What a huge ten days in politics! To end a week dominated by the aftershocks of Pauline Hanson’s jailing, contributions from Webdiarists who support the verdict and/or the sentence. As with everything concerning Hanson and her clashes with ‘the system’, the story is complicated, many layered, and utterly fascinating, particularly in what it says about where Australians are at in their conversations about our nation and its values.
Webdiarists’ Hanson reaction pattern is like the Tampa one – first a flood of emails outraged at the sentence, then defenders start to trickle in and gradually build in numbers. The strange thing is that many of the same people outraged by Howard’s Tampa sting are also outraged by Hanson’s jail term. Like the Tampa, many Australians are keen to get their views on this matter recorded for posterity. I’ll do my best, but there’s no way I’m going to be able publish everyone. So the usual request – if you’ve written a corker that hasn’t got a run, please re-send.
I’m debuting as a columnist for the Sun Herald on Sunday. It’s on Hanson, of course.
Geoff Kitney, our bureau chief in Canberra, in his brilliant column today, Cue the PM: ‘No one told me about that’, concluded:
For all their unseemly manoeuvring to try to protect themselves from any political backlash from Hanson’s imprisonment, both sides will be hoping the appeal court confirms her crime and her punishment.
Unusually, I disagreed. I reckon the major parties – if they’re intelligent – hope her jail term is dropped. What do you think?
I’ve just watched Lateline’s Friday debate before publishing. Mark Latham -v- Queensland Liberal backbencher, brilliant barrister, and strong civil rights defender George Brandeis on Abbott’s Hanson sting and his lies about it. In the middle, Tony Jones, the bloke who asked Abbott the question in 1998 on Four Corners, the bloke Abbott looked in the eye and lied to.
The last time I saw Latham on Lateline he debated opposite number Abbott on Howard misleading Parliament about his meeting with Manildra’s Dick Honan. It couldn’t be Abbott now, could it? Betcha Abbott is moved as manager of opposition business real quick, just like Peter Reith was after the Telecard scandal. Abbott can’t do outrage about the other side’s sins any more. George did his best, but the brief was so shocking even he didn’t sound convincing, poor bastard. Talk about getting the job from hell!
I’m debuting as a columnist for the Sun Herald on Sunday. It’s on Hanson, of course. Have a good weekend.
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Jason Hall in Newcastle emailed a complaint about Webdiary’s content and direction at the moment:
Margo, I used to like the Webdiary for its quirkiness, however it now has a sameness which is stale. Please, there is more to write about than the Government. Have a look at the headlines of the last 20 entries – what they tell you, and ultimately your readers, is that the Webdiary has become one dimensional and a comment guided by your politics. Let’s cover more than the government – it’s become boring!
Is it time for another navel gaze about Webdiary’s content? What do other readers think about Jason’s point?
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Anne Ryan
Oh please, Margo, “…let Pauline Hanson walk free”???! You can’t deny that she broke the law, cynically and with clear intent. Don’t replace hypocrisy with more hypocrisy – you do yourself, and us, a disservice.(Margo: Hi Anne. Have a read of Anthony Green’s piece Perils of Pauline: her breach of ‘club’ rules was technical rather than deceit.)
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Diana Lyons
I sort of agree with your comments in Mother of the nation in jail, its father in charge, but really, Pauline Hanson does deserve her sentence and I do not feel sorry for her.
This ignorant woman seemed to believe that becoming a politician was in some way the equivalent of becoming a film star – a gaudy wardrobe, lots of attention from fawning media and instant ‘celebrity’ status, all without actually having to work at anything. Apart from that maiden speech, which was written for her, not by her, she spent precious little time in the house during her term, instead preferring to party in Canberra’s night spots. She did not vote on legislation, again because she failed to attend. She spent buckets of money – party funds, election allowances etc on cars for her kids, extensions to her home, overseas trips to meet her American boyfriend and a truly horrendous wardrobe.
She knew exactly what she was doing in setting up One Nation as a company with three directors who had full control and a bunch of ‘supporters’ who had no rights apart from supplying cash. Apart from her appalling beliefs, the division she stirred up and the legacy she left John Howard, please, someone, tell me just what her achievements as a political leader were? I can’t think of any.
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Con Vaitsas in Sydney
Margo, Mother of the nation in jail, its father in charge was spot on except for the 2nd last line “…let Pauline Hanson walk free”.
No way does she deserve to get off scott free. She is lucky she got only 3 years – many ordinary Australians have had to endure 7 years of abuse since she came to prominence and gave Aussies the OK to release their racism in public on anyone they thought did not match their view of a typical Aussie.
