MEDIA RELEASE

The overarching consideration for any decisions made by One Nation in Parliament is this: is it good for Australia?

It was exactly this that guided our decision on the Ensuring Integrity Bill.

As I have said countless times, One Nation’s decision does not absolve the union movement of its responsibility to take genuine steps now to stamp out thuggery, corruption, standover actions, and unreasonable demands from employers. But I also have made clear that business groups also need to work with government to stamp out white collar crime and make sure they deliver fair wages and conditions for their employees.

It is only fair that all sides of the work and employment sector all improve their behaviour.

The Government has made a number of allegations about me since the vote last Thursday, and all of them are false.

They suggested I had given a guarantee that I would support the bill. I never did that. This lie was also picked up by the media, which kept repeating it to the point that some people believed it. 

Headlines that suggest that One Nation “flip flopped” are also not true. And to suggest that we “blind-sided the Government” is actually an issue for the Government, which apparently has believed its own hype and the media’s desperation for a scoop.

There have also been allegations that my vote was directly related to the Westpac money laundering fiasco, which revealed that Westpac had allowed around 23-million international cash transactions that may have aided child exploitation crimes; that it was somehow connected to the Government’s cash ban bill, which proposes to limit any cash payments by consumers to a maximum $10,000; and another allegation was that I had made a deal over the Bill with the CFMMEU. All these claims are false.

And, most recently, the Government also suggested I had given a written guarantee and had even texted Ministers that I would support the Bill. I never did that, and I’ve followed up that with a request for the recipients of those so-called texts to prove their allegations by releasing them publicly. 

No doubt they will find any excuse as to why they won’t reveal those texts, but the truth is they don’t exist.

As I said at the outset, One Nation’s vote against the bill was based on the belief that it is a poor law and it was not in the interests of Australia.

One Nation is a mature and growing party. It operates only for what is best for Australia and the Australian people. Any suggestion that we function any differently is false.

Senator Pauline Hanson
Senator For Queensland
National One Nation Leader

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