Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

G'day. Barnaby Joyce will make his maiden speech to the Senate just before 6pm. As I wrote yesterday, he could well be Pauline Hanson with brains, the latest maverick thrown up by Queensland regional and rural voters to demand a 'please explain' or else.

The big issue now, as it has been for a long time, is the full sale of Telstra. Seventy percent of Australians don't want it. Rural and regional Australians fear they'll get left behind on communications if it is, and they don't trust the Libs or most of the Nats to ensure it isn't so. And no wonder!

The Nats betrayed the bush over Telstra long ago, before the 1998 election, in fact, in a Senate vote on Saturday, July 11, 1998. THE NATS VOTED TO SELL ALL OF TELSTRA. Ex-Labor Senator Mal Colston, who sold most of his soul to the Libs in exchange for getting deputy president of the Senate, finally said NO! The Judas National Party Senators still sitting in the Senate groaning about Barnaby Joyce were Ron Boswell (Qld), Sandy Macdonald (NSW) (alleged to have helped try to bribe Tony Windsor so the Nats could win his seat) and Julian McGauran (Vic), the bloke who gave the Senate the 'up yours' last week. They worked within the system alright, and they're still alright, aren't they.

What happened since? John Anderson called a Rural Summit after the 1998 election, and, according to communications minister Helen Coonan in the Senate today, spent more than $1 billion to improve telco services in the bush and set up 'rural transaction centres'. Multiple government inquiries have found rural and regional telco services were nowhere near up to scratch. 

I loved Liberal MP Alby Shultz's recent remark that Barnaby was the "creature from Queensland" and the "son of Frankenstein". What a compliment! Re Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (my emphasis):

The subtitle The Modern Prometheus refers to the figure in Greek mythology who was responsible for a conflict between mankind and the gods. In order to help the people, Prometheus stole Zeus's fire from the sun. The people were thereby given an advantage to the animals since fire gave man the ability to make weapons and tools. Prometheus was severely punished by Zeus who chained him to a rock in the Caucasus. Every night, Prometheus was visited by an eagle who ate from his liver. During the day, however, his liver grew back to its original state.

It also refers to the story of Prometheus plasticator who was to said to have created and animated mankind out of clay.

These two myths were eventually fused together: the fire that Prometheus had stolen is the fire of life with which he animated his clay models. Because of the 'creating' aspect, Prometheus became a symbol for the creating artist in the eighteenth century.

Victor Frankenstein can indeed be seen as the modern Prometheus. He defies the gods by creating life himself. Instead of being the created, Victor takes God's place and becomes the creator. Just as Prometheus, Victor gets punished for his deeds. He is, however, punished by his creation whereas Prometheus was punished by the god who he stole from.

When covering Hanson's 1998 election campaign to win the Queensland regional/rural seat of Blair, her National Party opponent told a public meeting he'd never vote for a sale. if elected. Never ever.

Below is Chapter 18 of my 1999 book Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip (Allen & Unwin), which describes the devastation Labor and Liberal ideologues inflicted on our our regions in the cause of a competition policy devoid of care for the help the loser communities would need to adjust, or the basic services ALL Australians deserved wherever they lived. My first take on Hanson's incarceration is at Mother of the nation in jail, its father in charge and for an archive Webdiary's discussions on the meaning of the Hanson phenomenon, still playing itself out all these years later, see Now we feel sorry for her!)

But first, today's Telstra statements from Tony Windsor, fellow regional independent Peter Andren, Dems leader Lyn Allison and shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan:

Windsor urges Barnaby to hold the line on full Telstra sale

Independent Member for New England, Tony Windsor has today urged new National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce to hold the line on his opposition to the full sale of Telstra.

“Senator Joyce has been under a lot of pressure from the Liberal Party and his National Party colleagues to support the full sale of Telstra and I can empathise with him as he holds the balance of power as I did in the NSW Parliament from 1991-1995.

It is a tough position to be in but I urge Senator Joyce to be true to those who put him into the Senate and think more about being able to look these people in the eye at the end of the day rather than be worried about the joint party room who are out of touch with the people they represent on this issue.

You only have to look at the polls on the full sale of Telstra to see that it’s not only country people who want Telstra retained in majority Government ownership but also city based Australians,” Mr Windsor said.

Mr Windsor points to the new Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo’s seeking of $5 billion only last week to upgrade Telstra infrastructure as an admission that country telecommunication services are in need of immediate attention in a big way as a result of a lack of re-investment since the Government decided to sell Telstra to reduce Government debt.

“Last week Senator Joyce wanted expert input into the real figure it would cost to improve telecommunication services in the country up to parity of price and parity of service and to do anything without this expert input makes a mockery of any deal that may be done.