Sure she may not have spat on, verbally or physically abused anyone, but she gave succour to those intolerant ratbags who lurk in the community to go out and do such things in public – in the street, a car park or a shopping centre. I myself came close to blows on several occasions because I made it my business to interfere with passengers being abused because of their ethnicity.
What was so depressing about some of those train incidents was that the carriages were full of people but no-one made any attempt to say anything to stop the abuse, It was a case of minding their own business, which annoys me even more.
And sure, I know that if Howard had come out at the start of Hansonism and told Australia that he strongly disagreed with her views on people from certain ethnic backgrounds and Aborigines a lot of people might have been saved from harassment and abuse.
So you see, Margo, I feel she got what she deserved. Speaking to a couple of people today, they felt relieved she was sent to prison because of her views against their cultural background. They used to feel unsafe when she was at her peak with popular support. (Margo: Do they feel safer under post-Hanson Howard?)
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Mary Jones (nom de plume)
Having read much of the outrage in Webdiary and elsewhere in the media since Hanson was jailed, and taken time to think about it, I can’t believe what you and some of your fellow lefties are saying. I agree with everything Richard Ackland said in today’s SMH (Hanson’s fraud had major political consequences, as did her bigotry).
Don’t for a minute think I’m saying that Abbott and Howard’s comments re slush funds, who did what and what they said and when etc etc have been totally believable. They haven’t!! Their continued tendency to deceive, twist the truth and play with words is outrageous.
But for God’s sake, can’t some journalists, just for once, calm down and realise that what Hanson and Ettridge did was illegal and they deserved to be punished. Maybe three years does seem a bit long, but Karen Erhmann here in Queensland has also been jailed for electoral fraud. Matt Price is right in The Oz when he points to the incredible hypocrisy of Labor and as for Bronwyn Bishop, well…what would you expect from her. (Margo: I fail to see Labor’s hypocrisy. It was up front from the beginning opposing Hanson’s policies, strongly. Of course they urged Howard to argue the case too, but he didn’t. Where’s the hypocrisy? I was surprised by Matt’s piece. I love his work, but maybe he’s been in the gallery too long. I recommend a fabulous piece in this morning’s Australian Financial Review by the paper’s bureau chief Tony Walker. An extract:
Surely the bigger issue in all of this, in light of Pauline Hanson’s sentencing and associated static, is what it reminds us about the sort of duplicitous game being played by the Liberal Party back in 1997-98 in dealing with the One Nation insurgency on its conservative flank., and what it reveals now about lingering fallout from that period. Back to Mary Jones…)
I have voted for a range of political parties in my life. I support some of Howard’s decisions and there are many I disagree with. I have worked as a journalist and now teach at a university (a grossly underfunded one mind you!!). I’m preparing to do my PhD on an aspect of journalism relating to media coverage of the environment, the influence of the Internet and how this all sits in a globalised world. I’m just sick and tired of reading and listening to the “Howard haters” within Australia’s media reacting to every story and nuance coming out of Canberra, as if they’ve finally ‘got him’.
By all means report the facts in a truthful and fair manner, but don’t let your hatred for Howard and co so distort your reporting and commentary that it begins to sound totally ‘off the planet’.
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Greg Abbott
Margo, let’s not over intellectualise this. Pauline Hanson is not exempt from the legal process just because she brandishes (divisive, ignorant and hurtful) political views. (Margo: Agreed in spades!)
Ms Hanson appears to have thought she was above the law and that she did not have to go through due process to establish her party and have access to “ordinary Australians'” money.
How are you really able to argue that the “elite” have conspired to achieve this result. (Margo: I did not argue that.) Should enforcement agencies not have investigated? (I didn’t argue that either.) Should the public prosecutor not have prosecuted? (Or that.) Was the judge biased or politically motivated in her sentencing (a very serious charge)? (Definitely not – in fact I castigated Bronwyn Bishop for doing just that – see Now Abbott lies about lying, copies Howard’s Manildra)
No, this is not some attack by the “elite”. “Ordinary Australians” have with little apparent hesitation found her guilty of intentionally committing a serious crime, one that involved both fraud and interference with our system of democracy.
Some of the words you have written today seems to support the “martyr” role her few remaining supporters are trying to conjure. Why don’t you go and leave a message of support on her website then … (Because I don’t support her.)
Yours, with tongue partly in cheek. (Thank God for that!)
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Tom Chesson
A member of the right wing of politics taking on the extremes of the far right and wins – how dare Mr Abbott have the courage to do something like that? He’s not even a fully fledged Member of the latte set. Hanson and her cohort are in jail for RORTING the Australian public out of half a million dollars. She has been found guilty not by any political party but by a jury of 12 of her fellow Queenslanders.
