Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie has rejected Pauline Hanson’s claim that changes to his state’s electoral laws two decades ago were designed to target her, insisting the reforms were designed to combat electoral fraud within the Labor Party following a major corruption scandal.
Hanson on Thursday accused Beattie and newly elected Liberal Party president Tony Abbott of orchestrating a “political witch hunt” that led to her 11-week imprisonment for electoral fraud in 2003, a conviction later quashed on appeal.
Speaking at a business function in Perth, the One Nation founder alleged Beattie had changed Queensland laws before her trial, increasing the maximum penalty from six months’ jail or a fine to seven years’ imprisonment.
“It was a political witch hunt, because prior to my trial, Peter Beattie changed the laws in Queensland from a six-month jail term or a fine to seven years retrospective,” Hanson said, fighting back tears at times.
She said Abbott had set up a controversial $100,000 slush fund to underwrite a legal bid to deregister One Nation in the lead-up to the 1998 federal election.
“It was a very hard time for my children,” Hanson said. “The kids didn’t have their fathers at that time. I was the only one that they had and so I was their whole life. And through politics, they’ve had to wear so much. But you know what they said to me the other day? They said ‘Mum, it hasn’t been easy, but you’ve taught us resilience, to be independent, to stand on our own two feet, and for that we thank you.’ ”
In separate remarks in Perth, Hanson revealed she was abused by a former partner.
“I won’t go into detail, but I had domestic violence as well,” she said of a relationship in her past. “I’ve had a couple of relationships but I’ve never married again.”
But Beattie said Hanson’s account was “simply wrong”, arguing the reforms were driven by recommendations from the Shepherdson Inquiry into electoral fraud and branch-stacking within the Queensland ALP.
“The law change had nothing to do with Pauline Hanson,” Beattie said. “The irony of her claim is that the ALP rorters hated me for the rest of my time in office and no doubt still do.”
Beattie his government had been re-elected on a platform of cleaning up electoral fraud and the law changes delivered on an election commitment.
“The reforms were a response to the independent Shepherdson Inquiry and my desire to stamp out electoral fraud in the ALP. They were electoral integrity measures and nothing to do with Pauline Hanson.”
The Shepherdson Inquiry exposed widespread branch-stacking and electoral enrolment fraud within Labor ranks, triggering a major political crisis for the Beattie government.
Several MPs were found guilty of electoral rorts, while deputy premier Jim Elder resigned to fight charges, and a number of party members were expelled from the ALP as a result.
Among the allegations a state MP had told “war stories” about having nine people enrolled at his unit in the 1980s, and claimed that a federal Labor Party figure – whose name was suppressed – had a dozen people enrolled at his house in the 1970s.
“I don’t deny that I was a fierce critic of Pauline Hanson’s policies at the time and strongly opposed her politically,” Beattie said. “I actively worked against One Nation, as I did against ALP rorters … [but] the law changes were to deal with ALP electoral fraud and nothing to do with Pauline Hanson or Tony Abbott.”
Abbott has since said he was sorry that Hanson went to jail, but has stood by his efforts to expose the “shenanigans” within One Nation.
“Between Pauline and myself there has been a lot of dirty water under the bridge, but her willingness to let the past be the past is a sign of decency which is all too rare these days in our public life,” Abbott said in 2018 when launching her book Pauline, In Her Own Words.
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Rob Harris is the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect via email.