Pauline Hanson’s right hand man chances his arm in state politics
Pauline Hanson’s openly gay, deeply unorthodox chief of staff was in the box seat to inherit her place in the Senate and possibly atop One Nation. But, as usual with the ever-unpredictable James Ashby, there was a twist.
We’re talking about the one thing James Ashby vowed he wouldn’t do: run for parliament. Not that anyone believed him. From the moment he emerged as a political player there seemed to be an inevitability to what’s now transpiring because – let’s face it – the backstage gig never seemed like much of a fit.
The surprise is it has taken him this long to step forward. And where, given his future looked to be entwined, for better or worse, with that of his voluble boss, Pauline Hanson.
The One Nation diva turned 70 this year and her openly gay, deeply unorthodox chief of staff was in the box seat to inherit her place in the Senate and possibly atop the party they remade together. But, as usual with the ever-unpredictable Ashby, there was a twist.
So here he is, in his “safe haven” of scenic Yeppoon, explaining why he turned his back on Canberra to go for a seat in Queensland parliament at the October 26 state election. He points across the glistening bay to the hazy blue outline of Great Keppel Island. It’s a disgrace, he says, that the once-thriving resort has been abandoned for the best part of two decades. Gina Rinehart and Sydney developer Terry Agnew each ran the ruler over redeveloping the site and passed. Too much red tape from the state, too little incentive to invest by Ashby’s reckoning.
“I’d freehold it,” he says, sipping a double-shot coffee. “Not mess around with the leasehold that the state government maintains. It’s not worth it. They clearly don’t want to look after Great Keppel or any of the other islands for that matter. So let someone who wants to put the money in, come in, and give them the security of freehold title. But to do something like that, to push for something like that, you’ve got to be where you can get things done. And that’s the Queensland parliament.
“So I guess that’s my round-about way of answering your question about why I’m running now.
“I’ve enjoyed playing a coach role to the party – and it goes beyond Pauline’s office, as I’ve played a pretty active role over the years in mentoring other candidates – but I could see we were going nowhere fast in this area and that matters to me because it’s my home.
“Labor’s had the seat for nine years and I don’t think they’ve got any chance of holding it. But if it goes to the Liberal National Party, what changes? Nothing. The population growth is going crazy and our services are still going backwards. I just feel we can make a difference here.”
The state electorate of Keppel, taking in Yeppoon and the Capricorn Coast villages of Emu Park, Zilzie and Keppel Sands 40 minutes’ drive from Rockhampton in central Queensland, certainly promises to play an outsized role in what shapes as a change of government election. The seat is held by Labor’s Brittany Lauga on a margin of 5.6 per cent – bang on the statewide swing required by the LNP to take back power after nearly a decade on the sidelines. Keppel has gone with the government at every state election since 2004 and looms large in the must-win calculations of both major parties.
It’s also make-or-break for One Nation on Hanson’s home turf. The tide she rode in 2016 to grab a second political life and four Senate spots for the reborn party soon turned. These days, it’s just her and Queensland running mate Malcolm Roberts rounding out the numbers on the crimson chamber’s crossbench. The only One Nation MP in the state parliament, Stephen Andrew, defected to Katter’s Australian Party last month after being issued his marching orders by Hanson; she also booted West Australian state MP Ben Dawkins, claiming his commitment to the job didn’t “pass the pub test”.
Ashby, 45, is one of a select few to have not only survived but thrived in the tempestuous court of Pauline. With the other notable exception of Roberts, most of the men in Hanson’s political life have departed acrimoniously. The list is long and colourful. Party co-founder David Ettridge, jailed alongside her in 2003 before their electoral fraud convictions were quashed on appeal, became one of Hanson’s fiercest critics and this week went public with fresh allegations about the plundering of party funds. He is bitter that his legal costs weren’t covered when One Nation was revived ahead of the 2016 Senate breakout.
Another estranged Hanson loyalist, Jim Savage, made a point of running as a vote-siphoning independent in a state seat targeted by One Nation at the 2020 Queensland election. Ex-Senate colleague Brian Burston successfully sued her for defamation in the Federal Court, only to have the $250,000 damages award overturned on appeal last year, when he was also slapped with Hanson’s legal costs.
Then there’s Mark Latham. The former federal Labor leader quit as head of One Nation’s NSW division 14 months ago and has been sniping at Hanson ever since under parliamentary privilege. He too let rip with allegations of financial chicanery by the party – this time concerning state electoral funding returns in NSW, prompting an emphatic denial by Hanson that anything was amiss.
Why the churn? Ashby thinks about the question, taking another slug of coffee. “Finding people that are willing to work their guts out is hard,” he says. “Where we’ve failed as a party is in our own back end. That’s where I believe that we’ve let ourselves down and I think we’re slowly getting that right, and … my hope is that we can ensure that for anyone elected there’s stability moving forward.”
He is in with a shot in Keppel, though not a particularly strong one. Ashby needs to finish top two on the primary vote count before preferences are swapped. Let’s say he comes second behind one of the major parties, as the One Nation candidate did in 2017. His choice would be for it to be Labor, allowing him to scramble home on LNP preferences.
Unfortunately for him, the published opinion polls suggest that scenario is unlikely: The Weekend Australian’s Newspoll at the outset of the campaign had the LNP 10 points clear of Labor, 2PP, statewide. Private union-commissioned polling seen by Inquirer shows a swing of 11.5 per cent against Labor in central Queensland, while One Nation picks up just 1 per cent on the 2020 outcome. The swing to the LNP is a clinching 6.5 per cent.
