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.
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).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.
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.
AL, check out VDare.com, there is good in depth coverage of this story in their archives.
Hi.
Pauline is thick as two short planks, and she sacked everybody who made her feel stupid. She was great at getting press coverage and votes (by tapping into widespread and serious dissatisfactions), despite lack of money and total pariah status, but she never established anything that could be called a political machine. Since everybody with money and connections was against her, she couldn’t get funding to put her shambolic party on anything like a professional basis, thus public funding (which was brought in by the major parties to give themselves some free dough) was crucial to her. She was literally funding the party by winning votes, but since she would be unable to organize a chook raffle and the laws were slightly confusing, she was always going to muck it up, putting her in illegal possession of hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money.
Tony Abbott, the guy that took after her, was a Rhodes scholar and is a very smart guy indeed. When I’ve seen him debate, he’s impressed me a lot. He saw Pauline’s critical weakness, and he despises her politics (very justifiably) and her wits, so he set up funding for a legitimate investigation that caught her dead to rights and led inevitably to a public prosecution that could have only one result. This was not a case of a vigilante judge: Pauline had indeed violated the law, and the judge could have sent her down for even more time if he had wanted to.
It’s not a case of Pauline going to the chokey for years because she is a right winger. She was a sitting duck because she was bereft of big money backing and inside connections, she was challenging all parties as an outsider, she was getting money from a system that was never intended to benefit someone like her (regardless of any rhetoric about all candidates being equal) so she was violating the unwritten spirit of the law, and mainly, and I can’t emphasise this too stongly, she is a stupid, impulsive, disorganized drongo. Anyone who fit that profile, whether right, left or libertarian Martian, would have been begging for for the full wrath of the law.
Politics is no place for beginners, outsiders, empty pockets and witless enthusiam. That lesson has been well learned, and it’ll be many a long year before anyone else tries to do what Pauline did.
That’s my personal take on the thing anyway.
Armed Liberal, is that what you wanted to know? If you ask more specific questions, I can try to be more helpful: hunt up facts or whatever. If you don’t give me any more specific handle on what you want, giving you my broad impression is about all I can do.
Just to add a little bit more here, under Queensland’s electoral law, to register a party requires proof that it has at least 500 members. Successful registration means it can contest elections and receive public money based upon the number of votes it receives.
This presented her One Nation Party with a problem, because it was set up so that there would only ever be a handful of members (we’re talking 3 or so here), with a number of other people left with the idea they had joined the party, whereas all they had joined was the ‘supporters group’ that had actually no say whatever concerning the running of the party.
David:
You actually answered a big part of my question; if the ‘list fraud’ led to substantial public funding, I’m beginning to see the issue a bit more clearly.
A.L.
Point form summary:
“One Nation” The party, was set up so that only a handful of people were “Inner Party” with control, the rest were “Outer Party”, with no control.
“Inner Party” = “One Nation”, “Outer Party” = “Pauline Hanson Supporters”, who were under the impression they were all “One Nation” party members.
By Federal Electoral Law, this meant that the party size was 500+3, both Inner and Outer Party together. By Queensland State Electoral Law, it was 3, and you need 500 for registration.
Funding for *registered* parties is based on the number of votes they get in the election.
One Nation got itself registered. It then got a lot of votes, so got a lot of money.
Then a civil lawsuit was instituted, showing that by Queensland law, although One Nation had the votes, technically it wasn’t a registered party (it had been incorrectly registered). The lawsuit was funded by shadowy figures, and a trust fund set up headed by members of both major political parties, Liberal and Labor. Chief amongst them is Liberal Hatchetman Tony Abbot, who to his credit has never tried to conceal the fact.
The Lawsuit succeeded, so the 2 people that actually were the One Nation Party (by Queensland rules) had to give all the money back, despite having the votes to earn it. As it had mostly been spent on campaign expenses, they had to appeal to the Outer Party for funds, and got them.
Time passes.
Just before the next election campaign starts, the Queensland DPP, which Chief Justice Patsy Wolfe described in 2001 as “Highly politicised”, then instituted a criminal complaint against both One Nationers. The Queensland Govt is Labor.
Found Guilty, sentenced (by CJ Patsy Wolfe) to 3 years with no non-parole period, which means they’ll have to serve at least 18 months. Compare with people who have confessed to 47 seperate counts of out-and-out electoral fraud, who got parole after 9 months. And others in the ruling party who haven’t been charged, despite confessing to comparable crimes (“Branch Stacking” in preselection battles).
Pauline Hanson is under Maximum Security (for her own protection) being very much “Law n Order”, and perceived as being racist. She’s effectively in solitary confinement, like a handful of murderers and dangerous thugs.
Pauline Hanson is now ineligible to stand for election, which is the whole point of the exercise regardless of the sentence.
See articles on my blog.
Hi.
What Garth Godsman said is right. After proving repeatedly that she wasn’t up to leading any party where people could talk back to her and organize around her, Pauline went with a half-smart reorganization that defined her party as something like a dictatorship. Being an utter nong, she did it in a way that was illegal, as well as wrecking her moral cause, which required her to represented the underrepresented and talk straight with the people.
This wasn’t the first time Pauline had king-hit her own key principles. She also insisted that immigration was a problem because the cultures of the non-assimilating immigrants were incompatible with One Nation, and she also said that she didn’t have a thing against any number of immigrants if only they’d Talk Proper English. When John Pasquarelli pointed out she was blowing up her own cultural argument, his days with Pauline were numbered.
Since Pauline’s only way of dealing with people who noticed that she was contradicting herself was to exclude them, the final structure of her party was a logical culmination.
And yes, the ‘list fraud’ did lead to substantial public funding.
Anyway, glad to help, Armed Liberal.