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| Former One Nation president Ian Nelson. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen |
Jamie Walker
Associate Editor Brisbane
@Jamie_WalkerOz
“Need to talk, sport,” Ian Nelson wrote in a blistering email sent at 3.20am on Sunday, February 28 last year, firing an early salvo in the struggle that would engulf his party, One Nation.
The target was James Ashby, the smooth, wheeling-and-dealing right hand to Pauline Hanson, who is admired and loathed in equal measure among the true believers who never gave up on their flame-haired heroine, when just about everyone in national politics had written her off.
Nelson is still a fan of Hanson, whom he considered a friend and ally in the 20 years he spent in One Nation’s inner circle, holding positions that ranged from president and state director of the pivotal Queensland division to national treasurer.
“Her bravery is amazing,” he tells The Weekend Australian. “Australia needs someone like Pauline Hanson to say the stuff nobody will say because of political correctness. But she doesn’t need people around her like James Ashby. He’s the anti-Christ of politicians.”
No one will be watching the outcome of this battle more closely than Malcolm Turnbull, who has found that Hanson’s team is one of the few things in a topsy-turvy Senate the Prime Minister can count on.
One Nation is riding the crest of a populist wave that smashed political orthodoxy across the Western world, from the decision by British voters last June to pull the pin on the EU to Donald Trump’s triumph in the US presidential race.
Holding One Nation together, though, will test Hanson’s skill and patience. The experience with protest parties in Australia is that they split more readily than tight trousers. Witness Clive Palmer’s short-lived vanity project and the first iteration of One Nation itself.
Nelson doesn’t resile from what he told the fresh-faced, whip-smart adviser in his pre-dawn tirade. He can’t stand the burn and churn around Hanson or what her master’s voice says or does in her name.
“Don’t you ever speak to anyone about a possible candidate for this party unless you discuss it with the executive,” he wrote, confronting Ashby over what he alleged to be breaches of One Nation’s party constitution.
“Do not meet with anyone unless you clear it with me first. You have been in this party for a very short time. Respect our constitution and rules of process … share with the executive … no secrets please, not in this party.”
Nelson, 66, is the longest-serving One Nation figure to break publicly with Hanson and lift the lid on the seething cauldron of backbiting and jealousy that bubbles behind the scenes.
There have been other manifestations. The feud between Hanson, her office and former One Nation senator Rod Culleton and his staff has played out in public since she cut the chunky West Australian loose and backed the government in referring to the High Court his eligibility to have run for the Senate, after he pleaded guilty to larceny in NSW for hurling a $7.50 pair of cars keys into a ditch, to be lost. The conviction was annulled.
Ashby was then accused of throwing his mobile phone at Culleton’s female chief-of-staff during a fiery encounter in the senator’s Parliament House office last November.
The soap opera starring Culleton plumbed new depths this week when he was allegedly assaulted outside a court in Perth by former state Liberal parliamentarian Anthony Fels, who has put his hand up to run for One Nation at the West Australian election on March 11.
Hanson has distanced herself from Fels, but never Ashby, “her adopted son”, as she famously described him to this newspaper. The power he wields lies at the heart of the war within One Nation.
Nelson has been a lightning rod for the growing anger in the party’s old guard, a rallying figure for those who say Ashby has blinded Hanson to the damage he is doing to their party. This faction is now aligned with Culleton in the West, even though he has severed his ties with Hanson and for the time being sits on the crossbench as an independent.
The lady, though, is not for turning. Scathingly critical of Nelson — “I can’t believe you talk to that shithead,” she says at the outset of our conversation — Hanson makes it clear that Ashby commands her respect and utter loyalty.
“I rang Ian Nelson up and said, ‘how far are you going to go to try and destroy me and the party?’ And he said, ‘you are a stupid, stupid woman … you are letting that anti-Christ control you’. Right.
“The whole fact is they all wanted to control me. James doesn’t control me. We work very well together as a team. But Ian … they all thought they would be the one there guiding and telling me what to do. They have become now vindictive about James Ashby.”