Ashby concedes he has a lot of ground to make up. The previous state election – the third of the trot to be won by Labor under then premier Annastacia Palaszczuk – was a disaster for the Hanson party, its vote halving on 2017. “We suffered the consequences of a Covid election,” Ashby says. “We took a vastly different view to that of the major parties at that time which was we shouldn’t have border closures, we shouldn’t have lockdowns and mask-wearing and impose mandates on vaccination … and I suppose we paid a political price for that stance. I acknowledge that. Covid really hurt us.”
In Keppel, One Nation’s primary vote crashed to 15.65 per cent, 10 points shy of what its candidate had achieved in 2017 in finishing second to Lauga. The 38-year-old Assistant Health Minister has been embroiled in a draining personal drama since she went to police in April to complain of being drugged and sexually assaulted during a night out in Yeppoon. The investigation is ongoing, police say, cranking up the local rumour mill on why it has taken so long to finalise. For the record, a police spokesperson says: “Police can confirm they are waiting to obtain results of forensic evidence as part of the ongoing investigation. As is routine in such investigations, no further comment will be made at this time.”
Those who follow Ashby’s roller-coaster career have some questions of their own about what he’s up to in Keppel. Could it be a trial run for the main game of stepping into Hanson’s shoes in the Senate? A message to the boss to not take his services for granted? He clearly doesn’t need the profile. Ashby has been a lightning rod for largely unwanted publicity, preceding his emergence at Hanson’s side.
His first political allegiance was actually to the LNP, which he joined in 2010 while working as the marketing manager of a Sunshine Coast strawberry farm via stints as a presenter on regional radio and in Brisbane. Soon enough he landed his first job in politics – advising the then Speaker of parliament, Peter Slipper, the turncoat LNP backbencher who had jumped at Julia Gillard’s offer of the plum job in 2011 to prop up her minority Labor government. The rest is history, a “squalid, sordid miserable period in our national life”, to quote Gillard’s successor as prime minister, Tony Abbott. Ashby sued Slipper for sexual harassment, igniting a firestorm that cost the MP his job as Speaker and, as collateral damage, terminated the comeback to federal parliament of former Howard government minister Mal Brough.
Both vehemently denied any wrongdoing. By the time the dust settled a decade later on the storm of litigation, Ashby had racked up legal costs of more than $4.5m, a bill he had no means to pay.
When his last-ditch appeal to have the commonwealth pick up the tab failed in 2021, he was confronted with bankruptcy, a sanction that would have made him ineligible for elected office. But instead of coming after him, his law firm, Harmers Workplace Lawyers, wrote off the debt of “several million” dollars 18 months ago, according to Ashby.
“I was always conscious of ending up with nothing,” he says. “It took a lot out of me … sort of living with the fear that someone was going to come along and just take everything I had worked for. It did run me dry, right?
“You know, during that period I came back up here. This place has always been a safe haven for me. It’s my sanctuary because,” he pauses. “Because I knew I could come up here and not be harassed – harassed by media, harassed by dickheads on the street. There isn’t that sort of behaviour up here.
“And, yeah, I owe this place as much as I owe my family for the support they gave.”
Ashby is showing us around town in his orange Ford Ranger ute – “sounds like ranga”, he jokes, in a dig at the boss’s trademark locks – when you-know-who phones in. Hanson is in Canberra for a busy sitting week while her right-hand man takes unpaid leave to step up the pace in the run-in to October 26. The car, decked in One Nation livery, sports personalised numberplates: Gotguts.
Hanson told Ashby he had to run, and makes no bones as to why. “I haven’t put all this work and effort into building a party just to let it slide again,” she says. “And besides, I’m getting to an age now that I’ve got to look at my retirement in the years to come, and I have to have competent people to carry on what I’ve started.”
Ashby still bristles at Steven Miles, Palaszczuk’s successor as premier, for calling One Nation racist last week, when he went after the LNP for preferencing the Hansonites above Labor and the Greens. Politics does make for strange bedfellows. One Nation is on a unity ticket with the Katter party – which is eyeing gains in its north Queensland heartland on the three seats it takes into the election – to revisit Labor’s abortion law reforms in the next state parliament, one of the few issues to throw a cruising LNP leader David Crisafulli off his stride to date.
Ashby doesn’t think abortion should be recriminalised but he is concerned about late-term terminations post week 22 of pregnancy, likening them to “cutting up a Sunday roast chicken”. He says human-induced climate change is “hoo-ha” and is adamant that a “woke agenda” lies at the heart of Queensland’s youth crime crisis, Crisafulli’s priority, because “we’re worried about the human rights of the juvenile offender and we seem to forget about the rights of those impacted by the crime”.
Ashby continues: “Look, I grew up in a household where we were lucky … we had a mum that stayed at home, Dad went to work every day. We had discipline in the home – you know, it was old school where you’d sit down at the dining table together and no one left until everyone had finished dinner and no one started until Dad sat down at the table, at the head of the table.
“I suppose things were just different in that respect. But there was discipline, there were consequences, we had a healthy fear of our parents. Whereas as I look at it today with these kids: no healthy fear of authority, no healthy fear of their parents, no respect for the greater community. And I just think that we’ve allowed that as politicians or as a political class … to occur and that’s got to change because we’ve seen some pretty detrimental impacts on society as a result of it, and it’s not going to get better until we change it.”
There is one subject, however, that’s strictly off-limits. Ashby won’t speak publicly about his partner or their home life in Yeppoon. “It doesn’t come into the equation,” he says. “I’m not a cheerleader for the LGBT community and I never will be because this is no one’s business except ours. You have to have some boundaries and this is where I draw the line. People can accept that or not.”
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