The closest thing to expert input so far is from new Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo who last week put a plan to the Government requesting a $5 billion upgrade program which is a long way above the $1billion injection plus $100 million per year from a trust fund of $2 Billion that is on the table.

At that rate, the rate that the National Party is saying could be acceptable to them, it would take 40 years to reach what Mr Trujillo is saying is needed now and this doesn’t take into account any access to new technology rollout in the future.

Telstra generated $2.2 Billion for the Government in the year just gone so it’s not as though the Government doesn’t have the ability to reinvest its share of the profits back into upgrading the service and even if it only put back the 40% share of this profit – the share for the 7 million Australians that the National Party purports to represent – then this is still $880 Million per year that could be utilised and Telstra would not need to be sold at all,” Mr Windsor said.

Mr Windsor believes that if Senator Joyce doesn’t hold the line on this issue, the people who put him there have every right to be bitterly disappointed.

“Senator Joyce has thus far talked the talk, but if he doesn’t walk the walk, he will slide back into being taken for granted – just another rubber stamp on anti-country policy for which the National Party is now renowned just when he was being feted as being the resurgence of the National Party and their standing up for country people like they used to,” Mr Windsor said.

*

Coalition sells out the bush on Telstra  

The Coalition is prepared to sell out the bush for $1 billion and $100m a year to engineer a Telstra sell-off despite opposition to the sale strengthening across the country, according to Peter Andren, Member for Calare.

“The government is offering the Nationals a one-off spend of $1B then a $100m a year from a $2B trust fund. This is supposed to be for fibre-optic, wireless and satellite links to network country Australia, but they’re dreaming,” Mr Andren said.

“The coalition must think country voters are pretty dull to swallow this deal when the Nationals estimated the cost of the same job at a minimum of $7B, Sol Trujillo wants a $5B government contribution to do it, and previous Telstra estimates were between $20B and $30B.

“The government has never clearly defined and costed the job of building a state of the art telecommunications network in the bush, sticking to its meaningless ‘up-to-scratch’ benchmark. There is no way to measure what ‘up-to-scratch’ is.

“This is why we have so many different and meaningless figures being thrown about now.

“Barnaby Joyce seems tempted to join his Nationals colleagues in rolling over to their Liberal masters, just as Newspoll shows national opposition to the sale firming to 70%. In my own electorate survey that number is 92%.

“This is despite rising satisfaction with the price and quality of services being offered by Telstra, resulting from public pressure brought to bear on the majority owner – the Commonwealth.

“The message is clear – the quality and price of services now is not the issue when it comes to the Telstra sale. It is the future of those services that country people are worried about and the economic insanity of selling such a valuable public asset.

“I am convinced this week’s resignation of Telstra Country Wide’s western NSW manager suggests a lack of confidence within the organisation in its ability to meet customer expectations in rural areas,” Mr Andren said.

“The political debate has been reduced to buying the votes of recalcitrant junior coalition party members but the Nationals stand warned – this is their GST, the issue that cost the Democrats so dearly,” he added.

*

Nationals sell out their constituents for chicken feed

Australian Democrats Leader Senator Lyn Allison said that a $3 billion kitty has been plucked out of the air and is chicken feed in return for selling $33.8 billion public ownership in Telstra.

"If Senator Joyce thinks this is a reasonable deal, then his objections to the sale are not serious,” Senator Allison said.

"What surprises me the most is that there are other alternatives that the Nationals are not exploring.

"Minister Coonan is wrong when she says that there would be no money to protect services into the future unless Telstra is sold.

"For a start the Government generates $2 billion a year in revenue from Telstra, which would go directly into infrastructure upgrade and maintenance. With the deal this $2 billion will not be available for revenue or for infrastructure year after year.”

Senator Allison said the Government could have required Telstra to focus on core activities that are in the national interest, and divest its shareholdings in non-core offshoots such as Foxtel, Sensis, Telstra Clear and CSL and use the proceeds, around $12 billion, to fund a national roll-out of fibre.

"As the majority shareholder and with Ministerial discretion, the Government could sell off these businesses and keep Telstra's core business public,” Senator Allison said. “This would be the best way to 'future proof' telecommunications for the country.”

"In its rush to the reduce non existent debt, despite Australia having one of the lowest national debts in the OECD, the Government has not given adequate consideration to the implications of the full privatisation of a vertically integrated monopolistic Telstra, and the alternatives.

"Instead we have the Government in a mess, making policy on the run to pursue its ideological wish list."

"At the very least the Nationals should take this package to a Senate inquiry so it can be properly scrutinised,” Senator Allison concluded.

