ChittleBlog
Why Tony is angry
Still on One Nation: Why did Tony Abbot put so much effort into fighting them? Because David Oldfield co-founded One Nation while purporting to work for Abbot, in his electoral office. His paychecks came via Mr Abbot, but he was starting up his own party which would compete directly with the Liberals ... when Abbot found out about his, he was extremely angry. Looks like he translated his anger into action.
Why Tony is angry
Still on One Nation: Why did Tony Abbot put so much effort into fighting them? Because David Oldfield co-founded One Nation while purporting to work for Abbot, in his electoral office. His paychecks came via Mr Abbot, but he was starting up his own party which would compete directly with the Liberals ... when Abbot found out about his, he was extremely angry. Looks like he translated his anger into action.
Stupidity and Ignorance
In all the recent media coverage of Pauline Hanson, I have only found one journalist who addressed the obvious question:
Why did Oldfield, Etteridge and Hanson structure One Nation as a tightly controlled corporation rather than as a proper political party?
The answer should be blindingly obvious to anyone who knows anything about Australian politics: to keep the League of Rights (see
below), the LaRouchies and other nut-jobs from taking over the party via branch-stacking.
Andrew Bolt got it right. Everyone else either never asked the question, or didn't want to tell their audience the answer.
Worse still, a senior political journalist [link lost, sorry] described One Nation as "Extreme Right" only last Friday. Rubbish. One Nation were stupid and racist, but not anti-semitic. They didn't deny that the Nazis murdered six million Jews or blame "Internation Bankers" (a traditional codeword for Joooos) for the world's economic problems. So they are
not part of the
Extreme right. (Indeed, like a lot of populist movements, they are a strange mixture of left
and right. Of course, the traditional left-right scale is obsolete, but we are still waiting for something better to replace it.)
My conclusion: Hanson and Etteridge were demonstrably stupid but almost all Australian journalists are distressingly ignorant.
About One Nation
Is it compulsory for Australian political bloggers to say something about Pauline Hanson
and David Etteridge getting 3 years in jail for fraud in setting up One Nation?
Nah, surely not ... but I'll say something anyhow ...
If you want to know anything about One Nation beyond the media's prolific but shallow coverage, read
Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, Australia, 1999) by Margo Kingston. Yes,
that Margo Kingston. But it's the best book available about One Nation -- I would even call it the only useful book about them. Margo did include a few pages of Serious Political Analysis, but they can easily be skipped.
In Googling for that link, I found out that (1) Steve Edwards posted a good description of this book
in June. and (2) there is now a second edition.
