Like old times: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has been here before

Pauline Hanson with the two-seater aircraft that is giving her strife.

The more Pauline Hanson talks about her chief of staff, the plane and the media-shy property developer who ties this Gordian knot together, the more it sounds like the same old story for One Nation.

Infighting, dysfunction and the disintegration of a trusted inner circle around Hanson destroyed the first iteration of her party, and the parallels with what is going on in One Nation today are all too glaring.

This time the man at her side is fresh-faced James Ashby, Hanson’s senior aide and titular owner of the Jabiru light aircraft that has caused them both such political grief.

To Hanson, he is an “adopted son”, and he speaks for her in a way no other chief of staff does in Canberra. But to those he has fallen out with, Ashby is the personification of what has gone wrong inside One Nation since Hanson returned to the fold and led it to success at last year’s federal election.

That result — four Senate spots including seats for her and Queensland running mate Malcolm Roberts — looked set to lay a platform for One Nation to break through at the state election that now looms on Hanson’s home turf north of the Tweed.

Delivery of the Queensland budget on June 13 clears the way for Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to go to the polls, though the election is not due until early next year. A snap winter election cannot be discounted. More likely, it will be in the October-November slot ahead of the close of business for Christmas.

In February, the News group’s well-regarded Galaxy opinion poll gave Hanson’s party 23 per cent of the state vote, putting it on track to match or surpass the 1998 apogee for One Nation Mark I, when it won 11 of Queensland’s 89 state seats and abruptly imploded.

The next state parliament will be expanded to 93 seats, adding another layer of complexity to the coming election. But former Liberal National Party premier Campbell Newman insisted the equation was clear-cut for his side: the only way the LNP could return to power was in coalition with One Nation, he said.

Hanson could barely hide her delight. She told a confidant: “They won’t stop me this time.”

Since then, she has barely managed to put a foot right. On March 11, One Nation pulled a modest 8 per cent of the vote at the West Australian election, well below expectation. True, it delivered Hanson three seats in the state upper house. But she had a diabolical campaign.

One Nation signed up to a preference swap with the WA Liberals that, far from helping, incensed the supporters of both parties and handed Labor an issue to belt them all with. Hanson then sacked the elderly mum-and-dad campaign team of Ron McLean, 87, and Marye Daniels, 79, who had brought the One Nation branch back to life, precipitating a public spat with the aggrieved pensioners.

She was forced to retract comments critical of child vaccination, and got herself into a muddle by suggesting that Queensland should be docked GST revenue to top up WA’s share of the tax take.

The opinion polls continued to track south for One Nation, giving rise to speculation that her new-found popularity had peaked. At the end of April, Galaxy had the party on 17 per cent in Queensland, down seven points.

The ALP believes that “soft” Hanson support drifted back into its column to help Palaszczuk leapfrog into a potentially winning position over the LNP, 52-48 after preferences. The next round of Queensland-based polls will be crucial. If One Nation’s slide intensifies and Palaszczuk’s puzzlingly ineffective LNP opponent Tim Nicholls doesn’t lift his game, it may embolden the innately cautious Premier to roll the dice with an early election.

Hanson needs to get the media spotlight off her messy backroom dramas and back on to the major parties, lickety-split. The problem is that the cracks zigzag into the foundations of One Nation, as another damaging leak underlined her sensitivity about the cash that was stumped up by developer Bill McNee’s Melbourne-based company Vicland.

Each of the key players — Ashby, McNee, disgruntled former party boss and treasurer Ian Nelson, his friend and former party secretary Saraya Beric — had crucial, often interlocking roles in getting Pauline Hanson’s One Nation up and running again a decade after it had collapsed in a smoking heap in the wake of her jailing for electoral fraud in 2003. (The conviction was famously quashed on appeal.)

Hanson acknowledged this in her first speech as a newly minted senator last September 14.

With “deep appreciation and sincerity” she thanked 37-year-old Ashby, a kindred soul who too had been “kicked about … unfairly” by the establishment, for the dedication and hard work that was the “clincher” to her re-election 18 years after she was tipped out of the House of Representatives; Nelson, 66, for “asking me to come back and lead the party”; Beric, 32, for her “invaluable” service to the office and the campaign; and, of course, McNee and his wife, Renata, who “helped me spread my wings”. This was taken by those in the know to be a nod to McNee for helping purchase the $106,000 Jabiru two-seater that Ashby, a pilot, used to fly Hanson to federal election campaign stops last year.

