Pauline Hanson
Pauline Lee Hanson (born 27 May 1954) is a controversial Australian politician who was the leader of One Nation Party, a party with an anti-immigration, nativist platform. In 2006, she was named by The Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians of all time [1]. On 6 December 2006 she announced her intentions to run for election in the 2007 Australian federal elections.
Early life
Hanson was raised in Woolloongabba, an inner city suburb of Brisbane. Her father was an English immigrant who owned a popular take-away food shop. Pauline left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a variety of clerical and service jobs. She accumulated several rental properties whereby she became independently rich. She married twice and has four children. In her early political career, she was famous for having been a fish and chips shop owner in Ipswich, a city near Brisbane, a fact often referred to by political opponents and supporters alike.
Political background
Hanson was a member of the Liberal Party of Australia, and from 1994 to 1996 was a local councillor in the City of Ipswich. She was endorsed as the Liberal Party's candidate for the House of Representatives electorate of Oxley (based in Ipswich) for the March 1996 Federal election. After the 1993 Federal election, the electorate of Oxley was the safest held by the Australian Labor Party in the entire State of Queensland. However, comments she made to The Queensland Times [2], a daily newspaper in Ipswich, advocating the abolition of special government assistance for Aborigines above what was available for other Australians led to her disendorsement by the Liberal Party during the campaign. With the Liberal Party's name still appearing on the ballot paper and nominations having been closed by the Australian Electoral Commission for the registration of candidates so no other Liberal Party candidate appeared on the ballot paper, Pauline Hanson won the election easily, with the largest swing away from the Labor Party in Australia. A large proportion of her support came from traditional Labor Party voters.
On 10 September 1996, Pauline Hanson gave her first speech to the House of Representatives, which instantly made headlines and television news bulletins right across Australia. She warned that Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians" due to high immigration and the policy of multiculturalism, asserting "they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate." She also denounced the "privileges Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians", suggested the withdrawal of Australia from the United Nations, advocated the return of high-tariff protectionism and generally decried many other aspects of economic rationalism and what she perceived to be 'political correctness'. [3]
As a result of her controversial maiden speech, Hanson was briefly catapulted to the forefront of Australian politics, with the Australian population divided on whether Hanson was honest and plainspoken (a view more likely to be held in regional areas), a populist racist, or misinformed and uneducated. Hanson's critics derided what they saw as her inarticulate style—the very trait that her supporters took to be evidence of her credentials as a speaker 'for the people'. On 13 October 1996, asked by Tracey Curro on 60 Minutes if she was xenophobic, she replied "Please explain?". This has since become a catch phrase in Australia.
One Nation
On the back of her relatively small but loyal supporter base, in April 1997 she founded Pauline Hanson's One Nation with her senior advisor David Oldfield and professional fundraiser David Ettridge. Many of her branch formation meetings and political rallies across Australia in the next two years would attract protests, occasionally spilling over to violence between Hanson supporters and left wing protestors.
The peak of Hanson's success occurred in June 1998, when One Nation attracted nearly one-quarter of the vote in that month's State elections in Queensland, and One Nation won 11 out of 89 seats in the Queensland Legislative Assembly.
"Death" video
In November 1997 Hanson, under suggestion from Oldfield, recorded a video which was to be screened to One Nation members and supporters in the event of her assassination, following claims that she and her daughter had received anonymous death threats. [4] [5] The 12-minute tape started off with the following message:
Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means that I have been murdered. Do not let my passing distract you for even a moment
and then urged that
For the sake of our children and our children's children, you must fight on. Do not let my passing distract you for one moment. We must go forward together as Australians. Our country is at stake
Declining popularity
Ever since then, Hanson's popularity has declined. During the campaign for the Federal election of 3 October 1998, she supported a number of policies which alienated much of her support base, such as the abolition of pensions for single mothers, the abolition of all taxes to be replaced with a 2% tax on all financial transactions, and the reduction of the universal coverage of Australia's Medicare system.
She lost her seat in Parliament after an electoral redistribution split Oxley before the 1998 election. She contested the neighbouring Division of Blair and won 36% of the primary vote, about 15% more than her nearest rival. However, preferences were enough to elect the Liberal Party candidate, Cameron Thompson. Nationally, One Nation gained 9% of the vote, but only one MP was elected - Len Harris as Senator for Queensland. (Heather Hill was originally elected to this position, but the High Court of Australia ruled that although she was an Australian citizen, she was ineligible to sit as a Senator as she had not renounced her childhood British citizenship).
At the next Federal election on 10 November 2001, Hanson ran for a Queensland Senate seat but narrowly failed.
She has accounted for her declining popularity by blaming Prime Minister John Howard for "stealing her policies". Other interrelated factors which have contributed to her downfall include her connection with a series of mentors (John Pasquarelli, David Ettridge and David Oldfield), all of whom she has fallen out with; disputes amongst her supporters, including One Nation's high profile webmaster Scott Balson (who left the movement after a disagreement with Oldfield), and a lawsuit over the organisational structure of One Nation.
