{"id":34289,"date":"2016-07-05T13:58:51","date_gmt":"2016-07-05T03:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=34289"},"modified":"2022-05-02T11:29:45","modified_gmt":"2022-05-02T01:29:45","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-pauline-burgewords-comments-on-paulinehanson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/we-need-to-talk-about-pauline-burgewords-comments-on-paulinehanson\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to talk about Pauline: @burgewords comments on #PaulineHanson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Like all political parties, One Nation sends mixed messages, and its followers are able to live with policy blind spots, just like other Australians.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WITH no result on election night, it wasn’t too surprising when people came up to our market stall at Cleveland in South East Queensland on Sunday morning asking who’d won. We weren’t selling anything, but petitioning voters in the federal electorate of Bowman about marriage equality. Recognising the rainbow flag and the symbol of national lobby group Australian Marriage Equality, many assumed we were a good bet to talk politics.<\/p>\n

I did an eye roll after I mentioned to a punter that one thing was sure: Pauline Hanson had been elected to a Queensland Senate spot. This shopper jumped in with a couple of perceived positives about Pauline. “Not many people really take the time to find these things out,” she said. A bit chastened, I back-pedalled behind my concerns about how Hanson will vote on marriage equality.<\/p>\n

But it bugged me. The petition I have been championing since April across the region I’ve lived in for almost four years has led me to feel I have a place in this community, whereas my sudden education about Pauline Hanson’s popularity reminded me with a thud that the place I am living is Queensland, One Nation’s spiritual home.<\/p>\n

\"ScreenWith nothing new to report on vote counting, the media flocked to Pauline Hanson’s press conference on Monday. Twitter exploded. The mainstream media followed. News Corp’s was the first lead story I saw, with the headline: “What Pauline Hanson thinks”.<\/p>\n

As a former sub-editor, I thought it was either a lazy header or one dripping with irony. The story behind it proved to be no story at all, just a list of direct quotes from Hanson’s presser (sourced from Australian Associated Press) interspersed with capitalised sub-headings. The only journalistic intervention was filtering out the clearest quotes from the Hanson press conference and packaging them in easy-to-consume bites.<\/p>\n

I scanned through the list to find meaning. It was in the last two lines: “ON MEDIA TREATMENT ‘Don’t take me out of context what I’m saying here at all’.”<\/p>\n

Irony, then. One way to capture Pauline, unfiltered.<\/p>\n

Not quite believing what I was reading, I sought a recent precedent for what I saw as a dumbed-down approach to reporting Hanson. Buzzfeed wasn’t as stripped-back as NewsCorp, but in late 2015 it ran with what looks like dialogue in a screenplay<\/a> when seeking more information on James Ashby’s role on Hanson’s staff. Their reason: Hanson Redux is big on the legal threats.<\/p>\n

Twitter storm<\/h3>\n

No Fibs’ editor-in-chief Margo Kingston took to Twitter Monday afternoon with her eyewitness accounts of Hanson from the late 1990s:-<\/p>\n

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Instead of Greens leader saying Hanson a racist a bigot his job to expel her, how about “I look forward to discussing her views with her?”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Margo Kingston (@margokingston1) July 4, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n