Trying to kill a vicious offshoot

by Tom Pearson

The case of the Hanson electoral rort has two interconnected parts; the 
legal and the political. First is the legal question. Pauline Hanson and 
her cohort David Ettridge were sentenced to three years jail for electoral 
fraud. The jury found that Hanson fraudulently registered the One Nation 
party in Queensland in 1997 and dishonestly obtained $500,000 in electoral 
reimbursements following the 1998 Queensland State election.

Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott, who engineered Hanson's downfall 
through a slush fund legal vendetta, may now also face prosecution under 
Australia's electoral laws.

The Australian Electoral Commission has announced that, after receiving 
legal advice, it is reconsidering its finding in 1998 that Abbott's slush 
fund — called contemptuously Australians for Honest Politics — was not 
connected to the Liberal Party. The law requires political parties to 
declare the sources of donations used for party purposes.

Then there is the political question. The irony will not be lost on people 
that one of the planks in Hanson's political platform was a campaign for 
harsher sentencing and longer jail terms. Nor will they miss the fact of 
Abbott's use of the law and legal system to try and smash the trade union 
movement and workers' rights to collectively bargain, while he has covertly 
organised a collective of filthy rich individuals and influential political 
figures to target the leadership of other parties for regime change.

The Australian Democrats were also pursued through legal action for seven 
years to 2002 by a group for "honest politics". In a statement last week 
the Democrats outlined how "A political party then capable of marshalling 
over a million votes [the Democrats] had its leader, deputy leader and its 
organisation assailed through a series of well-funded legal cases."

The Democrats say one of the donors who funded that offensive is also a 
donor to the current Abbott slush fund. Only two donors have so far been 
revealed — the head of WA-based engineering company, Harold Clough, and 
Trevor Kennedy, a former Kerry Packer media executive.

The Democrats also point to the secretive nature of these funds that are 
"designed to reduce political competition".

But then, the Liberal Party has always been a secretive clique: backroom 
deals, collusion and character assassination are its modus operandi. 
Undermining individuals and bringing down organisations that pose a threat 
to Liberal electoral turf is almost child's play for the party that 
secretly trained a whole scab labour force in Dubai, in collusion with 
waterfront employers, to try and bludgeon the Maritime Union out of 
existence.

Thus we have the endless bleating of PM Howard that he is the last to know 
— about secret meetings with ethanol producers, about children overboard, 
about Dubai, about Abbott's slush fund: one finally must conclude that he 
is either a hand puppet or a liar.

It is the party that produced the founders of One Nation, Hanson and David 
Oldfield. After all, the Liberal Party has historically embraced fascist 
ideas, and fascists themselves when Nazi fugitives from justice were 
welcomed (covertly, of course) by the Liberal Party Government of Robert 
Menzies after WW2, a number of them slotting comfortably into the ranks of 
party membership.

So it should come as no surprise when in the 21st century it produces 
fascist-minded ideologues like Hanson and Oldfield, both former Liberal 
Party members; Oldfield a staffer for Abbott when the latter was 
parliamentary secretary; Hanson a former Liberal Party candidate in 
Queensland.

Moreover, despite perceptions to the contrary, the current government did 
not steal One Nation's policies but was in fact the architect of them. The 
implementation of the "Pacific Solution", the locking up of asylum seekers 
in desert prison camps, the gutting of Indigenous rights, the draconian 
anti-union laws, the wholesale undermining of democratic rights: all came 
out of the right-wing think tanks and corporate boardroom brainstorming 
that are the basis of Liberal Party policy formulation.

At the political centre are the reactionary power brokers of the Liberal 
Party, thugs in expensive suits, of which Abbott is one.

When One Nation gathered pockets of voter support in certain areas running 
with an opportunistic and populist platform based on fear and racism, they 
were clearly trespassing on Liberal Party ground. As Abbott himself put it, 
his slush fund was set up "to prevent the creation of a credible rival for 
the conservative vote".

So, the Howard Government set out to kill its vicious offshoot: a distilled 
and dangerous concoction of fascist aspirations. And the final irony in 
this episode may be that the system they all used and manipulated toward 
their own ends is turning around to bite them back.