Yeah, sure, Pauline Hanson’s rhetoric, philosophy, political agenda, etc., is assinine, stupid, backwards and just plain downright offensive, but jail time?
Are there any other cases where a $500,000 fraud, or similar, resulted in jail time in Australia?
As much as I find everything about her yuckky, this court sentence makes here a political prisoner, jailed for her political beliefs.
Umm, are you really suggesting that if i steal $500,000 I should not go to jail??? Cool. What’s your bank account details?
FWIW, Rene Rivkin got weekend detention for about $300 in insider trading. Bond got away with only 4 years for $15 million, which seems low to me. Skase got away with it altogether.
It seems pretty rich jailing them. I have no time for her or her former party but all they really did was say that the 500 members of her personal support group were party members. They no doubt would have joined the party if asked. This entitled them to public funding. When it became apparent that they were wrong in claiming the supporters as party members they repaid the money.
Recently a Sydney journalist wrote a piece about how the Labor party while in government in Canberra, signed a lease for a building owned by the Labor party to rent it to a government department. The lease is for 15 years and taxpayers are paying 3 times the correct commercial rate for the building so the Labor party pockets millions a year. Nothing will happen about this because it’s one of the 2 big crooks of politics - Liberal and Labor.
Her gaol sentence has nothing whatsoever to do with her views. She committed electoral fraud and made out with $500k. It also potentially impacted on the outcome of a subsiquent State election.
Now I’m more than willing to believe that she and Etterage did so out of stupidity and not with an intent to defraud the Commonwealth. Hanlon’s Razor cetainly applies in this case. But still there are numerous examples where crimes have been committed out of ignorance and stupidity yet people have been gaoled. That’s life.
Should she be gaoled though? Personally, I’d love to see her living for three years on the dole working full time at an Aboriginal/migrant welfare centre. Of course, she should be banned from running for parliament ever again. I dunno if that’s constitutional though…
Ahhh… the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind finely indeed.
Just as a bit of “Six Degrees of Separation” type trivia, the law firm which represented Pauline Hanson is owned by a pretty high flying barrister here in Queensland by the name of Christopher Nyst - and he’s an OK dude in my book. He wins far more than he loses that’s for sure, but he lost this one!
Anyways, his firm is directly across the street from a shopping centre here in Southport, in which my wife owns a haridressing salon. Over the last 3 months, most of the pivotal people involved in Paulines’ defence have come in for haircuts, and as is the nature of hair dressing salons, they tend to blab.
The general consensus from what I can tell - at least amongst her (Pauline Hansons’) defence team is that she was up shit creek without a paddle - that is, she was obviously not intelligent enough to have knowingly worked out a way to scam the Electoral Commission, but the facts were such that she was fucked anyway.
I’m not sure that karma ever enters a courtroom - but considering some of the ultra-right-wing woe-is-me pygmie intellect stuff she whipped up 6 years ago, in this instance, I gotta say it was a welcome visit.
I am no fan of right wing Labor member Mark Latham either, but he hit the nail on the head when he said that she had been campaigning in the recent NSW elections for tougher prison sentences, and now she has one.
All the carry on about it being a politically motivated sentence is rubbish, why do these people think there should be one law for them and one for everyone else? It is sickening to see her website claiming Nelson Mandela like status, I saw another person on television likening her to Joan of Arc :eek: unbelievable.
And someone should mention the word spellcheck to whoever writes her website :wally
Just to point out that the fraud was in the registration of One Nation in Queensland, it was not electoral fraud.
One Nation was also registered in NSW and federally (and still is?) and there is no doubt that, if they had not been so anal about wanting to maintain control, getting the 500 supporters would not have been difficult. Hell they collected nearly 1 million first preference votes in 1998, and won nearly 25% of the vote at the subsequent Queensland state election.
So shadenfreude aside, the conviction is correct but the sentence is outlandish.
Of course this is Queensland, where white shoes mingle on the frontier. They’ve just gaoled their Chief Magistrate for a year for making threatening phone calls to another magistrate.
I hope you are not complaining about that, but pointing out that the white shoe brigade still lingers, although the Chief magistrates gaoling is a sign that their days are numbered.
The same with Hanson. All the excuses about not being bright enough to realise what was being done was illegal doesn’t wash. If she was lacking in intelligence and fraudulently claimed social security payments she would still be liable - but of course in that case she wouldn’t have been in the position to raise the half a million needed to repay the amount fraudulently claimed, which I understand was raised by donations from adoring one nation supporters.
I agree with big_yellow_kingswood:
on top of a custodial sentence, but that is for legitimising bigotry and stupidity for many citizens of this country.
I’m a leftie who loathes the woman and her politics but I do find the severity of the sentence disturbing. As far as I know she has no previous convictions for anything so a 3 year jail term seems unwarranted and excessive especially given the hostility she is likely to face inside. The issue of registration of the party appears a technicality rather then criminal in nature, and I dont believe the fraud charge alone justifies the sentence. Like it or not, One Nation was a political party that attracted the support of many thousands of voters and succeeded in winning 11 seats in parliament. In other words whatever the legalities of its registration in practical terms it was a real political party. Personally I hope the bitch appeals and I hope she wins.
I agree with spooje - the sentence is appropriate for the theft of that amount of money. It probably only seems excessive because white collar criminals don’t usually serve so much time, but they should! Hanson may well be being made an example of because of her politics, but it’s an argument for giving ALL white collar criminals longer sentences, not for giving her a shorter one.
God forbid that I find myself about to defend Pauline Hanson again but I’m going to. I just want to make a comment about the theft aspect. The charge is she received public funding such as is due to all registered parties in varying amounts based upon their size, and that as the One Nation party wasn’t legally registered that she wasn’t entitled to the $500,000 that her party received and therefore she was guilty of fraud.