*

$3b Telstra give-away will cost $3b more in lost Future Fund returns

The real losers out of the Howard Government’s proposal to earmark $3 billion to appease the Queensland National Party are Peter Costello, his Future Fund, and the Australian people.

In May’s Budget, the Treasurer announced proceeds from the further sale of Telstra were to be put in the Future Fund ‘locked box’.

Now it seems the locked box has been raided by the National Party.

Calculations show that this $3 billion raid on Peter Costello’s Future Fund will result in a loss of investment income of at least another $3 billion over the life of the Fund.

This figure assumes the funds now redirected for pork barrelling would have earned the current cash rate of 5.5 percent between 2006-07 and 2020-21.

This means the true cost to the Budget of the Telstra giveaway is likely to exceed 6 billion dollars.

This is a costly capitulation from Peter Costello that leaves his Future Fund gutted before it’s even been launched.

Only a fortnight ago the Treasurer claimed that using Telstra sale proceeds to appease the National Party would be inflationary and economically irresponsible, and that Barnaby Joyce’s demands would ‘cannibalise’ Coalition policy.

Peter Costello talks tough, but his bark’s worse than his bite – he’s too weak to stand up to the QLD Nationals and he’s been left out in the cold by his colleagues again.

As expected, the Treasurer’s Future Fund has been trashed in the interests of short term political expediency.

Costello and the Government are too out of touch to know that the best thing for Australians and for the Budget bottom line is a Telstra in public hands, delivering decent services.

***

Colston scuttles $40b Telstra plan: poll blows for PM

by Peter Rees, Sunday Mail SA, 12/7/98

Key Independent Senator Mal Colston last night dashed the Government's plans to sell all of Telstra and robbed the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, of a $5 billion election war chest when he voted against the sale.

His move stunned the Government, which offered to hold last minute talks in a bid to win him over to avoid a humiliating defeat on the floor of the Senate. The 33 all vote, with Senator Colston joining his former Labor colleagues, along with the Australian Democrats and the Greens, meant the Bill failed. This was even though the Government won the support of Tasmanian Independent Senator Brian Harradine.

Loud applause erupted in the public gallery as the Bill was defeated. The loss of the Bill robs the Government of a crucial plank for the Federal election.

While the Government said the bulk of the $40 billion plus, which the sale of the remaining two−thirds of Telstra was expected to raise, would go to pay off national debt, it planned to use up to $5 billion as a "social bonus" and for tax cuts to woo voters.

It also means a $150 million package unveiled last week to buy off the National Party, plus another $60 million boost to its regional telecommunications program, will not go ahead as all funding was contingent on the full sale of the telecommunications giant.

With the Government confident he would support the sale, Senator Colston scuppered the bill, despite 11th hour talks with Mr Howard on Friday. But it is understood the 90 minute meeting went badly, with Senator Colston upset at several points Mr Howard raised. According to sources, the meeting discussed the refusal of the Government to accept his vote. Senator Colston is also believed to have been unimpressed by some references to the travel rorts affair over which he faces charges.

But last night he made no reference to the discussion other than to thank Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, for his efforts, while pointedly ignoring the meeting with Mr Howard.

Senator Colston said he would vote against the Bill because he feared services in remote and regional areas could not be guaranteed without government control of Telstra. "One of my concerns is the standard of telecommunication services in Queensland, especially in rural and regional areas," he said. "I am also concerned about stable employment opportunities for Telstra workers."

He said new figures indicated employment assurances had not been fulfilled, with some staffing areas down 12 per cent. "At this stage, without the benefit of a crystal ball, a continuing government interest in Telstra can provide some reassurance for regional customers that their long term service requirements can be maintained," he said.

Senator Colston said he recognised his vote could be decisive. "Should I vote with the Government, or even abstain, the Bill will probably be passed," he said. "Should I vote against the Bill it will probably not proceed.

*

Telstra sale plan sunk by Colston

by Tony Wright, Sunday Age, 12/7/98

Independent Senator Mal Colston last night torpedoed the Government's $40 billion proposal to sell the remaining two thirds of Telstra, sending the Coalition's pre-election plans into dissarray.

At 8.20pm, he voted with the Opposition and minority parties to oppose the Telstra sale Bill, to applause from the public galleries. His vote meant the Senate vote was tied, which is treated under standing orders as a decision in the negative.

The decision leaves the Government without a major plank of its election strategy. The proceeds of the Telstra Bill were to have been used to pay off Government debt and fund major telecommunications infrastructure, especially in rural areas.

Paying off debt would also have freed up money to be used as tax cuts to sweeten the Government's proposed goods and services tax.

