Pauline Hanson has wept bitter tears about all the men who have let her down in a string of betrayals topped by this week’s strip club scandal, which felled her Queensland party chief.
In a frank and unvarnished interview, the One Nation Leader cried on camera as she ticked off a list of men she had harboured in her party who crashed and burned, or abandoned her.
“I cop all this s**t all the time and I’m sick of it! Absolutely sick of it,” Senator Hanson told A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw.
“I’ve had Fraser Anning, I’ve had Brian Burston, I’ve had a whole list of them.
“David Oldfield — you name them — where are they now? Where are they?
“I am kicked in the guts time and time again. It happens right before an election.
“I am devastated. I am furious about this. I have worked for years to get change in this country.”
Senator Hanson then cited other politicians embroiled in “scandals” who had not been damned like One Nation candidates.
“Kevin Rudd goes to a strip club, Craig Thomson with a credit card,” she said.
“Corruption, Eddie Obeid, paedophiles, everything.
“They sail through it. No, let us give Pauline Hanson a kick in the guts.
“I have been let down dreadfully.”
As tears rolled down Senator Hanson’s face, Grimshaw asked her: “Why are you still in it? Look at you, why don’t you walk? Look at what it’s doing to you”.
Sometimes too choked up to speak, Hanson said: “Tracy, I made a change out there for people.
“I save people from losing their lands. I have helped the primary sector. I have helped kids out there get premiership schemes produced this year by the government, my scheme.”
Hanson gave the interview to Grimshaw on Channel 9 in the wake of the program’s airing of a shocking video of One Nation Senate candidate Steve Dickson.
After tonight’s interview aired, reporter Dan Nolan, who was responsible for last night’s strip club video story, was brought into the studio to analyse Senator Hanson’s chat with Grimshaw.
“People have not seen that side of Pauline before,” Nolan said.
“She is a divisive character. politics has not been kind to this women.”
Nolan recalled Senator Hanson’s stint in jail for electoral fraud before the conviction was overturned on appeal, and said she “has a history of bad men being in a party making bad decisions”.
“Here was Pauline today very visibly upset in a raw interview talking about yet another bad chapter in her party,” he said.
“A lot of people will feel sorry for her.”
Even before the interview aired, Twitter lit up with comments critical of Hanson.
Jason Whittaker tweeted One Nation was “a fringe party” which “attracts terrible people”.
“Terrible people get exposed, Pauline emerges as emotional, blameless, martyred victim.
“Spare us.”
Jeff Sparrow mocked the One Nation leader, saying “It’s very sad when racists don’t recognise that Pauline put in the hard yards of being racist for years and years and years.
“We better have her on prime-time TV so she can boo hoo about it!”
Vanessa Comiskey tweeted, “Karma. Suck it up Hanson. Your tears are deserved.
“Imagine how many tears were shed by innocent families when you stood up in parliament and attacked kids with autism without any evidence or facts to back up your uneducated opinions. What goes around comes around.”
But it centred on allegations that One Nation was courting the US gun lobby, the crux of a documentary made by Al Jazeera, the same broadcaster which secretly filmed Mr Dickson at the strip club.
Steve Dickson resigned last night after ACA aired secret video of him groping an exotic dancer and making lewd and offensive comments on footage secretly filmed inside a US strip club.
The scandal has left One Nation in a political crisis less than three weeks before the federal election.
Early this morning, Ms Hanson stormed away from a press conference at her Queensland property after answering questions about Mr Dickson.
In the strip club footage, filmed by broadcaster Al Jazeera, the married 56-year-old says at one point, “I’ve done more Asian than I know what to do with”.
Ms Hanson said this morning Al Jazeera had “conveniently” given the tapes to A Current Affair weeks out from the federal election but she was unable to “ignore or condone” the footage.
The secret tapes show Dickson appearing to repeatedly grope a stripper’s breasts, and place one-dollar notes inside her G-string.
He remarks about one of the girls, “Now that young lady has a wonderful set of cahoonas”.
The footage was shot in a Washington club by Al Jazeera when it was secretly filming a documentary about One Nation’s courting the American gun lobby.
Screened in March, it shows Mr Dickson and Ms Hanson’s party chief of staff, James Ashby, meeting with pro-gun lobbyists.
Broadcast on the ABC in March, that footage created a headache for Hanson who was forced to come out in support of both men, denying the pair had tried to get money from the National Rifle Association (NRA).
She claimed the three-year Al Jazeera investigation by an undercover journalist posing as an NRA lobbyist was “entrapment”.
PAULINE’S BETRAYALS
Pauline Hanson’s list of the string of men involved in her party who have abandoned her include defectors who have tried to forge their own way in politics.
DAVID OLDFIELD
Co-founder of One Nation in 1997 with Pauline Hanson, David Oldfield served as an informal party deputy leader.
But in 2000, he was expelled from the party after a dispute with Hanson and formed One Nation NSW, which folded in 2004.
FRASER ANNING
Conservative Queensland senator Fraser Anning, is now best know for being hit on the head with an egg by a young man dubbed “egg boy”.
The incident happened after he made an anti-Muslim comment in the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacre.
Anning’s far-right, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim views have seen him expelled from One Nation to run as an independent.
BRIAN BURSTON
Appointed a One Nation senator in 2016, Brian Burston had a falling out with Ms Hanson over company tax cuts and left the party.
He joined billionaire businessman Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and was announced its new leader last year.
JAMES ASHBY
James Ashby is still with Senator Hanson as the One Nation leader’s chief of staff, but the controversial former Liberal adviser has proven he is still accident prone.
Mr Ashby is best known for “Ashbygate”, a political scandal involving the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Peter Slipper.
In 2012, as Mr Slipper’s media adviser, Mr Ashby claimed he was the victim of sexual harassment.
The allegations were dismissed, but three years later the Australian Federal Police raided his home.
They claimed federal MPs Christopher Pyne and Wyatt Roy had offered Mr Ashby inducements to complain about Slipper.
In the same year, Ashby became Ms Hanson’s media adviser, was promoted to his current position, and unbeknown to him was secretly filmed by Al Jazeera meeting gun lobbyists in America.
Mr Ashby did not go out to the strip club for the visit which has now brought down Steve Dickson.
STEVE DICKSON
Senate candidate and leader of One Nation in Queensland, Steve Dickson was forced to resign last night after sleazy strip club footage, which Al Jazeera claimed it had not given permission to be broadcast.
He has since released a statement over the footage, apologising for his behaviour and saying it was not a “true reflection” of him.
“The footage shown does not reflect the person I am. It shows a person who was drunk and not in control of his actions and I take full responsibility for allowing that to happen,” Mr Dickson said.
He said he had immediately told his wife Debbie the day after he visited the strip club in September 2018 and admitted he had “little recollection of the night”.
Mrs Dickson is standing by her husband.
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