Pauline’s pleased to explain: it’s personal

All eyes are on Pauline Hanson as she sweeps into the restaurant maskless, unvaccinated and utterly unrepentant. She won’t be told to behave. Tomorrow she’ll savour that other dish best served cold: vindication.

On Monday, Pauline Hanson will celebrate five years in
the Senate. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Pauline Hanson will chalk up a personal milestone on Monday, one in the eye for the knockers who said she would never cut it in the Senate, a chance to savour that other dish best served cold: vindication.

Well, that’s how she sees it and who can blame her? In the five years since she returned to federal parliament on August 30, 2016, Hanson and her party have been written off or disparaged by the pundits time and again. I’m no exception. To me, history seemed destined to repeat, dooming the quixotic enterprise of One Nation 2.0 and its volatile leader.

But here she is in all her pomp, flame-haired and utterly unrepentant about anything she has said or done, resplendent in the blue cardigan she knitted herself. All eyes are on her when she sweeps into the restaurant maskless. Yes, yes, we’re no longer required to wear them in Brisbane. But most people do. It seems sensible when more than half the country is in lockdown.

Hanson won’t be told to behave. Not by Scott Morrison, a bully, she harrumphs, nor by the critics in the media who have piled on over her refusal to be vaccinated for Covid. “I believe in what I am doing,” she says. “It’s not just a job to me. It’s a commitment that I have.”

As we settle in and order – steak for the senator and only a sip of the wine because she’s driving – Hanson delves deep into the trials and tribulations of a spectacularly public life, replete with betrayal and bitter disappointment, that has brought her to this curious point where she wields a measure of the power she always craved.

Hanson in the Botanic Gardens, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

If you can’t be prime minister, the next best thing is to be able to get the PM on the phone at the snap of a manicured finger, something she loved to do with Malcolm Turnbull. Part of her beef with Morrison is that he had the temerity to decline to meet a north Queensland businessman she had brought to his office. She wouldn’t wear it, and stormed past startled staff to confront him.

“I don’t see lobbyists,” Morrison told her, refusing to budge. She hasn’t forgotten the perceived snub two years ago. “He doesn’t connect with people … that’s Morrison’s problem,” she says. “Turnbull would have done this at the drop of a hat.”

Politics is irredeemably personal to Hanson, 67, which is the key to understanding how she operates. In this, she has not changed a jot from the Ipswich fish-and-chip shop operator who burst on to the scene in 1996, winning a House seat after the Liberal Party disendorsed her for making disparaging comments about Indigenous “entitlement”. One of the achievements she cites is to have been the first female independent elected to federal parliament.

Yet like much of what Hanson says, that’s demonstrably untrue: the Liberal Party didn’t have time to strike her name off the ballot paper ahead of polling day. One of the few mistakes she owns to up is not listening to then adviser John Pasquarelli’s plea that she run for the Senate in 1998. Instead, she switched House seats and lost.

Having spent 11 weeks behind bars, Hanson was vindicated – that word again – when the Queensland Court of Appeal quashed both convictions. She became the perennial candidate, unsuccessfully contesting in the Senate, the NSW Legislative Council and Queensland parliament. A defunct One Nation was deregistered in its northern heartland. But the stars aligned for her in 2016 when Turnbull called a double-dissolution election, halving the Senate quota. Hanson was back in the fold of a reconstituted One Nation. No.2 on the Queensland Senate ticket, Malcolm Roberts, was pulled through on her skirt tails, along with candidates from NSW and Western Australia, delivering the party the balance of power in the Upper House. Hence Turnbull’s attentiveness.

Hanson with James Ashby and Steve Dickson, after they were caught in an al-Jazeera investigation which used hidden cameras and a journalist posing as a gun campaigner to expose the far-right party's extraordinary efforts to obtain funding in Washington DC.

The wheels fell off soon enough, soap opera-like. Rod Culleton in WA had already quit the party by the time he was disqualified from parliament for bankruptcy, while Roberts became a casualty of the dual citizenship debacle that cut a swath through both the House and Senate. Hanson fell out angrily with backroom stalwarts such as Ian Nelson and Jim Savage over the fresh-faced adviser she had anointed as her “adopted son”, James Ashby. When NSW senator Brian Burston, a contemporary of Ettridge’s from the old days, defected to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party the writing seemed to be on the wall. Like its first iteration, One Nation 2.0 would be a flash in the pan.