The problem for Hanson was that the plane did not fall into the donations or gifts in kind declared to the Australian Electoral Commission by Nelson in his then capacity as treasurer and registered agent. McNee gave nearly $70,000 in early 2015 in a disclosed donation that was used to rent off­ices and bring on staff, including Beric, in Brisbane.

The developer had been so keen to donate that he chased Beric to take his money. “I would like to become a major financial supporter of your party and discuss any further ways I may be of assistance to your party,” he wrote in an opening email to the young woman, copied to Nelson. On March 15, 2015, keen to lock in a meeting with Hanson, he emailed Beric again, saying: “Sorry to be pushy … I’m so eager to offer support to a party that has the courage to stand up for ordinary Australians and give us a voice.”

Ashby took delivery of the new Jabiru on July 10, 2015, and kitted it out in One Nation livery.

He told his local ABC radio station on the Sunshine Coast that he had helped Hanson find an Australian-made aircraft because “Pauline’s all about keeping things local”.

When a curious ABC reporter asked her about the plane on July 4 last year, on the heels of her re-election, Hanson agreed it was owned by the party.

A few days later, Beric says she received a phone call from Ashby, asking her to “get Ian Nelson to do the AEC financial return as soon as possible so that the media could see that Bill hadn’t been a significant donor for the campaign”. Beric says McNee was also on the line, hooked into a three-way call. “Bill brought up the plane and asked, ‘What about the plane?’ ” she remembers. “James said that it didn’t need to be declared because Bill had transferred the money to him, it was in his name.”

By then Hanson was barely on speaking terms with Nelson, who had clashed fiercely with Ashby, putting the party veteran firmly on the outer. The Australian reported on August 8 last year that Nelson had been stripped of his role as Queensland treasurer in favour of Hanson’s brother-in-law Greg Smith, who also would take over many of Beric’s duties as office manager.

But Nelson retained enough regard for Hanson, a friend of two decades’ standing, to email her last September 7 describing how he had lost sleep “over the way we departed”.

“I have had … several requests from a number of stations/programs to do interviews,” he wrote. “I have politely declined them all. I have no intention of possibly providing anyone with ammunition to harm you or the party which I have supported, loved and worked for, for twenty-odd years.”

On November 20, Nelson recorded his conversation with an agitated Hanson about an article that was to appear in The Australian the next day, identifying McNee as the party’s biggest donor. The reference to McNee in her first speech to the Senate had been oblique — he had been mentioned only as Bill, surname omitted — and she was livid at the leak, when the knowledge of his largesse had been confined to just four people in the party: Ashby, Nelson, Beric and Hanson. “Who the bloody hell did they get that off?” Nelson said.

He revealed this week, after the recording was leaked to the ABC and The Courier-Mail, that it was his practice to record important conversations, and Hanson would have known this when she spoke to him.

In any event, Nelson said his feud with Ashby and final break with Hanson were old news, covered in exhaustive detail by The Weekend Australian on January 7, including Hanson’s withering description of him as a “shithead”. He tells Inquirer: “I was going to stay away from all of this, but because of the constant bagging and slandering by Pauline Hanson and her cohorts of Saraya Beric and myself, we find it no longer tenable to be quiet.”

Beric has said in a statement: “I reserve my right to take whatever action is required to protect my reputation from ongoing public attacks that are without substance.”

This week’s leak was the second to have shaken Hanson, coming on top of the embarrassing recording of Ashby proposing a scam, in her presence, to inflate the party’s declared campaign costs for the next Queensland election to secure a higher refund from the state electoral commission.

While the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission says it has no jurisdiction to investigate, Queensland police have approached Ashby for an interview, which he has made conditional on detectives handing over an unedited copy of the leaked recording. Hanson has blamed Nelson and Beric for the breach.

Ashby admits he was foolish to have floated the idea to overcharge the Electoral Commission of Queensland in a “brainstorming” session at One Nation HQ late last year but is adamant no law was broken as the plan was never implemented.

But those with long memories are struck by how history seems to be repeating. An openly gay Ashby has stepped into the shoes once filled by David Oldfield, the senior adviser whom Hanson claims to have bedded when the original One Nation melodrama was running in the late 1990s. (For the record, Oldfield denies they had a sexual relationship.)

And for the estranged Nelson, read David Ettridge, the founding director of One Nation, who last month made a separate complaint to the Queensland police about Hanson’s handling of the ECQ return from the 1998 state election. Ettridge, 71, is chasing the party to honour what he says is an indemnity to pay his costs for being jailed alongside Hanson in 2003.

McNee, meanwhile, is sticking to his policy of not speaking to journalists. Contacted by phone, he politely thanked Inquirer for the call and hung up.