Senator Colston sat mute during eight hours of debate on the Telstra Bill during yesterday's extraordinary sitting before climbing to his feet shortly before 6pm and declaring he could not support the legislation. Despite being accused in an extraordinary personal attack earlier in the afternoon by the Senate Opposition Leader, Senator John Faulkner, of doing a "slimy backdoor deal" with the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, Senator Colston said he would oppose the Government's legislation.

"On balance, I find at this stage I'm unable to support the bill and will thus be voting against it," Senator Colston told the silent Senate. "Overall, there remain too many question marks over services and employment, particularly in regional Queensland."

A clearly stunned Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, who earlier in the day had offered an extra $60 million for telecommunications in rural Australia, much of which would go to Queensland, said he deeply regretted that Senator Colston had not earlier expressed his concerns to the Government. "To the extent that Senator Colston does have concerns that can be addressed, over the next couple of hours, then we would still be prepared to look at those," Senator Alston said.

The Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, expressed disappointment with the Senate last night. A spokesman for Mr Howard said the Senate "has voted for a much greater debt burden for future generations.

*

Colston drops a new Telstra bombshell

by Phillip Hudson, 12/7/98

Queensland independent Senator Mal Colston last night presented himself as the champion of Telstra staff and regional customers as he announced he would not support the full sale of the communications company.

Acknowledging that his vote could decide whether the sale would go ahead, Senator Colston said: "On balance I find, at this stage, I am unable to support the bill and will thus be voting against it. There remain too many question marks over services and employment, but particularly in regional Queensland."

Senator Colston's bombshell came after he was taunted and abused by Opposition senators. He had held a secret meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, in Brisbane on Friday and a meeting with the Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, yesterday.

"The impact on people and the social costs which may be involved deserve to be examined in a context not driven by political or electoral timetables," he said.

Senator Colston told a silent Senate chamber that the Telstra workforce had been treated "abominably" and he blamed the company management for "endless uncertainty and insecurity. It appears management has acted with little realisation that Telstra could not operate without its highly skilled, competent and conscientous workers," he said.

He said he supported the one third sale in 1996 because it left two hirds of Telstra in Government hands.

"But it is a quantum leap to move from one third to 100 per cent privatisation," he said. "We need to reverse the now almost invisible social costs that have resulted since partial privatisation. We need to look at people, not numbers. The impact of staff cutbacks for small rural communities is enormous and goes beyond the telecommunications industry. It impacts on all levels of the community from the corner shop to the local schools."

He played down the Government's claims that the sale proceeds would be used to pay off debt and improve services to regional areas.

*

The devil to pay as a Faustian deal breaks down

by Michael Millett, SMH, 13/7/98

It took the Government three tries to get the Wik bill through an obstinate Senate. How many for Telstra? That was the question dominating the minds of the Government's senior strategists last night after Queensland maverick, Senator Mal Colston, decided to block the Telstra sale bill.

Whatever Colston's motivation, he has landed the Prime Minister with an extremely difficult problem. Howard needs Colston's vote or at least his absence a continuation of the Faustian bargain that has help shaped policy making over the past two years. He needs it because the Government has made the full sale of Telstra one of the central pillars of its election platform.

It holds up Howard's pledge of turning Australia into a nation of mini-capitalists via share ownership. It is pivotal to the Government's housekeeping strategy, paring more than $2 billion a year off the the public interest bill and giving it extra money to make tax cuts.

And it gives Howard his $5 billion "social bonus", a massive war chest to be used to entice voters from One Nation.

Howard has used the social bonus to keep nervous National MPs within the Coalition pen. He has warned them that without their vote to the sale of Telstra, they don't get to dip into the war chest. It is impossible for him to argue the reverse: that the social bonus applies even without the sale.

If Howard cannot guarantee that the sale will proceed (and the numbers in any new Senate will be even more stacked against him) then any pledge he makes which is bankrolled by the "social bonus" becomes just another unfunded election promise.

The Government and the Canberra press gallery misread Colston, believing he would fall into line behind the other independent, Tasmania's Brian Harradine. The Government suspects that son Doug is now calling the shots as much as his father.

Nevertheless, the Government has again misplayed the politics of the Upper House, its election plans tied to the whims of one person. In this case, it is a man fighting demons within and without, a diagnosis of terminal cancer and fraud charges relating to the mishandling of parliamentary entitlements.

*

So near and yet so far: the PM, it seems, blew it

by Laura Tingle and Anne Davies, Australian Financial Review, 13/08.98

After meeting Senator Mal Colston in Brisbane on Friday, John Howard briefed his senior ministers that nothing the former Labor man said had suggested he would block their plans to sell the rest of Telstra. It has been exposed as one of the Prime Minister's more appalling political assessments.

