One Nation guns furore: party figures ‘set up’, says Hanson

Pauline Hanson has appealed directly to voters to accept that she was not prepared to undermine Australia’s gun laws.

Senator Pauline Hanson holds a press conference with chief of staff James Ashby and QLD One Nation Leader Steve Dixon, Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices, Brisbane. Photographer: Liam Kidston

Pauline Hanson has appealed ­directly to voters to accept that she was not prepared to undermine Australia’s gun laws in return for US gun lobby cash, warning her One Nation party had been set up by state-owned Arab news service Al Jazeera in this country’s “first case of severe political interference from a foreign government”.

She spoke out as the ABC put to air last night the second part of an expose by the Qatari broadcaster containing hidden camera footage of another key One Nation figure outlining a scheme to funnel secret political donations from America through a “spaghetti” of companies controlled by US President Donald Trump’s wealthiest patrons.

Senator Hanson slammed Scott Morrison after the Prime Minister directed the Liberal Party to preference One Nation below Labor at the coming federal election — a move that would be fatal to the government, she predicted.

“You have just handed the keys to The Lodge to Bill Shorten, (Greens leader Richard) Di Natale and the CFMEU,” she said, referring to the militant construction union. “You’re a fool.”

Senator Hanson and Mr Ashby as they appeared on hidden camera. Picture: Al Jazeera

Reaching out to voters who are set to head to the polls in May, Senator Hanson said the Australia media had picked up a story “that was too good to be true” from Al Jazeera, based on heavily edited footage that had presented out-of-context secretly recorded conversations with her, chief of staff James Ashby and One Nation’s Queensland leader Steve Dickson.

Fronting reporters for the first time since the furore erupted, she said: “You have come here baying for my blood and I will not give it to you. I answer to the Australian people only and they will have their say at the ballot box.”

She said the documentary, How to Sell A Massacre, amounted to a political attack on One Nation by Al Jazeera in co-operation with the ABC.

The revelations have thrown One Nation into chaos, but Senator Hanson yesterday stood by her two pivotal allies in the party, defying pressure to sack them.

While Mr Ashby had made “some stupid remarks” and Mr Dickson’s statements had initially disgusted her, she said they had been set up and deserved a second chance.

She also rejected claims that in another covertly videoed conversation, she had given oxygen to conspiracy theories around the Port Arthur massacre of 35 people in 1996 by a lone gunman, the trigger for banning automatic and semi-automatic weapons under Australia’s beefed-up gun laws.

Mr Ashby handles a weapons in a scene from How To Sell A Massacre. Picture: Al Jazeera

In last night’s episode she is captured on hidden camera saying of the rampage: “An MP said it would actually take a massacre in Tasmania to actually change the gun laws in Australia … Have a look at it … it was said on the floor of parliament … those shots, they were precision shots. Check the number out.”

But yesterday, a furious Senator Hanson insisted the footage was “obviously heavily edited and does not reflect how I feel about those tragedies”.

“There is no question in my mind that Martin Bryant was the only person responsible,” she said.

Mr Ashby and Mr Dickson were duped into travelling to Washington last September by Al Jazeera’s undercover man, NSW dog food supplier Rodger Muller, who posed as an Australian gun rights activist to infiltrate the US gun lobby.

He arranged for them to see a representative of Koch ­Industries, the company owned by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2016 election campaign to elect Mr Trump president, as well as with the powerful National Rifle ­Association.

Evidently, the Americans were fooled as comprehensively as One Nation.

Encouraged by the friendly ­reception, Mr Dickson said at one point he hoped to extract $10 million in US donations, while Mr Ashby suggested they should go for $20m and win the seats that would deliver to One Nation the balance of power in parliament.

In the footage aired last night, Mr Dickson explains: “The thing you need to understand about the balance of power is the headlock and the 9mm to the back of the head. That’s where it sits. Once you say, ‘We want something’, we will get it. Without it, they don’t get any legislation through.”

One Nation chief Steve Dickson with a weapon. Picture: Al Jazeera

While pitching to Koch executive Catherine Haggett at the company’s Washington office, Mr Dickson says: “We can change the voting system in our country, the way people operate, if we have got the money to do it … The ingredients are there. We just don’t have the petrol to put in the engine, whatever you could do would be fantastic.”

Later, he tells Mr Muller, who purported to head an Australian gun rights group that was actually a sham, set up for the sting, that One Nation would use US money to push the federal government to “supersede” state legislation giving effect to the post-Port Arthur gun laws banning automatic and semiautomatic weapons.

Speculating that cash from the NRA would be red-flagged, even if it went through the cutout of Mr Muller’s bogus Gun Rights Australia organisation, Mr Dickson says in the hidden camera footage: “The (Australian) Electoral Commission will just come out at you going, ‘We are doing a full audit’ … and it will take five seconds to find it’s coming from the NRA.”

He suggests money could be routed through Koch company ­accounts to avoid being traced. “They do this shit all the time in countries all over the world,” Mr Dickson says, unaware he is being taped. “This ain’t the first time. It’s impossible to track where the money is coming from because it’s like spaghetti … boof, boof, boof, it ends up in your glass.’’

Al Jazeera’s director of invest­igative journalism, Phil Rees, stood by the documentary, saying that Senator Hanson had not been misrepresented.