Terry Sweetman, Sunday Mail, 22nd August 1999
Comments:
Just a few days after claiming that One Nation leader Bill Feldman had used Parliamentary privilege to ensure that defamation action could not be taken against him by Murdoch's Queensland Newspaper's The Courier-Mail after he correctly tackled the ethics of that paper and its staff Murdoch's Sunday Mail came out with this report by Labor stooge reporter Terry Sweetman.
A report laced with defamatory comments and hate. If this report involved Jews or a minority group he would have most probably have been unemployable following its publication.
Article starts here:
Stop laughing, this is serious. The One Nation debacle has gone way beyond the joke and now has become a serious matter of electoral fraud.
If nothing else, the little matter of almost Au$500,000 in electoral funding lifts it above the usual level of One Nation lunacy.
That One Nation is a stumblefooted outfit that collectively demonstrates an inability to read and understand anything more complicated than vending machine instructions is hardly news.
That its so-called policies are dumb and its politicians even dumber (something that jumping the party ship has done nothing to alter), is no great revelation.
However, the fact that two of its leaders have been held legally responsible for fraud on a grand scale is news, even if it only confirms what many of us might have suspected.
Apparently, among those more prescient folk who suspected the party's structure was shonky from day one was the deceptively wise former member and now Country Party leader Jeff Knuth.
And he even claims to have known that One Nation was designed as a "get rich" scheme for founder Pauline Hanson.
Now this knowledge is something I wouldn't be trumpeting too loudly were I a politician who slid into parliament on the coat tails of a fraudulent party.
There are, after all, such things as being an accessory before, during and after the event.
You might wonder how such transparent dodginess slipped by the guard of the Electoral Commission, which has not exactly emerged smelling of roses.
But, apart from the unprincipled assault on the public purse, the great unforgivable fraud is how the One Nation movement misled the hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders who thought it might offer some answers to their concerns.
It turned out to be nothing more than an ill-organised collection of boorish, intolerant, illiberal, half-baked, know-nothings, most of whom would still be nothing more than small-time cranks had they not been given spurious legitimacy as party members.
The disclosure that One Nation's stupidity was matched only by its duplicity will probably accelerate the decline of the movement, but that unfortunately will leave thousands of Queenslanders without what they see as a representative voice in the parliament.
And those few who still think Ms Hanson (who, ironically, lost the only time she ran under the One Nation banner) has anything to offer, will not be encouraged by her recent foray into Western Australia where she has been picking over the bones of the timber industry and contributing nothing more constructive than adding fuel to the fires of discontent.