It’s time the media took a stand against One Nation’s abuse of journalists

To ignore One Nation’s anti-democratic behaviour shows wilful blindness to what is happening in the United States, and suggests a complacency that it can’t happen here, writes Denis Muller.

The day before the Farrer byelection on May 9 in which Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party delivered a seismic shock to the Australian political landscape, her party apparatchiks banned the ABC from attending its election-eve press conference.

Journo ‘shut up’ barb vintage Hanson as she makes Adelaide ‘second home’

Why we need vampire hunters in Australia

Journo ‘shut up’ barb vintage Hanson as she makes Adelaide ‘second home’

Why we need vampire hunters in Australia

Thirteen days later, another party apparatchik told a journalist from Guardian Australia to “shut up” during a press conference in Adelaide about the party’s policy on oil and gas. Hanson was later heard describing the journalist as a “nasty bitch”.

And a week before Farrer, at the byelection in the Victorian state seat of Nepean, the One Nation candidate, Darren Hercus, refused to speak to the ABC because, he said, the ABC was biased.

The response of the media industry and the profession of journalism to these antidemocratic outbursts has been supine: a shameful abrogation of their obligation to defend the freedom of the press.

In Farrer, the other journalists stood by and watched as the ABC reporters were ejected. In the ensuing two weeks, not a single word of condemnation has been uttered publicly by any industry or professional leader as one abusive episode........

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