27th September 1999
Assigned to follow the election campaign of One Nation in the 1998 Federal Election, the political journalist Margo Kingston found herself sleeping over in the house of its leader, Pauline Hanson.
Pauline Hanson sat in an Ipswich restaurant with her head in her hands. Helen (McCabe, a reporter with The Daily Telegraph) had raised the matter of campaign organisation. "How do you think I feel? Don't ask me, no-one will tell me anything. They're all trying to protect me, especially Peter [James, Hanson's media adviser], but it means I don't know what's going on."
She was to work in her office all day, in what Peter James had dubbed a "media-free day". He'd announced the plan at her up-country primary industry launch the previous afternoon, where the free-range chooks that dashed about had far outnumbered the assembled guests.
Grant (Turner, a News Limited photographer), fishing for a day-off picture, had asked Pauline if she hung out her own washing. "Yeah, I do. I do all my housework - my washing and ironing and everything." A photo of that, then? "Grant, Grant, Grant, I'm at the office tomorrow, working, and I don't take my washing to work. Have a day off: you need it, you're looking tired."
It seemed strange that she'd agreed to the lunch until it dawned on us that maybe she was an isolated figure within her own party. Head still in her hands, she said she'd discovered at the last minute that her primary industry launch was to be held in a windowless room in Toowoomba. She had put her foot down. "Have it on a farm, where it's for," she'd told her party boys. Hansonites were a bunch of hare-brained amateurs without cash, talent or experience surrounded by a marauding media. I almost felt sorry for her. She didn't know the half of what she was up against, and we didn't tell her. Hanson's main man, David Oldfield, the only person in the party with a political brain, was overtly contemptuous of his leader to journalists, oblivious to the damage he caused to the image of the woman he called "the product".
After Easytax, Oldfield had told me that he'd tried his best to stop the policy seeing the light of day, but that Pauline could not be talked out of it, and that he'd rewritten her tax speech two hours before the launch.
He'd then insisted that Peter James call me to confirm Oldfield's innocence on the Easytax issue. A party heavyweight telling journalists that its tax policy was stupid seemed simply bizarre. Oldfield had told me the night before that he'd join the campaign soon in order to save it, and I asked Pauline whether she was looking forward to his return. She said she didn't like being seen with him because some people thought she was a puppet, and she wasn't.
We ordered steaks, and I asked who she thought would win the election. She said people were very disappointed in the Liberals but they weren't ready to go back to Labor. John Howard would win, but if a Paul Keating were leading Labor, Labor would win. She liked Paul Keating? "Yes, I do. He's strong."
I did a double take, one of many during the campaign. Paul Keating - the demonised king of political correctness who, according to the Right, had propelled Australia into all this division and pain on race and multiculturalism - was admired by the woman who'd led the backlash.
I asked if she was a feminist. No, she said, because when married she had cooked a hot meal every night and had it on the table for her husband, regardless of what else she was doing. That was a woman's duty, she said.
"But you have lived a feminist life, Pauline," I protested. "Single mother,
started your own business on your own, pro-abortion, no wish to marry again,
you believe men are just for sex, you are a feminist." (She'd mentioned her
aversion to remarriage and her current preference for the occasional fling
after our interview at her home after the Queensland election.) She laughed
and said nothing
...
We moved on to Wik. We'd been told the previous weekend that she'd be flying to Longreach on Friday, and we'd suspected that meant she'd play the race card there.
Peter James had confirmed our suspicions the previous afternoon among the chooks, ramming home the need to be there. She'd be announcing One Nation's "Aboriginal policy", which would be "controversial", he'd said. The event would take place at the Stockman's Hall of Fame, the spot where Howard had made his famous pledge to angry pastoralists that he would never back down on his 10-point Wik plan.
Pauline was banking on race to rebuild her campaign, and the night before she'd even considered postponing the Longreach trip when she'd realised it would clash with the opening of the Commonwealth Games.
After Oldfield had rung from Sydney with that bit of news, I'd suggested she'd have a media riot on her hands after all the scrambling we'd done to charter planes to be there, and she'd backed down ...
We couldn't seem to find a way to communicate on Wik, and she changed the subject by relating a run-in she'd had with her son Adam the night before. He'd returned a day late from a Gold Coast trip with his sister Lee, nearly 15. She'd been so worried she'd called the police, and had given Adam a good tongue-lashing about the need to "respect" his mother. No easy road, that of a single mother during an election campaign.
After two hours and a couple of bottles of wine, Helen and I prepared to leave. Pauline said it was a shame she had to work, otherwise she'd invite us to her house for dinner. We were paying the bill when she offered to pick us up in the early evening.
Sitting at the restaurant bar, somewhat stunned by her invitation, Helen said, "She's lonely, that's what this is about. She's surrounded by sycophants or manipulators. Maybe she's got no friends."
Pauline's police escort picked us up at about 5pm, but she had to take us back to the restaurant twice - first to pick up my phone charger and then Helen's portable computer.
She laughed at our disorganised state, seeing the joke before we did. She directed the police driver to a supermarket, where she bought a cooked chicken, wine and bread ...
Pauline's home, built on her fish and chip shop money, was on acreage at the top of a hill near the hamlet of Coleyville. She'd designed the house herself. Big glass windows and doors, surrounded by verandas, offered 360-degree views of her land and her bush, where she agisted cattle and horses. An enormous Australian flag flew from a corner of the veranda outside her bedroom.
