Pauline Hanson is back… again.

Believe it or not. Pauline Hanson wants you to vote for her in the upcoming State election. I spoke to Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show this morning, take a look:

According to The Sydney Morning Herald:

THE controversial former One Nation MP Pauline Hanson has launched a surprise bid for the NSW election, nominating for a spot in the upper house.

As smh.com.au revealed last night, Ms Hanson’s nomination was accepted yesterday by the NSW Electoral Commission, running as part of a group of 16 independents.

The former One Nation leader has moved to Corlette, near Nelson Bay on the NSW north coast.

The Australian reports:

In a surprise move Ms Hanson revealed she has nominated to run as an independent for the NSW upper house at this month’s state election.

Ms Keneally said the Labor Party would direct no preferences to her.
“I want to make unequivocally clear that the NSW Labor Party will have no preferences for Ms Hanson,” Ms Keneally told Fairfax Radio Network today.

Mamamia News Editor, Rick Morton, spoke with Pauline Hanson numerous times during the Queensland state election in 2009 and – despite his own personal politics – found her an interesting case indeed.

“There’s just something about Pauline. I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it. She lived near my hometown for quite some time and announced her run for the election in the state of Queensland. She was back. And the people loved her.

I was a journalist in the area at the time and I needed to speak with her. I didn’t relish the thought. I was around when she made her maiden speech in 1998 in Federal Parliament. I watched the footage of her quotes, about Asian communities. About keeping Australia for Australians. And I joined the outrage. I, like many of us, knew and loved people from many cultures and communities. Pauline represented the antithesis of everything I believed in and, I thought, most people.

I was wrong. She became a rising star because she was the lady who ran a fish and chip shop who decided she wanted to say what some people were thinking. She wasn’t a politician in the sense that she was not beholden to the same old political party structures of the past. She said what she wanted and there was no party figures to tell her to stop.

And then she was put in jail. She was, in the eyes of those who loved her, made the victim of old boy politics. She was made a martyr and her star grew. Like her politics or not, Pauline was used somewhat like a puppet by the major parties following her first election in Oxley.

It was this history that I brought to our meeting in Boonah when she launched her campaign. We were having coffee in the street with the state’s media camped outside, waiting for the official press conference. She didn’t talk about race in our meeting. She didn’t talk about xenophobia, surprisingly. She spoke about roads and services and hospitals. About helping people in regional communities. I asked her about her politics of the past and she said that wasn’t her concern. I had no way of knowing whether what she said was true or not, but it sounded true enough. Like any chat with any person, sometimes you just have to trust your gut instinct.

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What surprised me most was the press conference outside. The leading questions they asked were designed to trick her. To lead her into the trap of answering in sound bites they could distort and use out of context. It was a revelatory experience. She stumbled and she wasn’t wily enough to phrase her questions to fend them off.

Maybe that’s an indicator of inexperience. It doesn’t mean she was hard done by. But it made me wonder how much of the outrage in the past was manufactured? Nothing changes the fact she said what she said. Divisive politics does not help, but it made me see things through a different prism, having bore witness to the way these things play out from start to finish.

Regardless of her past or her comments, people in my town loved her. They feted her arrival. They hollered in the street. She was the red-headed reinventor of the ‘keep the bastards honest’ tag, according to the locals. They liked her because she was real. They liked her – I am going out on a limb here – not necessarily because of her politics but in spite of them, in some cases.

This will be taken out of context itself and I will add some caveats but I surprised myself when I told my editor that I liked her too. Maybe like is too strong. But I understood her more. And she was, after all, a person too. A person that not too many people have met or had the chance to speak in depth to.

This is not a defence of her politics. This is not a defence of inexperience in dealing with terribly complex national issues. Inexperience accounts for why some things are said but it doesn’t make their utterances excusable when it has the ability to incite rank hatred among people.

But, like any politician, Pauline has another side. And I struggle to reconcile myself with it.

I am very conflicted indeed.”

Rick Morton

About the Author: Rick started his career as a cadet journalist at the Gold Coast Bulletin in the police scanner room.  He was the first journalist with the news of the Lacey Brother’s murder on the Gold Coast and was shortlisted for the News Awards Young Journalist of the Year. Rick also spent some time in his hometown, working for a small country newspaper during the Queensland state election where the seat of Beaudesert was being contested by both Pauline Hanson and Warwick Capper. He left journalism for a life in Queensland politics as a media advisor, spending many early mornings and late nights on the job throughout Queensland. In one way or another he has worked continuously in media and journalism for almost seven years and brings his background to Mamamia as news editor.

What do you think about Pauline Hanson’s return to politics?