A Hanson Reward

Why shouldn't we condemn Pauline Hanson as just another ignorant racist? Well because all the other ignorant racists didn't cost us $1.2 million this election.

How?

Under election rules, the Australian Electoral Commission pays parties and candidates $2.62 for every first-preference vote they get in each state or division in which they attract more than 4% of the vote.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation picked up 9% of Queensland Senate votes and just over 4% in NSW, earning her around $800,000. Add to that 15 lower house candidates who got more than 4% of the vote, and there's another $400,000.

In fact after Labor, the Coalition and the Greens, One Nation is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of AEC funding, pipping Nick Xenopohon by more than $200,000.

And it's not as if she's hit the jackpot just by winning. Hanson has learned to turn political failure into a very profitable business.

Hanson first ran as the Liberal candidate for Oxley in 1996. Although disendorsed before the election, ballot papers had already been printed and nominations had closed. Hanson therefore appeared on the ballot as the Liberal candidate and was elected in the 1996 landslide, entering parliament as an independent.

Since then Hanson has:

Stood for the Queensland seat of Blair in the 1998 election, and lost.
Stood for the Senate in Queensland three times, and lost.
Stood for the Senate in New South Wales, and lost.
Stood for the New South Wales Legislative council three times, and lost.
Stood for a Queensland state seat, and lost.

Hanson's reward for this Eddie the Eagle-esque performance? Around $6 million in AEC funding.

Now (thanks to halved quotas due to Malcolm Turnbull's masterstroke of calling a double-dissolution election) Hanson is $1.2 million richer and back on the public teat for at least another three years. No wonder she's worried about some immigrant taking her job.

Hanson's success hasn't come from tapping into the concerns of the fearful, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, racists, bigots, arseholes or whoever make up the roughly one in 25 voters who support her. It's comes from attracting enough core votes to make political hate-mongering a nice little earner.

And she'll keep coming back, election after election, for as long as we keep paying her to do so.

We should condemn Pauline Hanson as an ignorant racist, but we shouldn't condemn her as 'just' another ignorant racist.