It was certainly one which left Government senators, led by Senate Leader, Robert Hill, and Communications Minister, Richard Alston, stunned when Senator Colston dropped his bombshell in the Senate at 5.45 pm on Saturday.

"On balance, I find that at this stage I am unable to support this bill and thus will be voting against it," he told the Senate after a long day of filibustering and unparliamentary brawling.

The expectation all afternoon had been that the legislation to allow the sale would pass with Colston's support and that of Senator Brian Harradine, the Tasmanian Independent.

Yet sources close to Senator Colston marvelled yesterday that there should be any surprise. Before he met the Prime Minister for an hour and a half, the sources said, he was certainly prepared to consider the legislation. But by Saturday morning, he wasn't. The Prime Minister, it seems, had blown it. The question was why.

Senator Colston emphasised on Saturday the importance to his decision of unmet assurances given about Telstra's Queensland employment plans when he supported the sale of one third of the corporation in 1996. Senator Alston says he spoke to Senator Colston "on a number of occasions" before Saturday and that "he did express some concerns about services in Queensland and employment".

But what also seems to have repeatedly come up in conversations between Senator Colston and the Government is the Government's refusal to accept his vote since he came under a cloud over travel rorts last year. The issue was raised with the Prime Minister on Friday, and Senator Alston also says: "I think he has raised the issue".

***

We're all poor lean people and we're bangin' on your gate

DAYS 28, 29 AND 30

We stood on the footpath of the deserted main street of the tiny town of Yarraman in Blair waiting for Pauline Hanson. It had taken a 500kilometre criss-cross of Blair to find her. In the mid-afternoon heat and dust we waited like a posse of outlaws for our prey. The two federal police who followed her everywhere in her home State wandered out of the haberdashery shop first, saw us, and smiled.

Pauline Hanson followed. She wore blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the neck. Her face was stripped of colour and her eyes had taken on the wild, unfocused look I'd seen on many of her members throughout the campaign. Her expression did not change when she saw us. She walked to her car looking straight ahead and said nothing as we gathered around her asking questions on her costings.

The leader of One Nation was mute. The toughness, the once-moreunto-the-breach bravado of the 'little redhead from Ipswich' had disappeared. Hanson was a beaten, fractured woman, retreating to the Blair haven in the bush where her vote was solid. She was far, far away from the voters she needed on the edges of Ipswich, the Labor town she had stormed in the 1996 election but who, according to the polls, had now had second thoughts and were bringing her down.

Hanson often reminisced at her public meetings about her introduction to politics, how she'd put up her hand to stand for the safe Labor seat of Oxley, the only Liberal to do so, then been disendorsed after standing by her anti-Aboriginal comments. 'It was a wake-up. It was a shock,' she'd say. 'It was like being told 'Hey, listen, you know nothing, we know everything, you shut up and we'll tell you what to do.' That's not why I was going into politics. I wanted to have a voice.' Now it was gone. And so was she.

She drove for an hour along thinning gravel roads to an isolated property. As Hanson's car disappeared up the long winding path to a sanctuary hidden from view, a woman from One Nation parked her car across the cattle grid to bar our entry.

As Dean drove back to Brisbane, I played the tape of One Nation's jingle, Poor Lean People, produced just in time for the campaign launch. Dot Cornwell had talked me into buying the tape for $10. A North Queensland fan sang it in the broad-accented, traditional Australian ballad style. You've all had it pretty good for the last 200 years You crushed us at Eureka and you never saw our tears, You robbed us with your rum trade and we fought in all your wars, We paid in blood and bodies and no one kept the scores. Now you've taken all our guns away to protect us from ourselves, And you gave our jobs to strangers and you sent us all to hell. Now we're standing in the dole queues while we contemplate our fate, And if we're over 50 then for us it's all too late. Now we're poor lean people who can no longer wait, We're all poor lean people and we're bangin' on your gate.

You took away our dignity and you messed with all our lives, But come the next election and we'll see who holds the knives. To ATSIC you gave millions and you wonder where it went, But in your heart right from the start you know how it was spent. You're all bitten by the travel bug and we pay for all your trips, You stay in all the best hotels and you tax the waiter's tips.

We're all poor lean people and you made us all this way, We're all poor lean people and that's how we're gunna stay. Poor lean people with our backs against the wall, Look out little Johnny 'cause you're riding for a fall.

You sold off all our assets and you taxed us to the floor, Then you hit us with a GST and screwed us all some more. You taxed us on our incomes and you tax us when we die, Why don't you tax the air we breathe, c'mon now don't be shy.

We're just poor lean people and we're rednecks so you say, We're just poor lean people tryin' to find another way.