No matter how much money Abbott raised, not even he could rort the Queensland criminal justice system. Far from being ridiculed for ridding Australia of an extremely dangerous group of conspiracy freaks, the Labor Party should be taking a leaf out of Mr Abbott’s book and take on the dangerous fringe groups gaining some respectability on the left wing spectrum of politics.
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Marcus Vernon
Margo, I haven’t checked in with Webdiary for some time, for various reasons, but felt I had to after the Hanson verdict. I was shocked to see dreadful picture of you at the top of the page. How long has that been there??! (Margo: Since I published Webdiary’s ethics last month) Who on earth decided that was a good idea? (My news editor) Please lose it asap. We don’t need or want any personality cults in the media.
As to Hanson, the three-year sentence was appalling, way way over the top. I’m no fan of Hanson, and knew she had neither the intelligence or organisational kills to develop a genuine, long-lasting presence in politics. But I supported her right to say what she thought (which has since been picked up by other pollies and community groups) and stand for election if she felt that was the way to go.
I liked your piece on the verdict, Mother of the nation in jail, its father in charge, although I think Howard has done nothing more than what other opportunistic pollies, including Hawke, would have done.
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Gary Fallon in Noble Park, Victoria
I have been under the misapprehension that the term ‘right wing bleeding heart’ was an oxymoron – until I read the newspapers! The One Nation Onanists are up in arms because Pauline Hanson, in accordance with the laws that prevail in the state of Queensland, has been found guilty of fraud. There are disingenuous claims that the crime was ‘victimless’, a novel concept to say the least. Even under good old Joh, the laws of Queensland needed to have this test applied. Somehow these individuals feel that ignorance of the law should be a reason for it not to apply. Although ‘ignorance’ is certainly a hallmark of Hanson, I note that they are unwilling to extend this defence to anyone else in the criminal justice system.
I wonder what the reactions of the One Nation Onanists would be to a situation where an Aborigine falsely completes an employment application for a position in a bank. Through this she obtains employment and then proceeds to defraud the bank of $500,000 to help her local community fight alcoholism and domestic violence. She is charged, tried in a court of law, and despite having arranged repayment of the money to the bank, is found guilty by a jury and sentenced to three years imprisonment by the judge.
Would One Nation Onanists be claiming the sentence is ‘racially based’? Would they be claiming that the sentence is ‘too severe’? Or would they demand that the maximum sentence (I believe this is 10 years) be applied and decry the fact the courts are too lenient on criminals?
Somehow, I think we all know the answer to this; our poor Aborigine would not receive the One Nation sympathy that Precious Pauline has! Ah, the hypocrisy of the ignorant right!
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Andrew Stapleton in Sydney
In an effort to show that they can be magnanimous in victory the ‘left elite’ are tripping over themselves and the facts of the case.
In Too severe on stupidity Mike Carlton said: “On reflection, I think her sentence is too much. Her crime was not deliberate, more a stupid administrative error” (SMH August 23, 2003)
Richard Glover in At least the Sunshine State is safe from angry pen wielders said: “This week it was the turn of Pauline Hanson, who’d made a hash of her party paperwork. There were all sorts of forms that were filled out incorrectly.” (SMH August 23, 2003)
Margo Kingston feels ‘sorry’ for Hanson and says: “Australia’s political, police and legal establishment has put Pauline Hanson – fish and chip shop heroine to the poor, the ignorant and the disenfranchised, the woman who created a party out of nothing in an instant and mobilised Australians never before involved in politics – behind bars.” (SMH online, August 21, 2003)
Politicians from B. Carr to B. Bishop feel that prison was inappropriate.
A fundamental element of the platform on which Pauline Hanson ran was that Australia had become an oligarchy, in so far as the major parties had been captured by an elite and no longer responded to the concerns of ordinary Australians. Her One Nation party was intended as a grass roots party that would represent the interests of the forgotten Australians.
There are differing levels of democracy in political parties. At the most democratic end are the Australian Democrats who may have come unstuck because they were too democratic. The membership of the Democrats can all vote to elect the parliamentary leader of the party which is fine if the membership is similar to the people who vote for the party but when the party became dominated by Uni students attracted to Natasha and chose her as its leader it alienated a significant proportion of its voter base, middle aged housewives from the North Shore. A significant portion of the damage to the Democrats was caused by Natasha framing her speeches and policies so that they appealed to her electoral base within the party
rather the electoral base of the party.
The Liberal, Labor and National parties have a more stable model of internal democracy. Any Australian elector can join the local branch of their preferred party (membership of political parties has dwindled over the past couple of decades and these parties would be delighted to get new members) and then vote in the preselection for the local candidate.
Occasionally a party’s head office will overrule that preselection, as the Liberals did with Hanson in 1997, but generally they will accept the branch’s choice. The party’s parliamentary membership then elects a leader of the party.
