AUSTRALIA: Former MP Pauline Hanson Jailed 3 Years for Electoral Fraud

Former Australian MP Pauline Hanson was convicted after a 23-day trial and jailed by the Brisbane District Court . She was found guilty of fraudulently registering One Nation Party in Queensland on December 4, 1997, with David Ettridge. She was also found guilty of dishonestly claiming almost $500,000 in electoral reimbursements from the Queensland Electoral Commissioner, Des O'Shea, after the 1998 state election.

The chief District Court judge, Patsy Wolfe, sentenced Hanson with David Ettridge to three years jail with no parole. Hanson is facing further mention of a charge in Brisbane's Magistrates Court today for allegedly spending up to $20,000 from the fund on herself.

Pauline Hanson was the founder of Australia's xenophobic One Nation party. Hanson first appeared on the political scene with a shock victory in the suburban Brisbane seat of Oxley in 1996. Initially endorsed by the rightwing Liberal party, she was removed from its slate when her views on Asian immigration and Aboriginal rights became known. Her policies, which she described as "... a fair go for all Australians", included slashing health, education and housing aid for impoverished Aborigines.

She said Asian immigrants were synonymous with crime and disease, and that immigration should stop until unemployment reached nil. The Liberals deselected her because of the fear that her extreme views would help Labor.

Despite her disappearance from parliament, her impact on Australian politics has remained dramatic. "She transformed the political landscape," Margo Kingston, her biographer, said.

"She started off as a profound risk to the conservative side of politics, but when [prime minister] John Howard broke the bipartisan policy on refugees during the Tampa [immigrant boat] crisis, that was completely turned around. From that moment One Nation support ended, its support went to John Howard, politics was shifted to the right and Labor was dragged along with it."

Hanson always insisted that Howard had simply stolen her policies on Aboriginal rights and immigration. "It's ironic," said Ms Kingston. "The woman who started all this is in jail and the man who took her policies is prime minister."

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has joined a chorus of critics of the sentence, branding it excessive.

The comment pages of the Australian press were dominated over the weekend by the imprisonment of Pauline Hanson, the controversial founder of the anti-immigration One Nation party. Last week, she and David Ettridge, the party's deputy director, were handed three-year jail sentences for electoral fraud. For many, however, the sentence was excessive. It was ignorance rather than malice that had landed Hanson in prison, argued Piers Akerman in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, and "three years is too long a sentence for stupidity." The Melbourne Herald Sun noted that "far greater crimes have resulted in leniency ... Hanson was dishonest, her politics ill-conceived and dangerous, but in this case the punishment does not fit the crime." The Queensland Sunday Mail's Terry Sweetman was happy to "dance on her political grave", but he felt "a suspended sentence or a symbolic couple of months in the slammer probably would have been enough."

Read Here full article by Alan Ramsey, "Don't cry for a sleazy grub "
.August 23, 2003

Do not waste sympathy on Pauline Hanson. She was a Liberal Party aberration who by ignorance or design tried to defraud taxpayers of almost $500,000. People tend to forget voters never elected Hanson in her own right. She was an accident of circumstance that shot her to prominence, where she self-destructed.

Hansonism was a political reality, Pauline only ever its lightning rod. She was an ugly image who got into Parliament by mistake and who came to represent all manner of prejudices, none of which was virulent enough to get her re-elected, including intense voter disillusionment with the established party system.

Yet people who should know better profess she has been punished for a "technicality" when, in truth, it is the criminal justice system that has acted after an idiot element of an arrogant party political system behaved as though it was outside the law. It isn't the first time.

Almost four years ago, in Adelaide, a state Labor MP named Ralph Clarke, a former deputy opposition leader, sued his own party in the South Australian Supreme Court, and won. Labor had stripped him of endorsement in a factional branch stacking exercise the court ruled illegal, to Labor's immense shock. It didn't save Clarke's political career, who again lost in a new court-ordered preselection ballot. But it cost Labor $250,000 in legal fees.

And, more significantly, it sounded a warning to all political parties that their rank-and-file members have rights the legal system will uphold if the party system does not. It is this very principle at the core of what has now happened in Queensland.

The same year Clarke won his legal action in Adelaide, a Queensland state Labor candidate, Karen Ehrmann, pleaded guilty in a Townsville court to 47 counts of electoral fraud, again, like the Clarke case, involving vote rigging - or branch stacking - in an ALP preselection ballot.

On August 11, 2000, Ehrmann, like Hanson, was sentenced to three years' jail. I'm not aware talkback radio went into meltdown at the time on Ehrmann's behalf or that various self-interested politicians sought to rationalise her behaviour as the product of a "technicality".

Unlike Hanson, however, who was given no minimum term, Ehrmann's sentence carried a minimum nine months. She served the nine months. So whatever now happens to Hanson's appeal, nobody should think our legal system, in whatever state, isn't fair dinkum about dealing seriously with electoral fraud, however it shows up in the political process.

The Clarke and Ehrmann cases differ from Hanson's in one major respect. Clarke and Ehrmann were involved in internal frauds where factional manipulation of the electoral roll rorted party endorsements for election to political office. Hanson's sin was to deliberately or unknowingly fiddle Queensland's rules of political party registration, thus enabling her, as party president, to walk away with $500,000 in public funding after the 1998 Queensland state election, money she was later forced to return when the legality of One Nation's registration collapsed.

