Analysis
Updated
The Schmidt Sting Pain Index was composed in the 1980s by American entomologist Justin Schmidt. It rates the pain of stings.
The
assiduous Dr Schmidt had himself been stung by a full range of the
world's most agonising tiny predators and rated them from one (the
Southern Fire Ant, the Western Paper Wasp: "Almost pleasant. A lover
just bit your earlobe a little too hard.") through two (Asiatic bee,
Western yellowjacket: "Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W C
Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue"), all the way to the
maximum rating of four.It's at four that things get truly awful.Schmidt's notes on the South American Warrior Wasp are terse, but full of compressed and terrible meaning: "Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?"
I'm no entomologist, but Al Jazeera's undercover investigation of One Nation's attempts to curry favour with the US' National Rifle Association — which went to air last night on the ABC — has all the hallmarks of a four.
Is it the unexpectedness of the sting that hurts so much? The realisation that the chap with whom you've been plotting for God knows how long has had a tiny camera in his tie all along?
Or is it the slow burn of seeing everything you strenuously tried never openly to say, leaching out via the most undeniable visual source of all: you?
'A deliberate set-up'
In this day and age, a media organisation with the money to send a reporter to the corner shop is rare enough.A media organisation which can bankroll a Queenslander called Rodger Muller for more than two years to pretend he's a pro-gun activist and infiltrate One Nation and the NRA, packing a micro-camera throughout: now, that's a weapons-grade sting, and an especially painful one for Australia's most secretive right-wing political party.
For this impressive period of time, Mr Muller (a small businessman recruited for this purpose by Al Jazeera investigative reporter Peter Charley) travelled back and forth to the US dealing both with One Nation and American gun rights activists, posing as the head of Gun Rights Australia, a fictitious outfit.
Pauline Hanson's chief of staff James Ashby and Queensland party leader Steve Dickson — a pair who would no sooner give a frank interview to Al Jazeera (or the ABC, for that matter) than they would knowingly get stuck into a halal snack pack — shuffled out yesterday for an extremely rare joint press conference to explain how it was that they managed, against all odds, to provide these broadcasters with hours and hours of their actual, unfiltered thoughts.
"This was a deliberate set-up," declared Mr Ashby (perhaps unnecessarily).
Good guys and bad guys: the headwear test
Mr Dickson, in his own defence, offered that Muller seemed like "a reasonable guy" because he "wore the Akubra hat".
At this point, it might be worth asking whether there is anything in the world that would disabuse One Nation, as a party, from its steadfast tendency to assign character tendencies to human beings on the basis purely of their headwear.
The pair did provide a backup excuse for their enthusiastic speculation — secretly filmed on a visit to the US with Mr Muller — about how much money they'd be able to extract from the NRA on the promise that they could use the balance of power to change gun laws in Australia.
Ten million? Twenty million? Mr Dickson is captured declaring that with that kind of money, "we have the testicles of the Government in our hands".
(Why is it that testicles so readily float to the surface of such conversations? Are they naturally buoyant? Or is it a culturally-sensitive acknowledgment of pussy-grabbing, the local and presidentially-preferred formulation of hand-to-genital relations?)
'On the sauce'
Says Mr Ashby, with all the dignity he could muster yesterday: "I will be the first to admit, we'd arrived in America, we got on the sauce, we'd had a few drinks and that's where those discussions took place, not with any potential donors, no-one but Rodger Muller, Steve Dickson and myself".Having exhausted the full range of available exculpatory material (Your Honour: He was wearing a hat I recognised. Also, I'd had many Scotches), the One Nation duo reminded viewers that no money was actually forthcoming from the NRA, in the end.
Had Dr Schmidt taken the time to compose a Global Shamelessness Rating, however, he would no doubt have scored a four to Pauline Hanson, who rose in the Senate (at 11.39am on Thursday, November 15, last year, a matter of weeks after her closest advisers' US mission to shake down the NRA for millions of dollars) to declare sweetly that One Nation opposed the very idea of foreign donations, preferring to earn their funds "through hard work — having fish and chips at meetings, or sausage sizzles … I can assure you that no big organisations donate to One Nation".
Senator Hanson and her party ended up voting for the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform Bill, which outlaws foreign donations in excess of $250.
A shocking pastiche of racism
Matters of funding aside, the most searing parts of this documentary (second part airing Thursday night, at 8pm) are the remarks that must have seemed the most casual to those who were unwittingly recorded making them.Mr Dickson, in a shocking pastiche of racism and untruth, for example, assuring US dinner companions that Australia was awash with Muslims, 230,000 a year, coming into people's homes with baseball bats.
Or the NRA flacks coaching the enthusiastic Mr Dickson and Mr Ashby in how to use the bodies of gun massacre victims as a human shield to deflect criticism of lax gun laws.
One suggested gambit: "How dare you stand on the graves of these children to put forward your political agenda?"
And — most unforgivably of all — a secretly-filmed exchange in which Pauline Hanson appears to suggest that the Port Arthur massacre was a conspiracy:
Senator Hanson: "An MP said, 'It would actually take a massacre in Tasmania to change the gun laws in Australia'. Have you heard that? Have a look at it. It was said on the floor of Parliament."
Mr Ashby: "Also that whole September 11 thing, too."
Senator Hanson: "Those shots, they were precision shots. Check the number out. I've read a lot and I've read the book on it, Port Arthur. I read a book on it, on Port Arthur. A lot of questions there."
Recent events in Christchurch, New Zealand, invest these already-horrifying remarks with a fresh patina of obscenity.
Or, as a fellow traveller quite recently said: "How dare you stand on the graves of these children to put forward your political agenda."
Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer.
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