRA because of the power, the influence and because of the money,” Walsh explains.
“The end goal has always been about power and influence. You make the policy up as you go along, so it kind of fits in with this fundraising trip to Washington by Ashby and Dickson.”
Oldfield, for his part, sees no problem with One Nation tapping the NRA — in sharp contrast to Morrison and Bill Shorten, for once in furious agreement while condemning the minor party over the Al Jazeera revelations.
“It’s not unusual to get funds to support guns from people who support guns,” Oldfield says.
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‘Bareknuckled bloke’ fighting for a way back into politics
Steve Dickson has a colourful turn of phrase, to say the least. Over that memorable three-hour session on the drink with One Nation sidekick James Ashby and the man who duped them into talking about what they would do with all that cash from the US gun lobby, Dickson let rip, and it’s going to take him some time to live it down.
The problem with immigrants? “They’re just breaking into people’s homes with baseball bats and killing people,” he said.
What would One Nation do with $10 million? “You’d have the whole government by the balls.”
Dickson has since apologised, claiming he would never say such things in public, and that he and Ashby were taken out of context in the covert footage captured by undercover operative Rodger Muller for Al Jazeera’s takedown of One Nation and the US National Rifle Association.
But those who know the voluble Queenslander would not be surprised by his robust language. There is nothing subtle about Dickson or his approach to politics.
“He’s always been a bareknuckled kind of bloke,” says a colleague from his days in the Queensland Liberal National Party.
While Ashby has a high profile from his role as Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff — she once dubbed him her adopted son — as well as the part he played in bringing down one-time Speaker of parliament Peter Slipper for alleged sexual harassment, Dickson was probably best known outside his home state through appearances on television discussion panels on Sky News and the ABC.
A three-term state MP for his home town of Buderim on the Sunshine Coast, he had served as a minister in Campbell Newman’s LNP government but defected to One Nation in 2017, citing a dispute with the LNP over his support of medicinal cannabis.
His detractors in the LNP insisted it was more a fit of pique after Newman’s successor, Tim Nicholls, dumped him from the frontbench.
In the event, the LNP threw the kitchen sink at Buderim in the 2017 state election, where Dickson was Hanson’s point man in Queensland, heading the state campaign, and regained the seat at his expense.
Dickson, 56, has not given up hope of returning to parliament, though it’s hard to see a way back for him.
He will run for One Nation at the federal election in the unwinnable No 2 spot on the Senate ticket behind Hanson favourite Malcolm Roberts.