As Jason Bateman famously said, in Dodgeball, “It’s a bold strategy…” The bold strategy in this case is accusing someone else of being ‘weak and glass-jawed, while you’re throwing a massive sook because of a satirical cartoon.
Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie says Pauline Hanson is “weak” and unfit to lead the country after she refused to remove a video online that labelled him a “traitor” eight times.
Hanson is sticking to her guns and refusing to remove the cartoon. She also denies that the “traitor” reference relates to Hastie’s participation in the campaign to bring down war hero Ben Roberts-Smith. Instead, it refers to Hastie vowing to oppose Labor’s hate speech laws… just days before voting with the Albanese government to pass them.
In January, he recorded and uploaded a self-righteous video titled “Why I’m voting against Labor’s hate speech laws,” dramatically informing his online followers that the legislation was “an attack on our basic democratic freedoms”.
On 20 January, he marched into the chamber and voted directly with Labor to pass it. After coalition leadership brokered a backroom compromise with Anthony Albanese’s government, he uploaded a second video claiming his complete backflip was suddenly in the national interest. Three Nationals MPs had the spine to resign their positions rather than endorse that bill, while he rubber stamped it and clung tightly to his parliamentary paycheck.
Well, I guess we know why he’s so in favour of censoring the internet: people keep using it to make fun of him. It seems, indeed, that he has quite a problem with people who say mean things to him. Fifteen years ago, a mere corporal had the temerity to say mean things to him about “you fucking officers”, on the SAS selection course. That corporal was Ben Roberts-Smith.
Andrew Hastie, now the Liberal Party representative for the Perth seat of Canning and opposition industry spokesman, never forgot the bare-knuckle push ups nor how he was spoken to that morning.
Another former SAS soldier, Heston Russell, has since testified that Hastie’s hurty feelings became the genesis of a “blood feud” between the officer and the non-com who tried to flunk him out of one of the toughest selection courses in the military. Russell asserts that Roberts-Smith recommended that Hastie not be accepted into the SAS. Hastie almost failed the 18-month training programme when he was unable to hit an A4-sized target at 15 metres with a pistol while wearing a gas mask four weeks into a 12-week close-quarter battle course. A tough ask, no doubt – but that’s kind of the point of the SAS, surely?
The failure forced him to redo the course, which teaches soldiers to storm buildings and aircraft and rescue hostages. Because of the delay, unlike the rest of his intake, Mr Hastie missed out on being issued his sandy-coloured SAS beret by the late Duke of Edinburgh at a ceremony at Campbell Barracks, the SAS base in Perth, in October, 2011.
The regiment liked the son of a Presbyterian pastor and assigned him a platoon anyway.
On his own account, Hastie told another soldier, “Don’t you worry, time will take care of himself.” Sure enough, diddums got his chance for a bit of sneaky revenge eventually. Long before he was ever subpoenaed to testify against Roberts-Smith regarding ‘war crimes’ allegations, as journalist Sharri Markson pointed out, he “was an active, voluntary media source for Ben Roberts-Smith stories”.
Three years earlier, in 2016, Hastie was sacked from the Army Reserve for refusing a direct order to remove uniform photos from election materials.
He’s going to need all the election materials he can scrape up, if he is to keep his arse on the velvet, if the recent Secret Harbour state by-election, which overlaps Hastie’s federal electorate, is any indication. Hastie sent a begging-letter email the very day after the Secret Harbour result, a landslide for One Nation, complaining of a “real risk” his seat was in danger.
Meanwhile, One Nation has been targeting Mr Hastie’s seat in Canning WA ahead of the 2028 federal election.
One Nation director James Ashby said the party had 430 registered members in Mr Hastie’s electorate and would be targeting his seat.
I think we can see why the glass-jawed Hastie is so keen to attack One Nation.