Now we're poor lean people, we can no longer wait, We're all poor lean people and we're bangin' on your gate.

Class war, the taboo aspect of Hansonism, set to music, with knives. Pauline's People were rural poor and fringe city poor clinging to old cultural values they insisted were still central to Australia's identity, because otherwise they felt like white trash. And white trash kicks Aborigines because it makes them feel better.

All the little Blair towns the search party-the ABC, Network Seven, The Sydney Morning Herald, News Limited and Tokyo TBS televisionhad torn through during the day were bereft of mobile service, which died within minutes of Ipswich. Town after town had no bank, and public phones were invariably out of order. The jobs had gone and the youth dragged down the main streets each night until the police told them to call it quits. The events of their communities marking the passage of each year were petering out as young people left for the capital cities. It was hard not to feel in the eerie devastation of it all that the system had decided that these people and their culture were expendable, and they had been left alone to wither away in silence.

At the centre of One Nation, the hardcore 5 percent was mad and dangerous. The city carpetbaggers who had built the party around 'the product', David Oldfield and David Ettridge, had hitched a ride. Squeezed between the mad and the cynical were desperate Australians who'd flirted with their very own cargo cult heroine as their means to scream. But now Pauline Hanson, the lady with the lamp to her followers, leading the self-pitying and the forgotten from the darkness to the light, had gone to ground.

Yet Hanson had put on a federal election campaign which could not be beaten for its sweep of Australia, its spontaneous political debates between grassroots Australians, and the homemade, heartfelt protests against her racist excesses by citizens on the street. Her campaign could not be beaten for guts either. Neither John Howard nor Kim Beazley had held one public meeting during the campaign. She'd held more than 20 unvetted public meetings, walking into unknowable questions and hostilities, backing herself to come through. She'd left us, the media she professed to despise yet needed so much, to package her frenetic days for public consumption.

She had managed to engage thousands of Australians in political debate who had, before luck and timing threw her onto centre stage, been a part of the ever-growing band of citizens rendered sullen and disgusted by the people who governed them. While the dwindling numbers of grassroots members in the slick professional major party machines made it almost impossible for them to staff their polling booths on election day, Hanson's only asset was that she had grassroots members to burn.

Some of them had rejected the grand visions of Paul Keating for the comfortable and relaxed' soothings of John Howard, but found there was little difference-except that Howard screwed down the victims of his economic number crunching more than Keating had. Howard's cloak for his unforgiving, sink or swim economics in the 1996 election had been his dangerous flirtation with scapegoating, making 'minorities' a term of abuse in Coalition advertising and pledging to govern 'for all of us'. Hanson had thrown that back in his face by making the message explicit and extreme. Kick the chosen scapegoats please, don't just fiddle around with them. There had to be some lessons in all of this. There just had to be.

At the end of the journey she'd begun at the 1996 election, Hanson's voice and her people's screams had been heard so loudly she'd become the most famous Australian politician in the world. Hanson had begun to unravel the seemingly seamless nature of our transition from White Australia Policy racism and our crushing indifference to the plight of indigenous Australians towards tolerance and reconciliation. She had also opened a fault line in the apparent completeness of the ideological victory of economic rationalism, with its refusal to value anything that could not be measured in cash.

In the beginning, Hanson was demonised and her supporters derided as fools. Yet were she, and they, really to blame? John Ralston Saul's definition of 'the elite' in The Doubter's Companion (Penguin Books Australia, 1995) kept running through my mind.

Every society has an elite. No society has ever been without one. The thing elites most easily forget is that they make no sense as a group unless they have a healthy and productive relationship with the rest of the citizenry. Questions of nationalism, ideology, and the filling of pockets aside, the principal function of an elite is to serve the interests of the whole. They may prosper far more than the average citizen in the process. They may have all sorts of advantages. These perks won't matter so long as the greater interests are also served. From their point of view, this is not a bad bargain. So it really is curious just how easily they forget and set about serving only themselves, even if it means that they or the society will self-destruct.

There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them.

Now easygoing, 'egalitarian' Australia had experienced its unique brand of far-right populism feeding off disgust with our elites. In our version, we had a female leader and a political amateur, which had made her both easier to pull apart and much harder, since Pauline's People, despite everything, admired her refusal to abide by the rules and her dogged insistence on coming back for more. Surely it was the duty of the elites to solve the causes of Hansonism, because Hanson was only the symptom, not the disease. After all the anger and pain of Hansonism, that was the lesson I felt I'd learnt from covering her campaign. Pauline's People felt they no longer understood their society and what it was for, and many of them felt they were being told they no longer belonged in it. They couldn't make head or tail of the political discourse, and no one could explain it to them or even wanted to, let alone help them join the brave new world their elites insisted was inevitable.

