'Come here, Red': Pauline Hanson feels the love while campaigning in WA

Extract from The Guardian

The One Nation leader ignored questions about vaccination and Vladimir Putin when she visited Mandurah, south of Perth

‘She’s our lady’: Thelma Letch with the leader of One Nation, Pauline Hanson, who is campaigning in the lead-up to the Western Australian election. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP

Calla Wahlquist

Monday 6 March 2017 15.57 AEDT 

Thelma Letch pushed through the line of television cameras and threw her arms around senator Pauline Hanson with a cry of, “Come here, Red!”
Letch is 80 years old, her grey hair washed with copper. “We could be mother and daughter,” she said. “Oh, I just love her.”
Letch and a small group of other devotees gathered on the foreshore at Mandurah, a coastal city one hour’s drive south of Perth on Monday for the first stop in the One Nation leader’s week-long Western Australian tour before the state election on Saturday.

Leading the welcoming party was the candidate for Mandurah, Doug Shaw, who chose the location because the owners of the nearby Deano’s Cafe are “big fans” of Hanson and will tolerate the media throng for a chance to have a coffee with her.
One man, Tony Brown, has come equipped with a photo of him and Hanson taken during Hanson’s visit to the state in the federal election campaign in 1998.

He poses with Hanson again. “This is 19 years old, I had to update it.”
After posing for photos Hanson sat down in the cafe, accompanied by Shaw and One Nation’s WA leader and upper house candidate Colin Tincknell. Letch joined Shaw’s team in showering people sitting at the outside tables with how-to-vote cards.
“Vote for Pauline, she’s our lady,” she says.
Letch’s admiration for Hanson began when she was jailed for electoral fraud in 2003, on charges later overturned by the court of appeal.
“I’m 80 years old, I haven’t got much time left, and I know I can put my life in her hands,” she told Guardian Australia. “My life and the lives of my grandchildren, and she will look after them.”
Letch sees herself in Hanson: they have both had to work hard, she said, and have both brought up a family with little assistance from the state. They are also both worried that the lives they have worked for will be taken away by foreign investment, foreign workers and foreign ideology.

The One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, campaigns at Deano’s Cafe in Mandurah. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/AAP

Lowering her voice to a whisper, Letch leans in and explains the main reason she supports Hanson.
“We’ve got a, a Muslim problem and she will talk about it and no one else will,” she said. “I don’t want them in the country. I loathe the way they crucify little girls.”
Cecil Williams, another Mandurah local and devoted Hanson supporter, chimed in. “If you agree with Islam, you agree to allow paedophilia,” he said. “It’s in sharia law. Child brides.”
Williams was a “lifelong Labor voter” and a union representative for 22 years but said he turned to Hanson when both Labor and Liberal governments started privatising water and power assets.
He thinks the media is too tough on Hanson, who had a difficult morning on talkback radio after citing discredited anti-vaccination research on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday and arguing that parents should be encouraged to investigate the risks themselves.
“She put her foot in it with this bloody vaccination thing yesterday ... but they press her, the press, they press her,” Williams said. “It’s what they’re doing in WA in this state, they don’t want her in power.”
In front of another bank of cameras on the other side of the road, Hanson’s chief-of-staff, James Ashby, issued a warning to the press.

Tony Brown who took a photo with Pauline Hanson outside Deano’s Cafe to replace a photo he took with her in the 1998 federal election campaign. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist for the Guardian

“We are here to take questions on local issues only,” he said. “Any questions on Putin or vaccinations, she will end the press conference right away. She’ll just walk away.”
Instead Hanson spoke about the party’s electoral chances (“I think this is the time for One Nation,” she said), her position on the GST allocation (“I can’t fix it … but I do think it is unfair”) and was overpowered by Tincknell when asked about the decision to disendorse One Nation candidate Sandy Baraiolo, who publicly opposed the preference deal struck with the Liberal party.
“I can answer that, it was for disciplinary matters,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the preference deal, it was for disciplinary matters.”
Standing next to Guardian Australia, Williams was enraged. “Is this reporter from CNN?” he said. “Fake news … he sounds like a lefty.”
Shaw also criticised the media, responding to a question about whether the owners of Deano’s Cafe were paying penalty rates on this Labor Day public holiday by saying: “Look, the senator was here to meet supporters and say hello to Mandura this morning, not to make issues of policy or anything like that.
“It was purely to say hello to the people of Mandurah and see how it goes ... Not to labour a point, guys, but instead of all these questions still about disendorsed candidates, I really think you guys should look a bit positive.”
Questions about Hanson’s vaccination comments, asked at the end of the 18 minute long press conference, were not answered.
Hanson was scheduled to conduct meet and greets in a number of Perth suburbs on Monday afternoon before flying to Port Hedland for the first stop in a regional tour, taking in Geraldton, Kalgoorlie and Albany. She will remain in WA until Sunday.