New One Nation but same old betrayals

If anyone knows Pauline Hanson in all her perverse glory, it’s Brian Burston. Adding fuel to the fire now is Mark Latham.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson appears on Sky News on Thursday.

The more Pauline Hanson talks about back-stabbing and betrayal, the more it sounds like the same old story for One Nation.

As usual, the villain is one of her own, Brian Burston, the last man standing from the class of 2016 that rode on her coat-tails into the Senate at the last federal election, a fellow traveller of 20 years’ standing who became so disillusioned he sought to defect to the NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party.

If anyone knows Hanson in all her perverse glory, it’s Burston. He had fallen out and made up with the flame-haired populist before joining her Senate ticket two years ago and now, whether she likes it or not, he can make or break her remaining influence as the government battles to pass Malcolm Turnbull’s signature corporate tax cuts.

Without Burston, Hanson wields just two Senate votes — her own and that of West ­Australian Peter Georgiou, who replaced brother-in-law Rod ­Culleton after his disqualification from parliament.

Culleton, of course, had fallen out with Hanson well before he was felled by an old larceny ­conviction.

Fraser Anning — the Queenslander who replaced dual-­citizenship casualty Malcolm Roberts — jettisoned One Nation on the day he was sworn in to federal parliament, joining a rival bloc with conservative-minded independents Cory Bernardi and David Leyonhjelm. If Burston’s alienation is permanent, One ­Nation will have gone from being the biggest player on the crossbench behind the Greens to one of many minnows.

Senator Brian Burston. Picture: Kym Smith

Hanson shows no sign of wanting to mend the breach with her one-time parliamentary whip. Far from it. Live on Sydney radio yesterday, a blindsided Burston was read a letter from her demanding that he immediately quit the Senate and surrender his spot to One Nation. It had been sent to his parliamentary office while he was out.

Warning she had lost confidence in him, she wrote: “Please consider resigning from the Senate seat and hand it back to the party. It would be the honourable thing to do as you would not be a senator but for your association with me. You describe yourself as loyal to me and I now ask you to demonstrate that loyalty by giving up your seat in the Senate.”

Burston insisted he was staying put, in both One Nation and parliament. “I thought I had joined … a democratic political party, not a dictatorship,” he said. “If she wants to remove me from One Nation she is entitled to cancel my membership and that will make me an independent. But that’s her call.”

Even by One Nation’s febrile standards, this brawl has been ­extraordinary, played out blow by blow in the media. After The Australian broke the story on Thursday that Burston had split with Hanson over the government’s $35.6 billion company tax cuts and would honour the deal to support them that she had disavowed, the One Nation leader tearfully told Sky News that Burston had “stabbed me in the back”.

And not for the first time either, she claimed. Hanson has a long memory, as Burston knows only too well. He entered her orbit in the late 1990s when One Nation was run as a troika between Hanson and the “two Davids” — future NSW upper house MP and media identity David Oldfield and small businessman David Ettridge. Hanson says Oldfield became her lover, which he denies, as well as chief political adviser, while Ettridge, now 72, ran the party organisation as national director. Both were to fall out with Hanson.

Burston, 70, succeeded Ettridge as One Nation boss in 2000 and sided with Oldfield when their working relation relationship with Hanson soured. In those days, the party HQ was in a first-floor office in the Sydney suburb of Manly. After demanding that Burston hand over files, Hanson locked Oldfield out of the office, who called the police. Hanson then moved to expel Oldfield from the party; Burston subsequently joined him in the breakaway iteration of One Nation that was Oldfield’s springboard into the NSW upper house.

Burston and Hanson remained estranged until another loyalist, Ian Nelson, lured her back into the One Nation fold in 2014. Nelson, too, is now on her blacklist, after clashing with her chief of staff, James Ashby. According to Ettridge, Hanson confided to him in 2016 that she was still wary of Burston, even though she had installed him as head of the One Nation Senate ticket in NSW.

“She told me that she had ­attended Brian’s pre-election rally … and he was so bad that she had to rise up from the audience and take over the meeting,” Ettridge said yesterday. “Then she said, ‘I’ll tell you what, he is hopeless and I wouldn’t vote for him’.”

Hanson’s backflip on supporting the government’s tax cuts on May 21 brought to a head the simmering tensions with Burston. Three nights later, he was venting over dinner with Leyonhjelm, “tossing around a whole series of options”. Leyonhjelm said Burston canvassed the idea of an alliance involving Anning and Ber­nardi — a bloc that would well and truly eclipse the rump One Nation on the crossbench. Burston was also sounding out the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers through an intermediary, who approached NSW director Filip Despotoski about two weeks ago with an ­intriguing offer. A sitting senator was looking to jump ship. Was he interested?

Despotoski was noncommittal, but agreed to keep talking. Then, on Thursday afternoon, his phone rang while he was sitting in traffic on Sydney’s M5 motorway. The intermediary was back on the line, explaining that the would-be ­defector was available for a meeting in Sydney next Friday.

According to Despotoski, it was only at this point that Burston’s name was mentioned. He reached out to party heavyweight and NSW upper house member Robert Borsak to weigh up the pros and cons. “It took us all of three of four minutes to reach the conclusion that it wouldn’t work out,” Despotoski said.

Not quite. Burston hit the airwaves to deny he had approached the Shooters, which was cute, given a cut-out had been involved. Despotoski was scathing, telling The Weekend Australian: “It’s all false. I have met Brian, I have spoken to him on the phone, in text messages, and he did try to make an indirect approach. This guy, this intermediary, is a person that I trust very highly and would have no reason to make this shit up … I have no gripes against One Nation. I think the feeling is mutual.”

Borsak said the events of the past 24 hours had confirmed his view that Burston wasn’t a fit.

Adding fuel to the flames, former Labor leader Mark Latham was said to be top of Hanson’s list to replace Burston. Latham refused to deny he had been approached by One Nation, while Bernardi said he knocked her back. The Daily Telegraph last night reported Latham was also being courted by Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm to return to politics. “There’s a fair chance we will run him as a candidate in one position or another, but it is still a work in progress,” Leyonhjelm said.