She'd designed one wing for herself and another for Adam and Lee (her youngest children), both at boarding school but regular visitors.
It was idyllic, and you could see why she'd drive for hours after a full day's campaigning in order to sleep at home, rather than somewhere on the road in the huge seat of Blair. There were vast, empty tracts of polished wooden floors throughout, and a general air of minimalism.
The only eyesore was a big, overstuffed couch by the fireplace, covered in a rose-patterned chintzy material that looked like a Laura Ashley reject. "You've got to get rid of that," I said. She feigned outrage.
The lounge room, its walls filled with photos and portraits of Pauline, was dominated by a huge open fireplace. It was still a surprise to see that the camera liked her face and that she liked the camera.
When The Sydney Morning Herald had run images of a smiling Hanson during the Queensland election campaign, some readers and many press gallery journalists were taken aback. The more familiar images in the media were those glowering, hard, raw-boned shots taken when she'd been shunned, sullen and out of her depth in Parliament House - Hanson as the unwelcome outsider.
Her fans sometimes painted her and gave her their work as a tribute, and a glamorous "pretty" portrait had pride of place on one wall.
It was too glibly attractive, more a boring idealisation, and Helen said she didn't think it accurately reflected her. Pauline said she liked it. Her original Pro Hart painting, a gift from the artist, was propped on the floor near the TV.
She was house proud, and took us on a tour. She complained that she had no garden because she had no time to make one.
In reality, her home was not a haven. It was a fortress, due to the regular threats against her since the formation of One Nation. Inside the front gate sat a caravan in which a federal police officer with intercom access to the house was on duty 24 hours a day.
This was the entry point - no one drove up the long, winding track to the house unless Hanson gave the word.
It was a warm Queensland evening and she took us outside to see the glorious night view, opening complicated double locks on double doors. Every door and window had them, and each time I wanted to go outside for a cigarette she had to work the locks for me.
Pauline was a perfect hostess and good company, with a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour. But we felt uncomfortable.
She treated us like friends, when we couldn't be. She was a sitting duck. This level of openness was outside my experience, and I was completely taken aback at her lack of facade. It would be no easy task to draw the line between public and private on this campaign.
We sat by the fireplace - Hanson on the couch, us on two chairs opposite. She broke up the chicken, sliced some salami, cheese and bread, and piled up our plates. We ate the chicken with our hands, drank red wine, and discussed Aboriginal affairs.
I said that even if one accepted her claim that she was not a racist, there was still no denying that there were racists in her party, that her party promoted racist policies, and that as leader she was accountable for that.
If she wasn't racist, she could prove it on Friday and really shake everyone up by saying she wanted an official apology made to the stolen generations. That would make page one, I said jokingly. She smiled and said nothing ...
"I'm writing my race speech myself," she said, adding she would work on it when she went to bed.
I said to her a few times: "I'm going to work you out by the end of this campaign." She replied, "I know, I know." I found her a fascinating personality - as soon as you thought you'd found the box to put her in, she'd jump out of it with a remark that floored you. I'd made up my mind at the start of the campaign to try to maintain an honest dialogue with her on race, to find out if she really was racist by design.
I felt that if people of differing views couldn't talk about race constructively, there was no chance of moving beyond divisiveness to reconciliation. There didn't seem any point in persisting with the media myth that she was some sort of monster who needed to be slain.
She had clearly surmounted enormous disadvantages to become successful in business, and now in politics. Pauline Hanson was a maverick underdog - normally an attractive Australian archetype - and I found it hard not to admire her guts, even though she had triggered a disturbing and sometimes frightening political climate.
There was also an element of class putdown in Hanson commentary which I found
extremely unattractive - exemplified by people sneering at her pronunciation
of "Australia", her lack of grammatical correctness, and her "fish and chip
shop" background
...
The weirdest thing about the dinner conversation was that she didn't try to justify her views or use the opportunity to give us a positive spin on her politics. She just listened and chatted.
Maybe people like us, who thought like we thought, hadn't engaged with her before; we were curiosities to her and she was a curiosity to us. Or maybe she wanted to size up the enemy. It was hard to tell with Pauline Hanson.
At about 11pm we discovered we were stranded. Pauline said no taxis were available out here at this time of night. We rang the boys, but they'd been drinking by the hotel pool for hours. So we stayed.
She put Helen in the spare room and me on the couch, and I facetiously demanded a fire. She picked up a torch and took me outside into the pitch blackness to collect kindling.
The fire was still burning when Pauline woke me up at 7am. Without make-up she was very pale and looked very tired. She said she hadn't quite finished her race speech. I had nothing to wear, so she took me to her room and began pulling out nice shirts.
"No, give me a T-shirt that you'd do your gardening in." I finally chose a maroon T-shirt, and she told me to use her shower because Helen was using the one in the children's wing. Her bathroom was wall-to-wall cosmetics.
We put Pauline on the phone to Grant, by now at Ipswich, to give him directions. I joked about having to drink the same brand of instant coffee, International Roast, that my mother had when I was a child in regional Queensland. She laughed and disappeared for a makeover.
Hanson the politician emerged, looking like a million dollars, and began washing the dishes and wiping down the kitchen benches.
Extracted from Off the Rails, The Pauline Hanson Trip, by Margo Kingston. To be published by Allen & Unwin in October, rrp $22.95.