> I agree. Such a heavy sentence for a technical infringement of the Electoral
> Act is really stupid.
>
I don't know. I can't help thinking this is all very funny. As Hanson's handler David Etteridge was a paranoid nutter, he decided to set up the party so that all members except himself, Hanson and David Oldfield could be summarily expelled. This essentially meant that under Australian law the party consisted of precisely three people. It may be a technicality, but it is one that stems directly from the attempt to organize a fascist party under conditions of liberal democracy. That and stupidity.
But while it really is fitting to see them in jail, I think this is a flawed judicial victory that obscures a much more profound political loss. Hanson's party might have self-destructed, but a very large part of the reason for that is that the mainstream rightwing parties absorbed her anti-immigration agenda. Or more precisely: they chanelled the frustrations she had articulated into the manageable project of hating refugees. Ditto with Aboriginal relations and welfare measures.
Pauline Hanson is a racist and her party was packed with raving nazis, but their rhetoric thrived because she asked questions that no one had the guts to ask (I am paraphrasing the average Hansonite here). There is an element of truth to that, though she then proceeded to give perfectly insane answers. Wondering where the jobs had gone and blaming that on migrants is an improvement on the bs spin about the miracles of neoliberalism and how there are so many jobs around. Or at least, that is definitely how it played out in the country, where economic conditions are in fact dismal and there really are no jobs.
In the end we got the worst possible outcome short of One Nation actually taking root. The substrate of justified, oppositional frustration of Hansonism has been totally brushed aside and left to fester and fret about Moslems, the insane xenophobic aspect has become government policy, and to top it all, we get this dodgy law case locking her away. Whatever the structure of her party she did command a sixth of the vote. Those people haven't changed their minds and they won't change their minds because of this.
It is interesting that the legal case against her was supposed to be bankrolled by Tony Abbott, the Liberal federal minister for busting unions, who more than anyone in the government approaches Hansonesque levels of insane hatred. He was the figure chosen to revive the sagging liberal party in Queensland, touring the joint pronouncing that really, the only hope of having vile hatred made into policy was voting for his party. Whilst doing this he helped a disaffected One Nation MP to file a suit against Hanson, organized lawyers and then promised he would never go wanting for money during the legal action... Now that the case is over and the guy who moved it is bankrupt, Abbott refuses to cough up a cent and denies ever having made assurances...
Thiago Oppermann