Pauline Hanson

Pauline Lee Hanson (born May 27 1954) is a controversial retired Australian politician who was the leader of One Nation Party, a party with a staunch anti immigration platform. In 2006, she was named by The Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians of all time ^*.

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, cartoonists and satirists.

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 on Ipswich) for the March 1996 Federal election. After the 1993 Federal election, the electorate of Oxley was the safest one held by the Australian Labor Party in the entire State of Queensland. However, comments she made to The Queensland Times, 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 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.

Maiden speech

In September 1996, Hanson made her maiden speech to the House of Representatives, which instantly made headlines and television news bulletins right across Australia. She expressed her concern that Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians". Hanson 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'.

As a result of her maiden speech, Hanson became a very controversial figure, 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'. Her unaffected approach was parodied by satirists such as the TV show Full Frontal.

"Please explain"

She was given a television interview in October 1996 on the popular Australian Sunday night television show 60 Minutes. At the time it was at the height of her publicity and received huge ratings. Asked by interviewer Tracey Curro "Are you xenophobic?" Hanson's response was "Please explain". She apparently did not understand the meaning of the word. These and other words, in Hanson's unusually broad, hypernasal accent became catchphrases which was always associated with her by the public, and often used by comedians making fun of her.

In the same interview, Curro asked for Hanson's opinion on the pro-homosexual Mardi Gras: Hanson answered "I don't like it; because it's promoting something that's not natural." (A caricature of Hanson and an endlessly repeated recording of the hypernasal "I don't like it" became a float theme at the next Sydney Mardi Gras.)

Hanson also showed her political naivety when she expressed a lack of knowledge in relation to the concept of separation of powers.

Since the end of her political career, Pauline Hanson has used both the "Please explain" and "I don't like it" quotes in self-parody on television. Recently she has appeared in Australian TV commercials for ginger with the slogan "I don't like it - I love it."

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.

Declining popularity

Ever since then, Hanson's popularity has declined. During the campaign for the Federal election of October 3, 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 the largest portion of votes - 36% of the total votes, about 15% more than her nearest rival. However, due to Australia's system of preferential voting in which a candidate needs a majority of the votes to be elected, she lost to 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.

At the next Federal election on November 10, 2001, she 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.

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 had a 1998 Top 10 single in Australia with the track "I Don't Like It" featuring snippets of Hanson's voice edited out of context ("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").

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 falsely 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^*. 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...^* 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".

In January 2004, Hanson announced that she would not return to politics. ^*

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 didn't pick up enough additional support through preferences.

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.

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