And why did it collapse? Because Queensland electoral law, based on federal law, says a political party that does not have at least one elected MP must be able to show it has 500 legitimate members to be eligible to be a registered political party. And it must be a registered party under state law to be eligible to collect state public funding.

Thus when One Nation won 11 seats by polling 439,121 primary votes - or 22.7 per cent - in the 1998 Queensland election, it exceeded the 4 per cent necessary for public funding and qualified for a total $498,637. But only, of course, if One Nation was legally registered.

Which, it was later discovered, it was not. It didn't have anything like 500 legitimate members, under the terms of state law. Nor were the rights of those it did have properly observed and respected by Hanson, as party president, and by her co-accused crony, David Ettridge.

It wasn't enough just to cobble together 500 names of "supporters" and pretend One Nation was a legitimate party entitled to pocket just on half a million dollars of Queensland taxpayers' money.

Which is exactly what Hanson and Ettridge did. So please, no more tosh about technicalities, nor professed bewilderment at the "harshness" of the penalty now they've been adjudged guilty by a Brisbane jury. Either they were venal bozos or they were utterly cavalier in their behaviour.

Whatever, they got exactly what they deserved. Just as Karen Ehrmann got what she deserved, but who at least had the saving grace of no pretence she wasn't guilty. And just as the South Australian branch of the ALP got what it deserved when it wasted $250,000 of its members' money defending a court case it arrogantly had believed it, too, just like Hanson and Ettridge, should never have been taken to court for.

They were all just sleazy grubs.

And for the record, remember that Hanson, when elected to the Federal Parliament in March 1996, did so still as the candidate of the Liberal Party, even though John Howard, in a panic, insisted she be disendorsed after some of her blunt views on Aborigines and Asians surfaced in a local newspaper interview during the campaign. But her expulsion had come too late to affect her official status on the 70,000 ballot papers which already had been printed. And on these she was still listed, on polling day, as the Liberal candidate. The nonsense later that Hanson was elected as an independent has only been just that: nonsense.

The Liberals might have disowned her but she went into the ballot box on polling day as the Liberals' only identified candidate. And that is what got her elected. Thirty-one months later, in the October 1998 general election, Hanson switched from the outer Brisbane seat of Oxley to the nearby seat of Blair under the One Nation banner. It didn't help. She led on primary votes but lost on preferences to the Liberal candidate. In 2001 Hanson ran for a Queensland Senate seat and failed there, too. And in the recent NSW state election she was defeated a third time.

To repeat, Pauline Hanson has only been elected once, and then under the Liberal Party banner. She is its creation, nobody else's. Despite everything, Hanson in five years of trying has never been able to win under the label of her own party, Pauline Hanson's One Nation. The acronym almost got it right - a complete phoney. Voters were fooled just the once, no more. Nobody should be fooled now that she's in the slammer.

Which leaves only public funding.

The NSW Wran Labor government introduced public funding of general elections in 1981. Gough Whitlam had promised it federally in every election campaign from 1969 to 1977 but never got the opportunity to introduce it. Public funding remained in Bill Hayden's manifesto in 1980 and Bob Hawke repeated the pledge in Labor's winning campaign in 1983.

Later that same year, in November, Labor kept its pledge. Public funding of elections became federal law. It opened the door to public funding in all the states, one by one, thereafter. And each time it was a Labor government that introduced it.

And the Liberals? In the Federal Parliament in 1983, when Kim Beazley was the junior minister who introduced the relevant legislation, both Coalition parties vigorously opposed taxpayers' money being given to political parties for campaign costs, just as they vigorously opposed disclosure of political parties' campaign donations.

No matter. Both matters became law. Both houses of the Parliament adopted the legislation, despite the Coalition voting against them at each stage of the legislation. Among those Liberals still in the Parliament 20 years later who voted the party line at the time: John Howard.

Labor's Mick Young made a speech worth recalling. He told the House, in part, on November 10, 1983: "We put this proposal [for public funding] on March 5 in our policy speech. We told the Australian people - as we had in 1972, 1974, 1975, 1977 and 1980 - that when given the opportunity, we would pass these [electoral] reforms. It is important to understand all we are doing is instituting in Australia a system that already applies in most democracies [including] the United States ...

"And I can assure members not only that we have a mandate to introduce the system, as we are doing now, but also that if ever the conservatives return to power in Australia, as they are likely to do in the years ahead, they will not change the system. I'll bet on it ..."

He was right. Public funding of elections now applies right across the country. No state non-Labor government, on regaining office, has ever killed it off. And neither did the Howard Government when, ultimately, it got into office 13 years after Mick Young's speech. At the time all those years ago, public funding was limited to 60 cents a primary vote: the cost of three (20-cent) normal-rate postage stamps. In the first federal election in which it applied (1984), just on $8.5 million was shared among the parties.

The 60 cents a vote is long gone. Now it is up to $1.91 for every vote, under a formula which is indexed every six months.

And at the last election, the major and minor parties, as well as those independents who gained the necessary 4 per cent of the vote to qualify, shared a total $38.6 million of taxpayers' funds to meet election costs.

And you never, ever hear John Howard promising to repeal the law.

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