Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch, Terry Sharples, Tony Abbott and Patsy Wolfe – these names will forever live in infamy in Australian politics as Pauline Hanson’s assassins.
From the time Ms Hanson broke the journalists’ taboo on discussing Aboriginal welfare and Asian immigration the Packer and Murdoch journalists have attacked her with a savage, unrelenting fury.
When the Liberal Party realised Ms Hanson threatened the comfortable duopoly of the major parties it despatched chief head-kicker, Tony Abbott to dig up the dirt on Pauline Hanson. Abbott found a co-conspirator in human termite, Terry Sharples. The Queensland establishment did the rest.
Threats to democracy
There is clear evidence that there have been two serious attacks on Australia’s democratic process in relation to the Pauline Hanson saga.
The left-leaning, politically correct journalists of Packer, Murdoch, the ABC and SBS have quite clearly attacked and compromised the democratic process. Their vicious attacks on her character and her policies frightened all political parties into placing her party last on every how-to-vote card in the 1998 federal election, thus disenfranchising one million voters. Not one member of One Nation was elected to the Lower House. Only one Senator was elected.
The Democrats with a similar level of vote have five Senators in the federal parliament.
According to a report in The Australian of 23 August, 2003 , Federal Liberal Party heavyweight Tony Abbott offered money and support to former One Nation member Terry Sharples to help destroy Pauline Hanson. Their conspiracy resulted in the fraud charges and the eventual jailing of Pauline Hanson.
This was a conspiracy to defraud one million voters of a legitimate voice and to destroy a new political force before it challenged the Liberal-Labor duopoly.
These are far more serious matters than the technical “fraud” committed by Pauline Hanson.
The Fraud
How did Pauline Hanson come to commit the “fraud” for which she was convicted?
The Liberal and Labor parties have been accepting payments for years from their supporters in return for favours. Many of Australia’s largest corporate players pour millions into the Liberal and Labor coffers.
A few years ago the major parties worked out another nice little rort. As well as accepting millions from their favourites, they would also collect “donations” from the taxpayer mugs. They brought in a new Act of parliament to give themselves about $2 for every vote received at an election, payable after each election. Labor and the Liberal-National parties raked off more than $32 million in taxpayer monies from the 2001 election. The stipulation was that such “donations” would only be paid to registered political parties.
One Nation’s registration was accepted by the Commonwealth electoral office. The Beattie Labor government in Queensland decided to discriminate against smaller parties by requiring a political party to have a minimum of 500 members before it could be registered. The Queensland Electoral Commission when examining One Nation’s application for registration wrote to 273 randomly selected persons on the membership list asking if they were members. 237 responded stating they were members. The Electoral Commission then registered One Nation as a political party in Queensland and later paid out around $500,000 after the state election. These funds were then disbursed to the candidates to help offset the costs of their election campaigns.
Enter Tony Abbott. He contacted disgruntled former One Nation members and together they set out to destroy One Nation by claiming that One Nation did not have 500 members and therefore the $500,000 was obtained fraudulently.
Never mind that the Labor and Liberal parties routinely engage in branch stacking and electoral breaches. Thousands of “members” have been falsely enrolled in both parties over the years. The Labor Party was even found to have enrolled a number of dead people as members.
Ettridge and Oldfield had set up One Nation as a company with only three shareholders. The members were found by the court to be “supporters” rather than members even though they had paid a fee and considered themselves members.
At most this was only a technical “fraud”. Political parties are entitled to these funds. Pauline Hanson repaid the amount in full to the Queensland Electoral commission.
