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Barnaby Joyce says Pauline Hanson does not support the White Australia policy but he has backed her support for “mass deportations” of those overstaying their visas.
Hanson and her colleagues have spent days clarifying, explaining or walking back headline-grabbing parts of the One Nation leader’s trip to Europe, including a podcast interview with the far-right convicted criminal Tommy Robinson, her attendance at a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show and downtime by a hotel pool in Italy with the mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.
Channel Seven’s Spotlight program on Sunday showed Hanson meeting Rupert Lowe, the leader of the hard-right party Restore Britain. Lowe gave her a party pamphlet titled “mass deportations” and Hanson replied they were “on the same page”.
The Seven reporter Liam Bartlett asked Hanson whether she thought “this concept of mass deportation is a good one?”
She replied: “I love it.” One Nation’s website says the party wants to “deport ۷۵,۰۰۰ illegal migrants”.
Joyce didn’t back down from those comments on Monday. Though he did not repeat the term “mass deportations”, he told Sunrise: “As it becomes apparent that they’re not supposed to be here, they’ll be put on a plane and sent back to where they’re supposed to be.”
Asked how One Nation would enforce such a policy, Joyce said: “We’ve got to make sure as people present themselves for medical issues or other things, they’re removed from the country.”
Joyce and Hanson’s daughter, Lee, on Monday again claimed their party leader had been taken out of context when, during the Robinson podcast, she blamed the end of the White Australia policy for creating what she sees as problems with migration.
Asked by Robinson about “the changing face of Australia due to Islamic immigration”, Hanson replied: “They opened up and got rid of the White Australian policy then they started bringing in the different migrants.”
Hanson published two social media videos at the weekend responding to media attention to her trip, criticising “left wing media and their false, click bait stories” over her White Australia policy comments.
On Sunday evening Lee Hanson – who works for the One Nation senator Sean Bell – defended her mother, claiming she had been “misinterpreted”.
“Under no way, shape, or form did she say she wished the White Australia policy hadn’t have been changed,” she said. “She does not support it and she does not want it back. So I do believe it’s been taken out of context.”
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She conceded that her mother “may not be the most eloquent person in the world”.
Joyce, on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program, offered a similar defence. While he said One Nation “don’t support the White Australia policy”, Joyce claimed there had been a “chain of events” from its abolition which had led to bad outcomes.
“It’s a statement of fact, and Pauline herself said that at the start, it started from [Harold] Holt, actually the wind-down of the White Australia policy, a very good thing,” Joyce said.
“And at the start there was really no issues with it. But over time we got a section of people who didn’t want to really assimilate with Australia, didn’t work within the guardrails of Australia.”
The Labor minister Tanya Plibersek said on Sunrise that Hanson “will say anything and then when it is challenged, she wants to stick her head in the sand and pretend she never said it.”
“She’s palling around with convicted criminals, she’s trashing Australia overseas, then she’s saying she’s all for White Australia and for mass deportations and today apparently she’s not,” she said.
Despite the controversy surrounding Hanson’s trip, and the increasing scrutiny on her colleague Malcolm Roberts’ advocacy for conspiracy theories, One Nation has improved its polling position and now sits equal with Labor on primary vote in the latest Newspoll.