Hanson also claimed over the years to have been systematically misrepresented and publicly vilified by the mainstream media. In 1997, Professor David Flint observed: "Her message was presented in some quarters as if it were the voice of Satan. In fact, her views are more moderate than many right-wing parties in Western Europe." [6]
In 2003 she left Queensland, moved to Sylvania Waters, Sydney in New South Wales (NSW) and stood for the NSW Upper House in the 22 March State election. She lost narrowly to Shooters Party candidate John Tingle.
Pauline Hanson had also signalled her intention to pursue a career in country and western music, and she has worked as a promoter for Australian country musician Brian Letton. In 2006, she commenced a new career selling real estate in Queensland.
She has been parodied and impersonated by drag queen Pauline Pantsdown, who sampled snippets from Hanson's speeches to create a song called "I'm a Backdoor Man". After Hanson pursued legal action against Pantsdown, Pantsdown used the same technique to create the track "I Don't Like It", a 1998 Top 10 single in Australia. ("Why can't my blood be coloured white? I should talk to some medical doctors... coloured blood is just not right!", "I don't like anything, except, I like Neil Diamond" - Lyrics from I don't Like It).
Criminal action
On 20 August 2003, a jury convicted Hanson and Ettridge of electoral fraud. Hanson was sentenced to three years imprisonment by the District Court of Queensland for claiming that 500 members of the "Pauline Hanson Support Movement" were members of the political organisation "Pauline Hanson's One Nation", in order to register that organisation as a political party and apply for electoral funding. Because the registration was found to be unlawful, Hanson's receipt of electoral funding worth AUD$498,637 resulted in two further convictions for dishonestly obtaining property. Hanson's initial reaction to the verdict was - "Rubbish, I'm not guilty. It's a joke."
The case did not escape politicians' notice: Prime Minister John Howard thought it was "a very long, unconditional sentence". Bronwyn Bishop claimed Hanson was a political prisoner, drawing analogy between Hanson's conviction and the oppression of Robert Mugabe's opposition in his tyrannical Zimbabwean regime.
On 6 November 2003, the Queensland Court of Appeal (comprised by Chief Justice de Jersey, President McMurdo and Justice Davies) quashed Hanson's and Ettridge's convictions[7]. The Court's unanimous decision was that:
- the (more than) 500 persons on the list were members of the party;
- that even if they had not been, they were members of a "closely related party", which was sufficient under the Electoral Act 1992 to make the registration legal;
- the registration was legal; and
- none of the convictions could stand.
President McMurdo publicly rebuked Howard and Bishop, whose observations, she said, demonstrated at least "a fundamental misunderstanding of the Rule of Law...[and] an attempt to influence the judicial...process". The Court also ruminated that had the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions been better resourced, "the present difficulty may well have been avoided".
Some criticism was directed at the political interference of Tony Abbott, who had arranged for Pro Bono lawyers to fight the legal action which resulted in Hanson going to gaol. [8] Investigations by the ABC's Four Corners programme showed that Tony Abbott had financed disgruntled ex One Nation member Tony Sharples's court case against Hanson, in order to derail the One Nation party. [9]
In January 2004, Hanson announced that she would not return to politics. [10]
Attempted return to politics
On 15 September 2004, Hanson announced that she would be standing as an independent candidate for one of Queensland's seats in the Senate in the October 9 election. She declared, "I don't want all the hangers on. I don't want the advisers and everyone else. I want it to be this time Pauline Hanson."
She was ultimately unsuccessful, receiving only 30% of the required quota of primary votes, and did not pick up enough additional support through preferences.
On 6 December 2006, Hanson announced that she will stand for election in the 2007 Australian federal election in a seat yet to be determined. It is likely that her high profile and media profile will play a part in her election bid. Hanson launched her campaign by voicing concerns about Muslims and warning that "diseased" Africans were coming to Australia, stating: "They are of no benefit to this country whatsoever." She also assailed her critics, saying it was her right as an Australian citizen to question the Government's immigration policies. [11]
Appearance on Dancing With The Stars
In late 2004 during her election campaign, Hanson competed in the Australian Reality TV show Dancing with the Stars on the Seven Network. In the show a number of Australian celebrities compete against one another in ballroom dancing. Hanson made it to the final, surprising many in Australian politics and media as she advanced due to audience support in SMS voting, but lost to former Home And Away star Bec Cartwright.
Promotional Work
In September 2006, Hanson appeared as the face of Donut King, an Australian chain of doughnut retailers, with the slogan "What do you feel like?".[1] Donut King was widely criticised for associating its brand with Hanson.[citation needed] Donut King responded, citing that they felt Pauline Hanson was recognised and respected among the greater community, and therefore was a good choice for representing the company. [citation needed] They reasoned that the criticism was unnecessary and unjustified, but retired Pauline from their advertisements anyway.
External links
- Inside One Nation by Scott Balson
- An extract the book Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson trip. by Margo Kingston
- Pauline Hanson's official website for the 2004 election
- Text of Pauline Hanson's maiden speech to the Australian House of Representatives
- Hanson to sue Abbott?
- Costello rejects claims Hanson sentence was a 'political fix'
- Tony Abbot's dirty Hanson Trick