I remembered a scene in an Adelaide coffee shop when a woman had burst in demanding the right, as a mother of two children, to hear Hanson's vision. A dog-tired Hanson threw her head back and said like a mantra:

I'm offering more for this country than what the previous major parties have done for this country for a long, long time. We've seen this country being sold out, we've seen our kids have no future of ever possibly getting a job in this country, we've seen our industries and manufacturing sold out, we've seen our land sold out from underneath us, and we don't even know whether where we're Australians or not. That's my vision for Australia, to rebuild all these things again so that we have pride within ourselves and our nation and a future for our children.

.

Apart from the culturally loaded comment, the Democrats would have endorsed every sentiment. Democrats leader Meg Lees' election speech for radio said:

The Democrats stand between those who see everything as numbers on a balance sheet, and ordinary Australians who depend on public services. We stand between those who pursue competition policy and the lives of small businesses and rural communities being destroyed in the process. We stand between those who want to sell everything our parents and grandparents have worked and paid for, and the rest of us, who want a secure future for our children.

What Hanson had that the Democrats didn't was a common language with the disenfranchised. They could understand what she was talking about. It was the standard 'commonsense' of the ignorant unencumbered by rigorous analysis, yet there was often a nagging grain of truth in Hanson's half-baked simplicities. And maybe if the powerful, including the media, had engaged with the scream rather than returning it, the monster of One Nation might not have grown to terrorise us all. But the powerful either played a devious game of footsie, as had Howard in the beginning, or tried to deride her into oblivion.

The federal National Party leader of the 1970s and early 80s, Doug Anthony, put the issue so simply. 'I mean this economic rationalism is one thing, but you've got to realise that Australia wants to be decentralised and there are people's concerns to look after and they need to think about that.' And if 'they' didn't, and just kept getting richer and fatter, maybe one day they'd lose the stability in Australian society that allowed them to keep doing it.

According to the media commentators, the media's outrageous behaviour had resurrected One Nation's campaign. According to Hanson we'd destroyed it. Now Hanson the naive was beginning to see fault in her guru, too. After we'd found her in Blair, she flew to Sydney with Oldfield for her pre-booked two-hour appearance on Stan Zemanek's radio show. She'd then told her federal police officers she was changing her return flight to an earlier time and that Oldfield was not to be informed. A deeply embarrassed Oldfield, followed by the media who'd made the trip down with them, arrived at Brisbane airport alone. I learnt later that she'd taken the afternoon off from what was supposed to be an intensive last few days of campaigning in Blair to visit her father-the man she'd told us was famous for his homemade chicken rolls-in a Gold Coast nursing home. She'd often told her fans that when she'd told her father she wanted to be in politics he'd told her not to be silly, it would make no difference. After she'd won the seat of Oxley, she'd told him she wanted to start a new party, and he'd said don't be silly, it will make no difference. When she'd launched One Nation he'd been in the front row clapping, and was now her biggest ally, she'd say. She returned to see him now. Perhaps he was the only person she trusted any more.

The Faustian pact between Oldfield and Hanson had fallen apart. She needed him for substance, but had chosen a man whose narcissism and contempt for her and her supporters had helped tarnish her extraordinary appeal to Pauline's People, and constantly threatened to tear the grassroots party apart. And here he was; now de facto leader of One Nation, the public face of the party in the final days of a campaign she looked like she'd lose. He'd played a dangerous hand when he'd played the media card.

Hanson's media weren't committed to finding Hanson any more. There was no point. She'd refused to reveal the whereabouts of her last public meeting on Thursday night, even to the local media she needed to report her final speech to the voters of Blair. She'd instructed Oldfield not to say when and where she'd be voting on Saturday for the standard happy snap of the leader at the polling booth, and she'd issued a ban on the media attending her election night bash. That meant no communication from Hanson to her people on election night, whatever the result-no live crosses to the TV election night specials, no anything. Melanie had been desperately concerned that her head office would not understand such an unprecedented step, and tell her to fix it somehow, but that hadn't happened either. No worries, Laurie Oakes had said. Too bad. We'd have to be there, of course, standing outside, and the Nine Network and some other media were considering employing security guards in case there was trouble.