Now it seems to me that this really is a charge based upon a technicality rather then any particular criminality. If they had simply legally registered they were entitled to that funding. Point being this wasn’t an outfit set up for the purpose of defrauding public funds. It was a functioning political party with 11 members of parliament and with all the associated expenses that this entailed, and its worth remembering that at its peak it had circa a million voters supporting it which is a significant chunk of the Australian electorate. It was a real party just not a legally registered one.
Yes it wasn’t internally a very democratic party and it appears the way the registration was done (using affiliated supporters rather then legally registered members) was to serve the political aim of maintaining Hanson as leader. And yes it was foolish but then we are talking about a woman who without even trying to be unkind is unsophisticated, ignorant and not very bright. But three years for a technicality seems harsh, and I cant help suspect if it had been anyone else some other sentence would have been imposed. Its not like she bought a house with the money or personally profited after all.
It’s not as if the two major political parties in Australia are exempt from electoral fraud laws.
Only a few years ago Mike Kaiser, a Queensland politician was caught. He did not stand trial but suffered a similar sort of public humiliation now being experienced by Pauline Hanson.
There is another interesting take on the electoral fraud system in an article of July 2002 in the World Socialist Web Site, particularly as it relates to the Pauline Hanson case, which was then only just taking off.
Which can attract a sentence of 25 years. However, even the judge was aware that imposing the maximum sentence might have revealed his political bias a little bit too blatantly.
I’m no fan of Mark Latham, either, but it is a delicious piece of irony.
It’s a difficult situation; there are many good arguments both for the sentence and against it. Of course, she was guilty on a technicality caused by her own stupidity, but being stupid is no excuse under the law, and the result of her stupidity was her obtaining $500 000 by fraud and substantially affecting a state election (One Nation polled higher than both the Liberal and national parties in the 1998 Queensland state election and put 11 MPs into parliament). That her stupidity had such a substantial effect on the democratic process in Queensland, combined with the large monetary amount she defrauded makes a sentence in that ballpark reasonable. If Hanson had stolen that amount by any other means, inadvertently or not, she could expect at least a sentence of the severity she is now serving.
I do understand the objections people have to the severity of the sentence, though I think they fail under closer scrutiny. The claims (none of these made here, fortunately) that Hanson was the subject of a witchhunt because she threatened the status quo are moronic, however. This has nothing to do with Hanson’s politics.
I don’t think she should have been jailed. She didn’t keep the money - it was for the party.
I don’t know much about the case, but I don’t think jailing her is a suitable punishment. Jail should be for people who have hurt people and are dangerous.
She didn’t take the money from people. She didn’t hurt anyone. Community service and some other punishment should be sufficient.
I guess I am also looking at it from another point of view. It was a mistake wasn’t it? I went to school with one of her sons, Adam, and he was really nice, and I feel sorry for him too.
Come ON!!
no it wasn’t a mistake and if you read some of the posts in this thread you will also see it had far reaching repercussions on the Qld political landscape.
I am sure a lot of Australians who call talk back radio would agree with you, Pauline and her family are such lovely people, how dare she gaoled for breaking the law.
After all, her push for “truth in sentencing”, meaning people serve the full term of the most severe sentence available, was never meant to be applied to her or her really nice friends and family, only to the criminal classes, illegal migrants, indigenous Australians etc
As far as not taking the money from people - where do you think it came from? It was YOUR money Burnt Sugar, assuming you are an Australian taxpayer of some sort.
If she didn’t gain from her fraud that’s her own fault. Doesn’t change the fact that she stole $500 000 of public money. If I robbed a bank and gave the money to a political party, I’d still be prosecuted, and rightly so.
This is moronic. Of course gaol is for those other than the dangerous. Hanson stole public money. If we only gaol people “who have hurt people and are dangerous” then we’d better let out all those heroin dealers that are locked up right now, because that’s not a violent crime. Shoplifting isn’t a violent crime either - better let all them go.
Of course she took money from people. She took money from the Australian public.
Shit, let’s get the family members of defendants into court before we try them, from now on, ok? “Well, Alan Bond, you broke the law, but we reckon your son is a nice bloke, so we’ll let you off.”
She had broader repercussions then just upon the poltical landscape in Queensland. She brought to the front of the Australian national arena a narrow-minded and ugly view of the world that John Howard successfully hi-jacked and incorporated into mainstream politics. In the right-wing gutter politics of Tampa and imprisonment of refugees Hanson’s enduring influence lies, that fear, xenophobia and ignorance can be a useful tool in maintaining political power. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, as the same dynamic now dominates the American political landscape but we have her as our particular catalyst.
But she wasn’t on trial for not being nice and nor was the charge that of being a loathsome, ignorant and hateful woman. In the normal scheme of things her electoral offences, and they are technical ones would be prosecuted under the Electoral Act. Due to a technicality relating to the passage of time however she was prosecuted under criminal provisions and she has received a penalty 5 times greater then the maximum she would have received if prosecuted under the appropriate act.
And whatever way you view her or her politics thats just wrong.
I think you are missing something here. That electoral result was not a result of that fraud and nor was it a distortion. Had she done a legal registration of her party, she would still have received those funds and she would still have got those votes. That was a genuine result, and those were real voters. Do you seriously imagine for a moment that a party with a million voters, and that won 11 seats in parliament could not have found a mere 500 members? She chose not to do a legal registration as A. She is dumb as dogshit and B. She wanted to ensure ‘members’ could never replace her as leader. Yes she has to follow the rules like everyone else and some sort of penalty is due but all this talk of how she robbed the public and distorted politics is unwarranted. Votes cast by idiots are still real votes.
