Canberra: Pauline Hanson was vexed by a pending revelation about a major One Nation donor and concerned that media had been told he had donated a light aircraft to the party, a secret recording shows.
The Australian Electoral Commission is investigating the alleged donation of the plane, which has not been declared by the party.
One Nation has denied breaching electoral laws by not declaring the donation.
In a phone call recorded last November, handed to the AEC by the former One Nation president Ian Nelson, Hanson expresses her annoyance at the Melbourne developer Bill McNee being outed as a financial supporter.
She casts suspicion on the former party secretary Saraya Beric for the information falling into media hands but says: “Everything was above board because it was all reported with the AEC.”
The senator says: “They’ve been told that Bill McNee actually donated the money to pay upfront for the office for a year and the plane.”
She goes on: “So they’ve already rung Bill and they asked him and he said, ‘Yep, but I’ve donated to a lot of parties’.”
Hanson described the Jabiru aircraft, which bears her political branding, as belonging to the party as recently as January.
But her adviser James Ashby later said he had bought it for his own business purposes and declared when it was used for One Nation.
McNee has said his company Vicland’s contribution of almost $70,000 in early 2015, mostly in the form of a gift of $57,720 (Dh212,009) in rent for One Nation’s Brisbane office space, was the full extent of his donations.
In the recording obtained by the ABC and the Courier-Mail, Hanson indicates McNee’s identity had been a closely guarded secret.
Annoyed
“Who knows Bill’s name?” she asks. “We’ve always kept it very, very quiet. Who knows that he paid money upfront for the office? No one knew. There was four of us that knew. It was tightknit.” The party leader says she is “pissed off because people get the [expletive] with me and then they go to the media and this turns to [expletive]”.
She says Beric was “pissed off at me because I never gave her a job in my parliamentary office”. She suggests Beric was seeking a job with the embattled Western Australia senator Rod Culleton, who Hanson described as “a loose bloody cannon” a month before he quit One Nation.
Beric has denied being the source of the leak.
“And Rod’s going to fall flat on his bloody face; she’s going to be without a job there,” Hanson says. The Australian electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, told Senate estimates last Thursday the commission had issued One Nation compulsory notices to produce documents, converting its inquiry into a formal investigation.
Rogers also said a recording of Ashby, Hanson’s chief of staff, discussing “making some money” from electoral reimbursements did not disclose any breaches of commonwealth electoral law but might breach other laws.
Asked about the latest recording on Tuesday, Hanson told reporters in Canberra: “I cannot believe you would ask me some stupid questions like that when I have had a gentleman who has been shot dead in his electorate.”
“We have people homeless in the cold weather like this. We have the state of this country and you’re worried about, from some disgruntled people. I think it’s disgusting.”
