What's all the fuss about? Hanson got no more or less than she deserved

I believe that Pauline Hanson is a criminal who deserves to serve every day of her three-year jail sentence for fraud, even though she will probably serve only half or less of it. Yet, according to yesterday's Sunday Mail (24/8/03), 82 per cent of Queenslanders think her sentence is too long and 65 per cent think she shouldn't be jailed at all. Are there good reasons for me being in the minority? I think so, and in the way that they weld group-think, sensationalist journalism and public moral and ethical laxity together they repeat a pattern that is endemic in modern Australian politics.

Pauline Hanson was charged for defrauding the Queensland Electoral Commission of about $500,000. She did this by registering Pauline Hanson's One Nation as a political party even though the political party itself had only three members. Queensland law requires a political party to have 500 members. The Electoral Commission found out and demanded repayment of the money. Hanson and One Nation complied.

The major technical consequences of registering One Nation as a party were that it was entitled to public funding; to register its candidates in one bloc; and to have the name of the party published on ballot papers.

Hanson pleaded not guilty but the jury unanimously disagreed. Once the verdict had been reached the only question left to judge Patsy Wolfe was the length of sentence. She determined it should be three years - the length of a parliamentary term.

In making the sentence the judge had reference to four previous judgements. The most comparable was the decision of the Appeal Court in The Queen v Karen Lynn Ehrmann. Ehrmann falsely enrolled 24 people on the state electoral roll with the intention of using them in an internal ALP ballot. Ehrmann pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to three years with a recommendation for early release after nine months.

In terms of proportionality, Hanson's crime was greater. Ehrmann pleaded guilty and showed some remorse, Hanson did neither. You'd have to say that Patsy Wolfe's call was a pretty fair one. She even allowed Hanson's position as a Member of Parliament as a mitigating factor. I would have thought that it should have been the reverse - Hanson should have been held to a higher standard. Hanson's supporters say she should have escaped sentence because she repaid the money. Well, yes, she did, but only when she had been caught. If she hadn't repaid then she may have been sentenced to six years in jail, as in the case of Lockhart (see who misappropriated $390,000.

Compared with other crimes it is even more fitting. Hanson supports mandatory sentencing, a regime which, in the Northern Territory, has seen Aboriginal kids doing time for stealing a tin of biscuits. In this case she got her hands on much more of the lolly!

The fundamental basis of Hanson and Ehrmann's crimes was that they perverted the democratic process. This is a crime that involves the theft of something more precious than merely money and it is something that cannot be repaid.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation was a profoundly undemocratic party - it was in fact a personality cult masquerading as a party. People were free to support her but could only join her supporters group, where they had no real power. Imagine the outcry if a Ronald MacDonald Party were set up where franchisees held no equity in the business and could be dismissed by head office at any time at the same time that they had no say in corporate policy. Here was Hanson, the champion of the "average man" doing virtually the same thing. This is a fraud on the community that went well beyond the technical benefits of party status.

It was also a fraud on its "members". Most of them did not know they hadn't joined the party. When some became suspicious and demanded copies of the constitution, they were threatened with expulsion.

Hanson has form when it comes to fraud. Just consider her original election to Parliament. She was endorsed in 1995 as the Liberal Party candidate but, almost from the date of preselection, flouted the party rules and policy, breaking the agreement she made when seeking the endorsement.

In the end her behaviour was so bad that she became an electoral liability. As a result of a meeting with the party's executive Hanson agreed to resign as the Liberal Party's candidate. Because nominations had closed her name and former party affiliation remained on the ballot paper.

Her conduct led to Liberal voters in the seat being deprived of a candidate and she was able to take many of their votes, as well as the high profile she had gained by being the candidate, and parlay them into a win. An honourable person would have resigned from the party and then announced that, even though they were on the ballot paper, they did not wish to be elected. Steve Wilson, a candidate at the following state election in Ipswich, did exactly this. Hanson is not an honourable person.

There is also another aspect of fraud to Hanson, and I use the word is the most general and non-criminal sense. While she holds herself out as a saviour to Australians, she in fact has nothing to offer.

Australians have come to recognise this. While the Sunday Mail poll has One Nation's share of the vote at 21 per cent if an election were held tomorrow, an election won't be held tomorrow, and when it is held the percentage will be closer to two per cent than it is to 20 per cent. Australians have woken up to Hanson. She failed in her bid for the New South Wales Legislative Council earlier this year. She did not even score two per cent of the state-wide vote and was beaten by the Shooter's Party.