If you think this is starting to sound familiar in terms of One Nation’s rollercoaster history, the answer is yes — and no. Hanson founded the party at the height of her early success in 1996, after she was elected to the House of Representatives on a fluke. (The Liberal Party had withdrawn her endorsement for the seat of Oxley, west of Brisbane, but didn’t have time to strike her name from the ballot paper.) She jumped to the neighbouring seat of Blair and lost at the 1998 GST-dominated poll called by John Howard.
One Nation then stormed back at that year’s Queensland state election, securing almost 22 per cent of the vote and 11 seats in the state parliament. The shaky edifice soon collapsed, as the motley crew of Hanson MPs bickered and backstabbed each other, and mostly quit or were forced out of politics. Some see parallels in the infighting today. Perhaps. But the key difference between then and now is Hanson herself.
All those years in the political wilderness — contesting election after election, and sometimes going achingly close to winning before last July 2 delivered — taught her a thing or two. She has surprised with how well she has performed in the Senate: in negotiations with the government, she is said to be reasonable and reliable, sticking to her side of a bargain; her contribution to debate has at times threatened to be thoughtful.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made between the influence of Ashby and the way a younger, naive Hanson was led by glib-talking men such as David Oldfield, reputedly her lover as well as political adviser in One Nation’s early days. Give the woman some credit. If anyone has learned from their mistakes, she surely has.
As former Labor premier Peter Beattie notes: “Pauline Hanson has shown a great deal of discipline and political ‘smarts’ this time round, compared to 1998.” The same can’t be said for her party, obviously, and this is now a real problem for her.
Nelson is deeply aggrieved by what he sees as the unfairness of his treatment. He also points to that of 32-year-old Saraya Beric, a professional violinist who came on board in 2013 after Nelson and his friend, Jim Savage, pulled the shattered party together and persuaded Hanson to return and give it another shot as leader.
Nelson was then state director and president in Queensland and national treasurer. Beric became state and national secretary of the reborn party, badged in 2015 as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The young woman did just about everything else in the headquarters they set up in inner-Brisbane Albion, after Melbourne developer Bill McNee paid the deposit and a year’s rent in advance. In addition to managing the office, Beric helped set up computers, operated the website, and managed candidates and marketing during the 2015 Queensland election and last year’s double- dissolution campaign. She was immensely popular.
And deeply hurt when she was effectively shown the door after One Nation’s stunning result in the Senate: Hanson and her running mate were elected on a primary vote in Queensland of almost 10 per cent, Brian Burston got there on preferences in NSW, with Culleton the bolter in the side. This made Hanson’s original gang of four the biggest team on the crossbench after the Greens.
Ashby told people there would be no jobs for the boys — or girl, for that matter. Instead, he offered Beric a 20 per cent pay rise, which would have increased the salary she was paid through her private company to $50,000. Nelson, still fuming over being cut out of preselection decisions and strategy during the election campaign, said this was insulting to Beric. Ashby pushed back.
The showdown came at an executive meeting on August 2 last year, a blustery winter’s day in Brisbane. Present were Hanson, Ashby, Beric, Nelson and two newcomers: senator-elect Malcolm Roberts and Greg Smith, Hanson’s brother-in-law. Hanson said she wanted Roberts and Smith to join the party executive, according to Nelson’s account. He protested, saying that due notice had to be given under the party rules. The pent-up tensions exploded. Nelson claimed Ashby had accused him of leaking information to the party membership and asked Hanson: “What are you doing, Pauline?” She did not reply, by Nelson’s account, as he and Ashby went at it. At one point Nelson called him a “maggot”; Ashby snapped back: “Who needs friends like you, Ian?”
Nelson stormed out, saying he was through. He stewed for a few days and fired in his resignation from his office-bearer positions and from One Nation itself. “Anybody who stands up to Ashby is gone,” Nelson says. “That’s what happened to me, that’s the way it is. It’s a full-on dictatorship at the moment. Pauline seems to think the One Nation political party is her own personal property.”
It soon became apparent why Smith had been wheeled in. He not only took over Nelson’s responsibilities as treasurer, handling the $1.62 million One Nation received as an election refund from the Australian Electoral Commission, he assumed many of Beric’s administrative duties.
“After the election I have had to put in a new administrator to run it,” Hanson says.
“We have been cleaning up the mess … really bringing the whole thing up to scratch to work as an effective office.”