When Hanson, Ettridge and Oldfield and were setting up Pauline Hanson’s One Nation political party they decided they didn’t want to allow members any democratic vote in running the party. They created a separate skin, the Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Members Inc., for the membership that could be shed if it raised its voice against the leadership. This membership organisation had no control over the allocation of party funding, the selection of candidates or who would lead (the Party) Pauline Hanson’s One Nation political party.
Hanson and Ettridge fell foul of the law when they went to register the political party in Queensland. The Queensland Electoral Act 1992 Sect 70 (e) requires that if the party does not have one member of the party who is a member of the Legislative Assembly they needed to ‘set out the names and addresses of 500 members of the party who are electors’.
Although they had at least 18,000 supporters they did not have 500 members because they had chosen to allow only themselves, the leadership, membership of the party, kind of like an oligarchy. In her sentencing statement Judge Wolfe said:
In finding you guilty the jury has accepted that you, David Ettridge, as the person who was one of the National Management Committee of the party, one of the three, and you, Ms Hanson, as another member of that Management Committee, as well as being the president and vice president respectfully of the support movement knew, Ms Hanson, when you caused to be handed in a list of members, and which Mr Ettridge had obtained for the purpose of providing to the Electoral Commission, that it was not a list of members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the political party. The jury, in their verdicts, has found that both of you knew that it was a list of members of the support movement.
It is absurd for Hanson and Ettridge to claim that they didn’t realise the list of people submitted were not members having intentionally structured the party to exclude those people from membership.
It is a red herring to suggest that Hanson and Ettridge didn’t personally benefit and so the fraud can be forgiven – they were effectively the One Nation party and its success was their success. Judge Wolfe pointed out that registration of One Nation in Queensland conferred a couple of benefits on the party. Registration allowed the party to make a claim for electoral funding and it meant that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation appeared on the ballot paper easily identifying its candidates. Further more, if the One Nation candidates had stood as independents under a One Nation banner those that garnered more than 4% of the vote would themselves have been entitled to the electoral funding.
The greatest fraud was perpetrated on the supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation who thought that they were joining a democratic party and would have some measure of influence.
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Tim Gillin in Randwick, Sydney
Your discussion of the harsh treatment dished out to Pauline Hanson puts all the blame on Howard. Politicians really do deserve our contempt but it needs to be spread around more. (Margo: Not true! I also gave a big blast to Keating.)
You have left the whole left wing and “Big M” Multiculturalist hate campaign against Hanson off the hook. These self described opponents of racism and “friends of diversity” showed zero tolerance for opinions other than their own monologue. (I made this very point in my book.)
That some less optimistic souls wish to apply the Greens’ “precautionary principle” when massive state managed social engineering is foist on the only country we have, was frankly beyond these dogma addicts.
You rightfully pointed out that Howard’s refugee detention policies are actually tougher than the
position publicly advocated by Hanson. But somehow you managed to completely miss what Howard’s immigration policies really are.
Although the left accuse Howard’s tough line against mass maritime illegal immigrants as racist /xenophobic, his total policy seems quite different, at least according to Ross Gittins.(He’s kept it bloody quiet though – and he’s safe, because Labor won’t argue. And he’s skewed the intake away from humanitarian in a big way.)
If Gittins is right Howard may be playing a magician’s trick. Gittins seems to be saying that, despite Woomera, Howard has actually run the ‘least European’ immigration policy in our history. Future generations of multiculturalist pundits will no doubt rehabilitate his reputation a la Fraser. The two card trick was up until now Keating’s specialty. The “vision thing” on one hand, economic rationalism up the sleeve.
What does the average Australian think about all this? The last figures I saw come from this old 1996 article that show low interest in immigration as a ‘hot button’ issue. The public really has more important things to think about, but when pressed for their views, the majority position is one neither the government or white collar left would support. In fact these two apparent foes are solidly allied against public opinion.
This (admittedly old) poll explains Howard’s machiavellian tactics. It also explains the extreme paranoid (indeed “McCarthyist” in the worst sense) insecurity of the multicultural lobby. Pundits may accuse the Australian people for being scared about maritime hordes, but the anxiety in Moonee Ponds is nothing compared to the multiculturalists fear over an unplanned outbreak of public opinion.
I don’t believe there was a conspiracy to put Hanson in prison, but it is hard to believe she received a fair go when Hawke hero Alan Bond misplaces a billion dollars and serves three years. Anyone concerned with justice needs to examine whether the establishment and left’s joint campaign hasn’t steamrolled a mutually inconvenient and pesky nonconformist.
German poet Rev. Martin Niemoller once wrote: “First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Could it be that in cosmopolitan, globaloney, multicultural Australia, they are coming for the xenophobes first?