inamerrata

Articles on the Hanson verdict tend to fall into two camps: one says she was a bit silly, but didn’t do anything particularly bad, and three years is ridiculous; the other says she was found guilty of defrauding the state of $500,000 — what sentence would you hand out? It’s a bit difficult to work out from the reports which of these is a more accurate view; either’s quite plausible in the absence of any facts.

Mediawatch demonstrates its usual lack of faith in the public by blaming the outrage not on the result itself, but rather on the public’s ignorance. On the upside, it also has a link to the Judge’s Sentence. That includes the following comments:

I accept that Ms Hanson immediately threw her weight into and stood behind every effot to raise money from her supporters to pay back the electoral funding and that that has been done. […] The money has been paid back from those people so the tax payers are not out of pocket in that respect.

[…]

The advantage you received for yourselves has not been suggested by the learnered Crown Prosecutor to be an advantage which benefited you personally, financially. The benefit was that you continued to control the allocation, both of you, of the electoral funding and how the Party was run […].

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see a lot of point getting worked up when a thief pays back everything they stole. If you’re going to slap someone on the wrists, do it to the people who can and do remedy the harm they cause.

The jury, in their verdicts, has found that both of you knew that it was a list of members of the support movement, a body incorporated under the Associations Act, the Pauline Hanson Support Movement, which changed its name ultimately to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Members Inc. […] Whether or not those electors believed they were members of the party, the jury has found that you knew they were not and accordingly the party, through its registration became entitled to the benefits to which I have referred.

It appears, then, that the only entity that was defrauded here was the government. The supporters/members of the party knew or should have known what they were getting into, and the public presumably knew what they were doing when they were voting for (or against) One Nation. Which means One Nation was at least a real, reasonably popular, political party. That’s not enough to get funding from the government, but it’s probably the most important part. All of which leaves me in the “what was the big deal?” camp.

Certainly, you can criticise One Nation for having an unaccountable executive. You can criticise Debian for the same thing, if you like: one of the key groups enshrined in the Debian constitution is the Technical Committee, which has a number of reserve powers such as the ability to override anyone’s decision, or act in place of the Project Leader; it’s also impossible to appoint or remove anyone from the Technical Committee without the ctte’s assent. Ensuring groups stay true to their founding principles is a difficult problem — but their are wrong ways of solving it, and removing accountability is probably one of them.

The personality cult and the policies of One Nation do have overtones of Nazi-ism, but personally, I’m happier that One Nation was defeated at the ballot box, rather than in the courts. And once they are, let’s make them clean up whatever mistakes they’ve made, and get them back where they belong: serving us fish and chips, not looking for a come back tour.