inamerrata

Martin writes, among other things:

What it ought to confirm is that before dealing with large amounts of money or running for government you damn well should understand the detail, or consult someone who does.

Arguments about whether One Nation is unaccountable to its members or has wacky policies are beside the point.

Obviously, I don’t think this is the case. If it weren’t for the wacky membership policies and unaccountability, there wouldn’t be a problem here: the 1000 Queenslanders in the One Nation Support Group would have been members, and no fraud would have been committed.

Unfortunately the sentencing statement doesn’t go into any details on this, but the previous case that prompted the current one did. The following is from the appeal a couple of years ago to the Supreme Court of Queensland, Sharples v O’Shea and Hanson. It’s about Terry Sharples who campaigned for election under the One Nation banner. He failed to get elected, but achieved over 4% of the vote, and as such was entitled to recover $1 in expenses for each vote he received, or rather, since he was endorsed as a candidate for a party, it was entitled to that money. He had thought he had had an agreement with the party to have 75% of his expenses reimbursed, and having not recieved it after a falling out with the party leadership before the election tried to recover his costs.

[5] […] Mr Sharples believed he had joined Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. He had paid a $40 membership fee, and $250 candidate party nomination fees. He had received a membership card dated 4 June 1998 showing him as a member of the Gold Coast branch of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

[6] Yet those who controlled the party disputed Mr Sharples’ claim. On 17 February 1999 he received written notice of a forthcoming annual general meeting of the party, to be held in Sydney on 28 February 1999. He attended the meeting and showed his membership card, but was refused admittance. Mr Ettridge then told him, as Her Honour found, that it was “just a piece of paper with (his) name on it”, and that he had never been “a member of the party Pauline Hanson’s One Nation”.

I can’t help but note as an aside here, that the court’s rulings had those quotations punctuated exactly as above: with the commas and periods outside the quotes. W00t. Today quotations, tomorrow spaces after full stops!

Anyway, had the above and similar idiocy not occurred, there would likely have been no actionable problems with the party’s registration; although there may have been a good case for Mr Sharples to sue One Nation for breach of contract to recover his costs that way. That’s not to say there would have been no problems — the judge also mentions that the initial constitution submitted to the electoral commission was that of the federal One Nation party, and had to be changed after the fact. No doubt there was more bungling involved too, further confusing matters, and getting the party leadership more addicted to opportunistically reinterpreting ambiguities in their favour.

And none of that’s any good, it’s dishonest, double dealing, and, in spite of what I wrote earlier, letting people pay membership fees, then telling them they’re not members and have no right to enter a meeting is defrauding your supporters and members. And that deserves restitution and punishment.

It’s not fair to claim that Hanson simply misunderstood what was required — had that been the case, she could and should have fixed the problems when they were brought to her attention. But it’s also not fair to claim that this raises major doubts about the political process: One Nation was a legitimate political party, legitimately registered as such under the Federal rules. Hanson and Etteridge’s crimes were not that they received money, nor that they wanted to have autocratic control over their party: it was that they either defrauded their members when they tried to join, or (more accurately, IMO) opportunistically repudiated their memberships when it became convenient, and they violated a rule in the electoral act put in place to ensure registered political parties have a reasonable amount of support. Since One Nation did have a reasonable amount of support at the time — as evidenced by the election of eleven of its candidates — it’s hard for me, at least, to consider that a violation in principle rather than a technical violation.

For contast, a deliberately fraudulent attempt to manipulate the party registrations might include registering the “Liberal Party” and running candidates under that name, hoping to distract voters who are aiming for the “Liberal Party of Australia”. That, certainly, would confound my faith in the electoral process. Having people who agreed with One Nation’s policies running under the banner of One Nation, though, certainly doesn’t; although the converse — ie, not allowing them to run as a party — might.

Martin also says:

One Nation’s fraud brought them non-monetary benefits which they can’t repay. We can’t go back now and re-run the election with One Nation not registered.

Basically, I find such claims patently ridiculous. The votes One Nation candidates received due to One Nation’s policies are theirs by rights — claiming them a benefit doled out by a government bureacracy is nonsense. Had One Nation candidates received less votes because the electoral forms did not list their party affiliation, that would have been a wrong done to both the candidates and to potential One Nation voters.

Anyway, all that’s as may be. The focus of my previous remarks haven’t been whether Ms Hanson did anything wrong, but rather at the length of the sentence. Martin quotes me and replies:

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.

I think it’s just you.

Giving back ill-gotten gains when somebody is caught or about to be caught does not undo the crime. There are at least three reasons: Hanson had the benefit of the money in the interim, the fraud was wrong in itself regardless of whether it was profitable, and there must be a disincentive to people “trying it on”. It’s right and normal for criminals to do more than just repay the money. In passing sentence Wolfe CJ did consider their attempt to repay, among other mitigating circumstances, which is also entirely reasonable.

And certainly it is right and normal for people to do more than pay back what they stole. But we have a whole range of such punishments, from adding on interest and costs, through community service and weekend detention before we get to putting people in jail for three to five years. Perhaps “a slap on the wrist” is too weak, but compared to three years’ jail, more senible terms (like six months in jail, or a few years’ community service) certainly seem like nothing more than that.

(Blog war! Blog war!)