Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce: What could go wrong?

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has confirmed (via a video posted to Facebook) reporting in the Nine papers that she unsuccessfully tried to tempt former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce over to her party in February last year. Yep, shortly after Joyce was filmed prostrate in a Canberra gutter, gurgling obscenities into his phone, Hanson looked at the footage and said “That’s a guy I want on our team!”

It was to no avail, with Joyce “staying loyal” to his party, in Hanson’s words, despite the likelihood he will be ditched from cabinet if the Coalition returns to government this year.

But of course, we have a rich seam of evidence for how things might have gone, given Hanson’s history of working, and then swiftly falling out, with men not a million miles from the Barnaby type. Here are a few examples he may have been thinking of when he said “no thanks”.

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Essentially everyone she ever worked with in the 90s and most of the people after 2016

We have to resort to a little summary here, given there are literally books dedicated to the scores of people with whom Hanson has shared intense professional relationships who have then been smothered by her landslide through public life. Here’s a smattering:

• New South Wales state director John Cantwell
• Three vice-presidents of One Nation in South Australia — John Abbott, Gareth Jones and John Williams
• Former Brisbane branch president Brendan Bogle
• Many, many others left the party in acrimonious circumstances between 1998 and 2000.

Also getting the summary treatment are the scores and scores of candidates who got the boot or quit during the fairly calamitous state election campaigns in Western Australia and Queensland in 2017. Whether it was from individuals standing up up against the “brutal dictatorship” of Hanson’s leadership, or by just being hilariously scandal-prone candidates time and again.

But as far as how the recruitment of heavy hitters like Joyce might have panned out, the following examples might be the most illuminating:

Rod Culleton

Upon her media-boosted return to the Senate in 2016, with three other PHON candidates backing her, Hanson quickly set about implementing her most consistent agenda — falling out with colleagues.

First, there was Western Australia’s self-styled “Senator in exile”, Rod Culleton, who figured if it was worth losing your job at all, it was worth losing the hell out of it by managing to do it in roughly four distinct ways. In one of the earliest tremors that turned into the great section 44 earthquake of 2017, Culleton bested his rival by being found ineligible to sit in Parliament, twice. He not only violated sub-section (iii) by being declared bankrupt in December 2016, but also breached (ii) on account of having been convicted of larceny — a charge that carries a sentence of more than a year. 

For the purposes of his time with One Nation, though, all that turned out to be by the by. Five days before he was declared bankrupt, he resigned from PHON citing “un-Australian behaviour towards [himself] and [his] team”. Hanson, having publicly asserted that she was his boss (several times), responded to the news he had quit with palpable relief: he was a “pain in the backside”, according to Hanson, and she was “glad to see the back of him”.

Fraser Anning

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Hanson’s generosity towards Joyce at his lowest moment is more explicable when we remember that, however briefly, she was able to work with Fraser Anning. By the time he had forever stained the Senate floor with the bile of his maiden speech — thus kicking off some theatrical self-congratulations from the major parties — he had already been ousted from One Nation.

Brian Burston

Having gone under the radar for much of the first two years of his time in Parliament, Burston’s falling out with Hanson proved to be the ugliest of all. In a June 2018 interview with Sky News shortly after Burston was ditched as party whip, Hanson tearfully accused him of stabbing her in the back — first by voting in favour of tax cuts (that she had, until recently, supported herself), and then by trying unsuccessfully to defect to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. Within days, he was gone.

And worse was yet to come: In early 2019, Hanson used parliamentary privilege to accuse an unnamed senator (but anyone could guess) of sexually harassing at least six members of her staff. Then Burston got in a scuffle with One Nation adviser James Ashby after a boozy Minerals Council event in Parliament and smeared the blood from a resulting injury across Hanson’s door.

Burston stood in the Senate the next day and said: “Whilst I do not recall the incident of blood on the door, I now have come to the conclusion that it was myself and I sincerely apologise for that action.”

For good measure, Burston accused Hanson of sexually harassing him a handful of times over the past 20 years.

Mark Latham

We have to say, this lasted a lot longer than we expected it to. When Latham became One Nation’s NSW leader, we predicted a combination of two figures with such unerring talents for alienating colleagues would implode so quickly it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum. And yet, for nearly five years it endured, through several humiliating court cases and uninspiring election results.

Eventually, in August 2023, Latham was dismissed as One Nation’s NSW leader, splintering One Nation’s representatives in the state. At the time, Anthony Green pointed out that of the 31 representatives elected to state and federal parliaments under the banner of One Nation, 20 had left.

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