Ashby declined to be interviewed for this article, but it’s fair to say he doesn’t think much of Nelson, for all his service to the party. Hanson is withering. She agrees, when pushed, that Nelson was once a friend, though not a close one. “Ian wanted a job with the party and I wouldn’t give one to him because he wasn’t reliable,” Hanson says. “Saraya was vying for a job in my parliamentary office, which I told her she wasn’t capable of doing. They both had their noses put out of joint.
“I’ve had a gutful of it. I am so angry about all of this … because it is unwarranted, unnecessary. I’ve worked my guts out for 18, 20 years to get us back (only) for this to happen.”
Nelson has tugged raw nerves with Hanson. He has deep links to the membership. One Nation co-founder David Ettridge — with whom Hanson was jailed, briefly, in 2003 before their joint conviction for electoral fraud was quashed — publicly rebuked Hanson for failing to show loyalty to Culleton. But to the disgruntled old guard, Ettridge could have equally been criticising the treatment of Nelson and Beric.
The issues have fused. Beric now works part-time for Culleton, whose chief of staff, Margaret Menzel, the target of Ashby’s alleged phone throwing, is hooked into the core conservative membership of One Nation in regional Queensland. Her husband, Max Menzel, once held the state seat of Mulgrave, south of Cairns, for the then Queensland Nationals and is a past president of Bob Katter’s Australian Party, which has a similar support base to Hanson’s.
One Nation won the seat in 1998, then almost immediately lost it back to the ALP. The current member, under-performing Treasurer Curtis Pitt, will be targeted by both One Nation and the LNP at the next state election and could struggle to hold on, despite a buffer of almost 13 per cent.
Hanson’s first order of business, though, is the WA election. The Culleton saga won’t help, especially if his alleged assailant, Fels, is charged by police over Tuesday’s altercation. One Nation has limited infrastructure in the West — apart from its estranged senator’s set-up. This is very much a family affair: Culleton’s brother-in-law was second on the ticket last July, his wife Ioanna No. 3.
No matter, Hanson insists. For now, the party is run from a party member’s home, but she has told them to get a hurry on and lease a campaign office. “Culleton is having no impact … I think people see him as taking up wasted space,” she says. “Culleton’s office was never, ever used for anything to do with party business … that’s wrong, it shouldn’t be done.”
Hanson is standing by Ashby and the new guard of advisers who have come on board since the federal election. “Everything is coming along extremely well,” she says, back to work after a break over Christmas. “I am delegating to people who I feel can handle the responsibility and do the job.”
She makes no apologies for how she dealt with Nelson and Beric; that’s not the Hanson way. And the 3am email Nelson fired off to Ashby is not the only one circulating in the tit for tat of One Nation’s squabbles. The Weekend Australian was forwarded a reply Nelson sent to a message from Bruce Bell on April 27 last year in which Bell raised concern about Culleton’s suitability as a candidate. Bell is a former business associate of the senator who is pursuing him over his eligibility to be in parliament, in legal action that has become entangled with a restraining order taken out by Ioanna Culleton against Bell and a second man, Frank Bertola.
“May I ask respectfully for your evidence regarding R. Culleton please because we need to vet our candidate thoroughly simply to protect Paulines (sic) good name,” Nelson emailed Bell. “Thank you for large document attached, read half but already scaring the pants off me!”
A figure close to Hanson says the purported dossier on Culleton was not passed on to the leader or her office by Nelson, an important omission on his part. Nelson said yesterday: “Why the hell would I? It had nothing to do with them. I knew they were plotting to get rid of Rod, and you know the rules. Keep your enemy close … I wanted to know what Bell had.”
Nelson was talking to a mate the other day about Hanson, going through all that had happened in their bitter falling out. He had “worked like buggery” to bring her back to the party, get her voted in only for her to side with people who told her he was conspiring against her.
“Why would I do that?” he asks, shaking his head. “That’s what is really disappointing to me. She can’t be that stupid. And then this old, loyal friend said to me, ‘you know what she’s like, mate, she burns people … that’s what she has done all along’. And I said, ‘I thought I was different’.”
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| Pauline Hanson arriving for a press conference with her chief adviser James Ashby. |