If Hanson deserves what she has received, why the outcry? It comes down to three major influences. The first is the leniency our Australian tribes accord to one of their own when they face punishment and the disturbing failure of all of us to unite around significant national institutions. Hanson is the face of white disempowerment. Her tribe is uniting around her rather than the judicial system. She has traded on this sort of sectarianism, and it is standing her in good stead again, even though it is destructive of underpinnings of our society like the rule of law.

One can see the mirror image of this when it becomes a rite of passage in some Aboriginal tribal communities to do time, and yet again when important people turn up in Mercs to spruik at the trial of an Alan Bond. The way of Hansonism is the way of the mob, and we should have enough examples of this around the world at the moment to want to avoid it. Which makes the second major influence - sensationalism by the media - even more reprehensible.

There used to be a difference between a tabloid and a broadsheet that went to style and substance, not just the dimensions of the page. Now there appears to be no difference at all. Post-modernism appears to have rotted the guts of good journalism, and what we see on the front page is not an attempt to recreate the truth but the squalling of alternate "discourses" each asserting the virtue of its own case on the basis of the volume of its scream. This has been allied to a quest to bolster the bottom line, not by producing good journalism for which people will pay but producing entertainment that will engage their senses and leave their minds untouched.

It would be easy to indict the Murdoch press alone for this. The Courier-Mail in particular has devoted every front page since her conviction to the story, as well as countless inside stories and analyses. The truth is that the ABC and commercial television, are equally culpable. My criticism is not just the amount of coverage but the lack of balance in it. Mark Oberhardt in the Courier has done a good job of analysing the legal situation but it is his colleague Chris Griffiths who is given the front-page lead, "Please Explain", where he criticises the jail term on grounds of cases that are not in the least comparable.

While the media could have chosen to cover the story on the basis of a salutary lesson and how far the once-mighty can fall, they have instead treated Hanson as though she were royalty and put her accusers on the rack. In this morning's paper we read that, shock horror, Tony Abbott solicited witnesses to give evidence against Hanson, as though he were guilty of a crime. In fact, the story ought to be why it was left up to Abbott to ensure that justice could be done when it was the job of the electoral commission and the police. Where are these investigative pieces?

Of course, this media mania is nothing new. It was the same mania that drove the original bubble in Hanson support to 23 per cent across Queensland, at the same time as the media sanctimoniously condemned Hanson. Hanson's family claims that there was a conspiracy to "hunt their little sister down like a dog". Well, there is a conspiracy but they are the beneficiaries of it. It is the conspiracy to sell papers, page impressions and airtime to consumers so they can carry more advertising and thus enhance corporate bottom lines and viewer statistics any way that the media can. One can only assume it was the same force that drove the recent public outcry over the jailing of Di Fingleton, a woman from the other side of the political spectrum who also spectacularly failed the probity test, yet passed the celebrity one to score front page after front page.

As a result, the third factor comes in to play, which is the inability and unwillingness of politicians to stand up and defend what they know to be right when the public are opposed to it. There has been recent criticism by Murray Gleeson, Chief Justice of the High Court, calling on the Commonwealth Attorney-General to defend the courts against political attack. This matter presents an even more compelling reason for everyone who cares about civilisation, not just Attorneys-General, to come out and defend the process. First and foremost ought to be our politicians. Of these, only Peter Beattie has stood up. Yet Beattie has nothing to lose - One Nation is a problem for the National Party, not him - and he could not resist opportunistically having a shot at Abbott. The rest are running for cover, afraid that they will be the victims of One Nation.

I have always supported Hanson's right to her opinions and the right to a platform where she can express them. If she or her representatives want to write a matching piece for On Line Opinion they are welcome, and it will get equal prominence to mine. At the same time I see her brand of populism as being among the most damaging forces in the country. Not that she is on her own, or that it is only a "right wing" phenomenon. What appals me is that we as a society have become so fixated with our own needs, wishes and desires that we cannot stand aside and consider the common good.

Pauline Hanson can serve as a force for good but only if we use her situation as a mirror to hold up to our own faces and take a hard look at ourselves. At the same time that we are involved in pre-emptive actions around the world whose only justification can be that we are spreading civilisation and liberating peoples, our own grasp of our own cultural identity and why what we do and value is right is shown by this Hanson episode, to be sadly weak. At the moment she and the forces that she exemplifies is only a mote in our eye, but it seems to me to be growing into a log.

Graham Young chaired the Liberal Party preselection council that originally selected Hanson. In 1985 he was also Campaign Director to John Wolfe in the BCC ward of Paddington. John Wolfe is Judge Wolfe's husband.