PLEASE EXPLAIN!

Last night Pauline Hanson spent her first night in jail after being rapidly sentenced to three years behind bars for fraud by a Queensland District Court Judge.

I interviewed her original Svengali, and some say partner in crime, on my radio programme yesterday. David Oldfield. He wasn’t charged but his namesake, fellow plotter and strategist David Ettridge, was and was also jailed for three years yesterday.

Oldfield cleverly did all his dirty work across the border in New South Wales where he still runs a rump version of One Nation and has snared an Upper House seat in the NSW Parliament.

He also tried to get his wife elected but that fell over despite all the taxpayer-funded videos of her appearance on Beauty and the Beast that were disseminated.

It is a grubby and grotty – but predictable -- end to One Nation. The nation awoke this morning to front page headlines that the Pauline Hanson, from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, was in the slammer for three years for fraud.

A lot of people, including non-Hanson supporters, don’t understand what she actually did wrong. And many think that three years incarceration, starting yesterday, was too harsh.

The simple answer was this: The two Davids and their pliable puppet were too clever by half.

They were a tricky triumvirate. Hanson the redheaded neophyte politician who poured verbal water for a thirsty nation with her attacks on Asian immigration and Aborigines getting too much of taxpayers’ money.

She was ejected by the Liberals and took the safe Labor seat of Oxley as an independent with a swing of more than twenty per cent.

She touched a frustrated, angry nerve and her maiden speech grew into the redhead’s national rightwing, angry movement which collected one million votes at a federal election.

But, too clever by half. Oldfield (a former adviser to the Mad Monk, Tony Abbot who plotted the rise of One Nation from inside Abbott’s office) and Ettridge had a plan to control Hanson and their new party.

Ettridge, a professional fundraiser for charities like World Vision, who also got a percentage of all One Nation donations was happy to embrace the triumvirate.

There were only ever five members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In reality there were only three. The thousands of others who signed up around the country were members of support group. Their office holders could be sacked by the gang of Three at Any time.

They could never vote the leaders out.

The trio convinced the Queensland Electoral Commission that they were a legit party with more than 500 members. They got One Nation on the Queensland ballot and won eleven state seats in an election which saw the Nationals and Liberals turfed out and a minority Labor Government. The start of the Beattie dynasty.

And then they also got financially greedy and applied for and were paid nearly half a million dollars in taxpayers’ money.

The former fish and chip shop lady has gone out of the frying pan into the

Fire. She can never stand for public office again – despite once being the best known female in this country – and other fraud charges are pending.

Gullible One Nation supporters are entitled to ask their fallen leader: Please explain.

Thursday, August 21, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002