{"id":188,"date":"2003-09-07T19:13:56","date_gmt":"2003-09-07T19:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:19","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:19","slug":"the_question_of_ms_hanson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"The Question of Ms. Hanson"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve followed the Pauline Hanson story recently with a bit of interest, and have some questions I thought I’d toss into the luminiferous ether to see what floats back.<\/p>\n

For those who don’t use Google News as a homepage (you all do, right?) there was a brief flurry of stories a few weeks back about a right-wing populist MP in Oz who’d been charged with and imprisoned for electoral fraud (here’s a good overview<\/a>).Now there’s something in me that rejoices when politicians go to jail, because it shows that we all stand more-or-less equal before the law. But usually it’s for more venal things than this seemed. the base of the charge seemed kind of sketchy. It appears that she turned in petitions with the names of supporters, rather than party members, to get her party chartered. First, I can’t vouch of the exactitude of the charge (it’s only vaguely described in several of the articles I’ve seen). But if it is accurate, it’s potentially kind of alarming; this is the kind of dodgy paperwork that candidates do all the time (I should know, I’ve been an officer in several campaigns, and spent a lot of time cleaning up these kind of messes) and are typically fined for.<\/p>\n

So, out there in browserland, I’m wondering. What’s the story here? because the one thing that makes me damn uncomfortable is the thought that a politician unpopular with the authorities may wind up in jail for something others would get a ‘pass’ on. Note: I’m not in any way suggesting that that’s the case here. What I’m trying to do is see if anyone knows more about it and can enlighten me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.L.: The one thing that makes me damn uncomfortable is the thought that a politician unpopular with the authorities may wind up in jail for something others would get a ‘pass’ on. I’m trying to see if anyone knows more about it and can enlighten me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}