Emotional Hanson blames Abbott for electoral fraud 'witch hunt'

Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Courtney Gould gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.

As Anthony Albanese stood in front of a Medicare banner and Pauline Hanson put her hand out for donations, voters could be forgiven for thinking the election was two months, not two years, away.  

The prime minister wanted to get back on territory where the government feels most comfortable fighting, laying down the challenge for One Nation to outline its plans for health and education.  

But the minor party had other ideas. Buoyed by overtaking Labor for the first time in several opinion polls as the most popular political party, it launched an appeal of its own. 

“Fire the liar,” the message read in all caps. The call out was to donate so One Nation could spread the message. It amassed over $2 million in 48 hours – a number anyone who’s tried to sell a Freddo frog or raffle off a meat tray for a local club could only wish for. 

The three-word slogan wasn’t even a line One Nation dreamed up itself. Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, got the idea from Sky News host Peta Credlin.  

"I was watching her show and I stole it off her. Nothing quite like a borrowed line," he told 2GB. 

Credlin was part of the team that brought us some of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s most memorable slogans. She later admitted the lines used in the attack against the carbon tax helped bring down the Gillard government weren't entirely true. 

“That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did cut through Gillard was gone,” she said in 2017.  

The campaign has already begun

It’s clear the while the election proper is two years away, the campaign has already begun. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has done his best to attack the budget and the prime minister. His slogan is all about “toxic taxes”.  

The government has conceded the most recent budget included broken promises. Of course, it argues the circumstances have changed and that’s why it acted. But it also acknowledged that doing so carries a political risk.  

That risk is opening the door to the question of whether a broken promise is a lie. Hanson and Ashby will hope the recent press about the unprecedented donation drive, paired with whatever advertising that is funded by that, will cement that idea in public consciousness like Abbott and Credlin did with the carbon tax.  

She wants to use the money to target Labor seats, including ministers such as Chris Bowen and Tony Burke – who hold suburban Sydney seats.  

While Albanese questioned the legitimacy of the donations, Hanson argued she had no reason to claim otherwise.  

“It would destroy me,” she said. 

As One Nation begins to take up more time and space in the political consciousness, Abbott reportedly floated that a preference deal between the two parties should be considered. It’s what the Greens and Labor do, he argued, so why not the Coalition. 

Abbott’s own relationship with Hanson has ebbed and flowed over their 30 years of political life. The now-federal Liberal president was behind a trust fund set up to fund civil cases against One Nation in the 1990s.  

In a documentary a decade ago, Hanson said it took her a long time to get over Abbott’s involvement in a case that led to her brief imprisonment for electoral fraud (a conviction that was later quashed). Hanson was emotional as she repeated the sentiment while in the West on Thursday. 

"It just broke my heart ... it was a very hard time for me and it was a very hard time for my children," she said. 

Elsewhere, Liberal MPs are genuinely concerned about what One Nation means for their re-election prospects. Tony Pasin, who represents the South Australian seat of Barker, put forward the idea of carving out the electoral map so the Coalition and One Nation don’t go up against one another.  

That idea was promptly shut down by Taylor, although he’s more open to the idea of a preference swap. Senior Liberal frontbencher James Paterson went further when asked this morning, declaring the whole discussion was premature. The focus needs to be on rebuilding trust with the voters it's lost, he said. 

“Who knows what policies One Nation is going to come out with between now and then, who knows what candidates they’re going to endorse. Who knows how many of their MPs are going to defect or found to be invalidly elected between now and then,” Paterson told Radio National Breakfast.  

Friday marks four months since Taylor toppled Ley. The opposition leader hasn’t stemmed the bleeding of support to One Nation. Ley was given nine months in the top job.  

Outwardly though, the Coalition is declaring the Taylor-Abbott leadership has the party going in the right direction. Nationals leader Matt Canavan thinks there is a “revolutionary fervour in the air” and the electorate is “waking up”.  

But whether voters are open to hearing what they have to say is another question entirely.  

Tough decisions ahead

Meanwhile, the government has some hard decisions ahead of it. A resumption of strikes in the Middle East adds another level of complexity around whether the halving of the fuel excise will be extended beyond June 30.  

As with everything, it comes with a trade-off and a three month extension would cost the budget $3b in foregone revenue. But deciding to extend could help dampen inflation (as it did in April). Keeping it around would also have the added benefit of people not talking about their petrol prices for that little bit longer. 

Elsewhere, questions about the government’s approach to data centres are starting to crop up after rush of private investment in the infrastructure helped prop up Australia’s sluggish GDP figures.  

Fresh off the gas tax campaign that had extraordinary cut through; independent David Pocock has taken up the issue. He’s concerned Australia won’t get a fair return from the boom and unsurprisingly linked it to the gas producers.  

On the other side of the coin, Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton, will use a speech tonight to again argue the government's fix on gas (the reservation scheme) is correct, albeit years late. And the same should be applied early on to data centres. 

“That is the real lesson from gas for data centres: it’s far better to get the rules right at the outset than to try to put them right a decade later.”