Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2003/08/28/1062050604129.htm
Hanson's fraud had major political consequences, as did her bigotry
Sydney Morning herald August 29 2003
By Richard Ackland
What exactly is all the fuss about? Most people I know think it is a singularly good idea that Pauline Hanson is in jail. In the old days they would be described in the newspapers as "right-thinking people". Some may debate her length of penal servitude but few think the fact that she is at the Wacol women's correctional facility an appalling outcome. No one cares much what happens to her Svengali, David Ettridge.
The only slightly distracting additional feature in all this is that Tony Abbott may indirectly have had a hand in putting her away by geeing up the original civil case where the finding of fraud was first made. It is a close-called thing, but in a contest of awfulness between Hanson and Abbott, I judge Hanson to be ahead by a nose.
Despite the captivating argument of Bronwyn Bishop that Hanson is our first "political prisoner", one should not forget just how unattractive this prisoner was. After all, she did endorse a book called The Truth which claimed Aborigines ate their children and that the "new class of elites have deliberately earmarked Anglo-Saxon Australia for destruction". She also asserted that Aborigines in the north of Australia were stockpiling semi-automatic weapons. "There have been exchanges of weapons for actually a carton of beer," she shrieked in one of her grubby panders to prejudice.
Maybe the people who think three years too long for her would also believe one year was overdoing it. They're not clear about that. Unfortunately, the sentencing judge, Chief Judge Patsy Wolfe of the Queensland District Court, was not crystal clear either, although you can sort of see what she is driving at in a flimsy sort of way.
The jury found Hanson and Ettridge guilty of a charge of dishonestly inducing the Electoral Commissioner of Queensland to register Hanson's One Nation as a political party. The jury also found Hanson guilty of two further charges, each relating to dishonestly obtaining cheques from the Electoral Commissioner to a total of about $500,000. There were also circumstances of aggravation in relation to those two charges. She got three more years for the counts relating to the cheques but that is to be served concurrently with the three years for the dishonest inducement of the party's registration.
The jury accepted that Hanson and Ettridge both knew that the registration of the party was fraudulent because it did not have the mandatory 500 Queensland electors at the time. In fact, One Nation had only three members: Hanson, and the two backroom boys, Davids Ettridge and Oldfield. The structure was deliberate so that the smelly rank and file could not rise up and overthrow the junta. A nice touch for a populist party. The rank and file belonged to something called Pauline Hanson's One Nation Inc, which was not a political party.
The frauds in relation to the two cheques carried a maximum penalty of 10 years.
On the first count (fraudulent inducement to register a political party) the Crown prosecutor submitted three cases for the judge's sentencing consideration: the Queen v Ehrmann, the Queen v Fingleton and the Queen v Rouse. The Queen was successful in securing convictions in those three cases, but the important thing is that the range of imprisonment for those offences, and particular the two relating to frauds on the democratic process, was between three and five years.
Hanson got a sentence at the lower end of that range.
Justice Wolfe set out the "advantages" that accrued to the accused as a consequence of the fraudulent registration of the party, namely that all their candidates at the June 1998 Queensland election were entitled on the ballot papers to be identified as One Nation candidates.
We know the outcome. The National and Liberal parties, which governed with the help of one independent, were turfed out and Labor took office with the help of one independent. There were also 11 members of One Nation in the Parliament.
As the sentencing judge said: "It is essential that the electoral process, and the registration of political parties is one of them, are not thwarted or perverted. The crimes you committed affect the confidence of people in the electoral process."
While Hanson and Ettridge did not personally benefit from the electoral funding, the real benefit was that they could control the allocation of money and how the party was run. It gave them colossal power, and all on the basis that they knowingly bodgied up a membership that wasn't there.
After all, if these two prisoners had stolen $500,000 worth of social security money, they would have got seven or more years in the nick.
Sadly, for Hanson she did not run her best defence, which would have been: "I'm stupid and did what David told me."