Yet against all expectations, including mine, Hanson appears to have stabilised the listing ship. Roberts returned to the Senate at the 2019 federal election and One Nation gained a high-profile recruit in Mark Latham, the former federal Labor leader, in the NSW upper house. It has maintained toeholds in the WA and Queensland parliaments, though the vote crashed at last October’s election in her home state.

More than ever, the party revolves around Hanson alone, the way she likes it. After all, she had the membership appoint her president for life in 2018.

So what has she learned during her time in the Senate? Hanson chews the question over. “You can only make change if you are willing to stand up and speak up,” she says. “Too many people in Australia are reluctant to do that. So it’s a journey I am on, and I am trying to bring those people along with me.”

She enjoys the red chamber and admits she is still learning how it works. The Senate cross bench has moved on, diminishing One Nation’s clout now that it’s just she and Roberts. In a crunch, the government can get the votes it needs from Centre Alliance and Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie. Hence Morrison’s inattentiveness.

Hanson reels off her achievements: a deal to give Queensland sugarcane farmers more bargaining power with milling companies; Family Court reform – though she plans to dissent from the findings of the controversial Senate inquiry she pushed for and co-chaired; federal cash for Townsville’s new water pipeline; help for landholders resisting property acquisitions for defence firing ranges at Shoalwater Bay on the state’s central coast.

Hanson takes off a burqa during Senate Question Time in a controversial stunt that was widely condemned.

And, of course, her effort last year to persuade outgoing finance minister Mathias Cormann to fund a $3m course of US treatment for baby Wynter Clarkson of Toowoomba. As we report in the news pages, this has paved the way for other infants with incurable spinal muscular atrophy to access the lifesaving gene replacement therapy.

Hanson likes to style herself as a voice for people who don’t have one, a politician who not only says what she thinks but achieves results. To critics, she’s still shouty Pauline, ready to climb on any bandwagon so long as the media covered it. Former Nationals senator Ron Boswell, who took her on in the teeth of One Nation’s 1998 breakout, says her positioning on the vaccine is reminiscent of the headlines she hunted back then on Aboriginal welfare and Asian immigration or through her more recent hobbyhorse, denigrating Islam: “She is carrying a flag for the anti-vaxxers and this is where she becomes very dangerous.”

Hanson insists she is “pro-choice” not anti-vax, and won’t have the vaccine because she’s uncertain about the long-term side-effects, saying: “I decide what goes into my body.” The surging rates of hospitalisation and death among the unvaccinated in NSW don’t faze her and nor does the prospect of rubbing shoulders on the hustings with other holdouts. “If I catch Covid so be it,” she says.

Hanson speaks in the Senate chamber in 2017.

Which brings us to Hanson’s moment of truth, the approaching federal election. Ashby stepped up One Nation’s advertising in the Queensland regions in expectation Morrison would call the poll for next month or October, an option destroyed by the onslaught of the Delta virus in Sydney and Melbourne. Two years past the standard retirement age, Hanson knows this is her last chance to clinch the prize that eluded her all those years ago: re-election. She is determined to not let it slip away again.

Her prospects are promising, despite the collapse in One Nation’s state vote 10 months ago, down six points to 7.4 per cent primary. The Liberal National Party is a lock for two quotas, while Labor is on track to rebound from its 2019 nadir and return a second senator in incumbent Anthony Chisholm. That leaves Hanson, LNP No.3 and Assistant Women’s Minister Amanda Stoker, former premier Campbell Newman and the Greens’ Penny Allman-Payne to slug it out for the last two spots. Newman and rising conservative star Stoker could well cancel each other out in the scramble.

Roberts was elected fourth out of the six at the last election, clearing the quota with 52,876 votes to spare on 10.27 per cent primary, an improvement on what Hanson polled in 2016. So she is right to say she is confident of securing a second six-year term in the Senate, which she pledged to serve out. If so, she will mark another milestone in federal parliament, her 73rd birthday.

But this is Queensland we’re talking about, the evergreen surprise packet of Australian politics. Speaking from hard-earned experience, Hanson cautions: “I don’t take anything for granted.”