Lushington Brady: Pauline Kicks the Rat’s Nest Again

Calls for Australia to quit the WHO.

Good old Pauline – she never fails to put a rocket up the b*****rds.

This time, in a move sure to set the chattering classes shrieking and clutching for their pearls, she’s urging Australia to follow US President Donald Trump’s lead and ditch the venal WHO.

Frank Chung: Pauline Hanson slams voice to parliament as ‘Australia’s version of apartheid’

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has blasted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s “Indigenous voice” proposal as “Australia’s version of apartheid”.

Speaking to a nearly empty Senate chamber on Wednesday, Ms Hanson delivered her most strident attack to date on what she dubbed the “racist” referendum proposal, while praising fellow Senator Jacinta Price, the lone Indigenous MP who opposes the advisory body.

The five-minute speech came a week after she dramatically stormed out of the Senate during the routine morning “acknowledgement of country”.

Karl du Fresne: The Canberra elite's visceral loathing for Pauline Hanson

I first wrote about Pauline Hanson in 1997. She was then a newly elected Australian MP whom the liberal media – indeed most of the Australian political establishment – openly despised.

Hanson had been selected as a Liberal Party candidate in the 1996 elections but was dis-endorsed because the party was embarrassed by her opposition to special government assistance for Aborigines. She won the Queensland seat of Oxley anyway, despite it being an Australian Labor Party stronghold, and went on to form the One Nation Party.

Journalists and commentators made much of the fact that she had previously owned a fish and chip shop. She was seen as bigoted and uneducated and therefore not worthy of a seat in the Australian parliament. It didn’t seem to occur to her detractors that the bigoted and ignorant, in a democracy, are as entitled to representation as anyone.