By Christine Jackman, Courier mail, 16th September 1998
Just a few days travelling with Pauline Hanson and you quickly realise that a lot of people out there are desperate to tell someone what they want for Australia.
In a small house in a still Gatton street Mervyn Corwell is quietly dying.
After multiple by-passes and with emphysema in both lungs, Mervyn doesn't get out much anymore. He knows his time is limited and he wants to make the most of it. He wants to meet Pauline Hanson.
Last week, Mervyn got that wish.
It was the meeting Hanson didn't want the public to see. Even a One Nation critic would have to admit its a big compliment being someone's dying wish. But Hanson went to some lengths to keep the news from the media when she went to meet Mervyn last week.
A bit of smart driving in between two scheduled appointments - a nursing home visit and a "meet the people" shopping centre walk - and she managed to lose all but four of a determined media pack.
She asked us to wait outside during the visit. We obliged.
But then Mervyn's wife Dorothy, the vice-President of a local Hanson support group, urged us to come in.
Inside, in a tiny lounge room neatly crowded with knick knacks and the accumulated trivia of a life shared and slowly coming to a close. Mervyn sat and haltingly told Hanson a meandering story of war and its aftermath, of war pensions not forthcoming, of being sacked by Joh Bjelke-Petersen during the SEQEB dispute, of the Howard Government's slashing of support for invalid carers.
At times Dorothy tried to focus her husband's fading memory.
"But what is it you want from the Government, Merv?" she urged gently. "What do you want?"
Just a few days travelling with Hanson and you quickly realise a lot of people out there are desperate to tell someone what they want.
There's Bridie Gleeson, who introduces herself as one of Hanson's biggest fans (the One Nation leader is always meeting her "biggest fans") and who is, in turn, introduced affectionately by her husband as "Princess Precious Bum" of the Amaroo Retirement Village.
Bridie is confident Hanson will stop "them Abos with white blood in 'em" from getting government money.
When the One Nation leader eventually moves on to another table of retirees, a visitor who does not want to be named is equally passionate about Hanson "doing something" about big business. She tells Hanson a big supermarket chain in her area routinely checks the prices advertised at the local fruit shop, then marks its own prices down a few cents cheaper.
Another is concerned about kids on the dole.
And, as the Hanson entourage moves on, "Kathleen" grips my arm, confessing she was to shy to talk to Hanson herself. She urges me to pass on her worries about imported chicken meat and pork.
"Swine fever," she tells me, "I know. My parents were farmers in Victoria."
Maybe its just the fierce blaze of the TV camera crew's lights, which are beginning to melt the butter on the scones and date loaf, but spend too long in the eye of the Hanson cyclone and you begin to feel suffocated and disorientated by the heavy whirl of fears, insecurities, complaints and worries she attracts.
What is happening to Australia that so many feel so angry, so hurt and insecure?
It's easy to dismiss One Nation supporters glibly as "rednecks" or racists, but on the campaign trail, there's no doubt the hurt is real.
What is odd is that Hanson rarely offers any specific solutions to the plethora of problems she hears. She doesn't give too many details about how she will deliver those war pensions or stop supermarkets selling cheaper fruit than the corner store.
Of course, that makes her no better or worse than any of her political counterparts. If anything - and she would hate this - she is behaving like any seasoned politician.
But that fails to explain why so many still see her as a saviour. It fails to shine a light through the choking mist of desperate hope which envelopes Hanson whenever she meets her supporters.
One seasoned political journalist observed last week that watching Hanson on the campaign trail was like listening to a big chunk of our country screaming. A big painful howl that the rest of us are terrified to acknowledge because if we admit its presence, we may have to admit our role in feeding it or at least our responsibility to try to respond to it.
Looking at the redhead, angry and in full flight in Longreach last Friday, I could see what the journalist meant.
Hanson has become that scream. Forget the polls for the moment and whether they're going up or down for One Nation, and think of it this way: conservatively, there are thousands of Australians who still see Hanson as their means of screaming out their confusion, their anguish at being left behind by a fast-moving and, to them at least, cruelly incomprehensible world.
Forget One nation's policy detail or lack of it. Forget the concrete things they may or may not be able to achieve with a few seats in the Senate. There are plenty of people who seem ready to vote for Hanson simply because they want to scream a protest.
And rather than dismiss those people because they are flirting with Hanson as the megaphone for their screams, the mainstream political parties have three weeks to focus their understanding why they're screaming and demonstrating that they can do something real about it. If they've tried so far to do that, it certainly isn't apparent in Voterland.
Some polls indicate the One Nation vote is falling. In the wake of a widely derided 2% Flat tax proposal, that may well be true.
But these voters are hardly rushing back to Labor or the Coalition with open arms, crying "we're back, all is forgiven".
So what is it they want.
It may be simple - and as complicated - as Mervyn, back in Gatton, explains.
Dorothy pushes him gently, "What is it you want Merv?" and for a moment he struggles for words, before announcing with certainty: "Recognition. I just want recognition."