On Thursday night we gathered at our hotel restaurant for a premature post-campaign dinner. A Los Angeles Times journalist who'd contacted me for an entree to see Hanson - and whom I'd advised would be better off doing it solo-called in. He'd walked into Hanson's office to be greeted by Oldfield as a long-lost friend. He'd scored a long interview with Oldfield and had sat around the office all afternoon until Oldfield gave him a lift to the public meeting, held in her dead spot, Ipswich. The same David Oldfield who had refused to answer questions from the foreign media at the Easytax launch at the campaign's beginning was now escorting the foreign media to One Nation functions. His compulsive need for a media audience had come to this. The Los Angeles Times witnessed exclusively Pauline Hanson's final public speech of One Nation's first federal election campaign.

My sister Gay from The Age joined us on Friday and we drove to Hanson's Ipswich office in case she showed her face. Paul McGeough wanted to finish The Sydney Morning Herald news coverage of Hanson's campaign with the story of her muteness in Yarraman, and that seemed to me an appropriate time to call it quits. So while Helen, Gay and Christine Jackman endured consecutive rambling interviews with Oldfield in the office, Grant and I had coffee at the Globe Cafe across the street discussing when to get to Hanson's house the next morning to follow her and ensure we got voting shots. A woman at the next table said she lived near Hanson, and suggested we watch Hanson's house from her place over coffee. Grant gave her his mobile number on the back of my card and she agreed to ring if she saw Hanson leave her house. Still feeling squeezed between the antipathy of One Nation on one side and denunciation by media critics on the other, I thanked her for thinking we were okay. 'Of course you are, she's the one that's not,' she replied.

The Electoral Commission office was in the same building as Hanson's office, and the parties were camped outside handing out howto-vote cards to locals who needed to vote before Saturday. I struck up a conversation with an elderly woman knitting contentedly behind the National Party table. The National Party was bleeding to death in Blair, a natural National Party seat, and a dearth of volunteers in the district had seen her bussed in from Brisbane to keep the flag flying. What did she think of Pauline Hanson? 'She's the best thing that happened to politics because those other two parties just wandered on. I know I'm National, but it needed this one to come in and give them a serve. We're all at sixes and sevens up here, you have no idea, no one knows which way it's going. But at the moment she's a good frightener.' Gay came out of Hanson's office after her first interview with Oldfield shaking her head. 'He's obsessed with the media, that's all he cares about. He actually loves it that Pauline's away and the media are around him,' she said, disconcerted. 'I asked him at the end if there was anything else he wanted to stress, and he said, "Just that I'm a really nice guy".' Helen had ended her two-hour stint in the office watching Oldfield pack and make phone calls with, 'The best advice I can give you is to employ someone to take that step back and tell you where you're going wrong, like you say you do for Pauline.' Oldfield did the final campaign doorstop, One Nation's last plea for votes. Unlike David Ettridge and sundry other One Nation officials who'd predicted winning a swag of Lower House and Senate seats, Oldfield was at least a realist. 'If Pauline Hanson is re-elected, just that will be successful from our point of view. If we win anything beyond Pauline's re-election, then that is very successful, considering what we've had thrust against us.' He was preparing his supporters for a bad result?

'No, our supporters are incredibly confident, all of our candidates are incredibly confident. I'm the only pessimist in this party.' 'Do you feel responsible at all for the breakdown in the relationship with the media?' Lisa Millar asked.

'Not at all, because I understand that the media dislike me and they like Pauline. If I've got that situation, then I'm doing the right job, because the important thing is to have a person between the candidate and the media. So if the media don't like me and they like Pauline, then I'm doing my job.' Throughout the campaign I'd veered between seeing Oldfield as a genius or a fool, and now I had my answer. He was boasting about his success as her media adviser when One Nation's sole vote-winner was absent on the final day she could appeal to voters for support. It didn't matter whether we liked Pauline Hanson or not. She wasn't there. Instead of her down-home charm, viewers saw his big-city cynicism on the last night of the election campaign. He wasn't standing between the candidate and the media; he'd replaced the candidate. At the end of it all, as we walked away, he said it had been nice working with us.

'It's been a nightmare working with you, David,' I replied.

Oldfield rang around journalists very late that night to say Hanson had now agreed to vote at Ipswich primary school at 2 p.m., but that we were still banned from her election night function. I didn't trust him, and after his campaign launch set-up I wasn't going to risk another one. I rang him for the first time in weeks and told him I wanted personal assurances from Hanson that she'd be there, otherwise we'd follow her from her home. He wanted to discuss an unflattering Herald feature on him in the paper that morning. When I said I hadn't read it, he said: 'I don't care if you track her.' 'I know you don't, David, but do you care about whether she'd like to be tracked tomorrow? The issue is not whether you care, the issue is whether she cares.' The only thing we had going for us to restore cordial relations with Hanson on the last day of our mutual odyssey was that Oldfield was flying to Canberra early next morning to appear as an election commentator for the Nine Network.

---

Previous comments on this thread

---