Hello pot, this is kettle. Give us a break, Pauline
I didn't particularly want to write about Pauline Hanson but couldn't let her breathtaking hypocrisy through to the keeper.
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Her latest whine, that the PM's language - he called One Nation divisive, dangerous and dishonest - crossed a line and was somehow an incitement to political violence was as rich it gets.
The burqa wearing stuntwoman who professed she'd never met a good Muslim, who told a fellow senator to piss off back to Pakistan and has made a career of demonising people of different faith and colour trying to take the moral high ground on social cohesion. The very person who admitted her party was being infiltrated by extremists. Seriously? Give us a break.
Hanson's crossed so many lines in her 30 years in politics it's laughable she's playing the victim because of what in Australian political discourse was a pretty mild - and accurate - assessment by the PM. If anything, he would have been justified using stronger language.
In fact, a more robust stand against One Nation is precisely what's needed and it needs to come from across the political spectrum. A good start would be to stop overstating One Nation's influence on our politics and stop treating Hanson as a de facto opposition leader.
She's not, as much as she'd like to think she is.
Not when One Nation only has one elected member in the House of Representatives and a turncoat who defected from the Nationals and four senators, one of whom is rarely out of the news for his cooker opinions on far right podcasts.
Not because One Nation has won two by-elections - one state, one federal. And not because the polls tell us it's popular in the regions and outer metro electorates. To govern, One Nation would need to pick up a swathe of city seats, where most of the population resides, which is as unlikely as snow in January, given so many of those electorates are populated by people from migrant backgrounds.
It would........
