Politics is a dirty, dirty business. As Pauline Hanson knows from the inside: she was jailed for 11 weeks in 2003 on trumped-up charges, which were dismissed on appeal. With her party charging to the lead-in federal and state polls, the dirt units are spreading the muck far and wide.
One of the latest targets was One Nation’s newly announced Victorian leader, Warren Pickering.
In one of the grubbiest examples of gutter journalism seen in a long time (and for the legacy media, that’s saying something), the Australian dredged up Pickering’s ex to smear the successful business and former army soldier over allegations of a misspent youth. It was such a distasteful effort that even other legacy media wouldn’t touch it. They only joined in once there was some verifiable information, in the form of a couple of long-ago drink-driving convictions.
But the story behind the story was even grubbier.
Jo Scott, the former partner of One Nation Victorian leader Warren Pickering, turned up on her estranged son’s Melbourne doorstep on August 31 clutching $400 in cash and a bag of nappies, wanting him to back a drug claim about Pickering that he says wasn’t true.
The boy was made of sterner stuff than that. “I’m not saying yes because it’s not true,” he told the media fishing for a dirty story. He is the second of Scott’s three sons to publicly denounce the media smear campaign. Her eldest publicly stood at the podium with Pickering to defend the One Nation candidate.
But there was even more to this grubby act than met the eye, such as who was putting Scott up to it.
Behind the wheel that night was Jessica Christmas, a former Queensland LNP staffer who once advised John-Paul Langbroek. CCTV shows Scott arriving with Christmas. Fifty minutes later, Christmas slunk back to collect her. The young man says he’d never clapped eyes on Christmas before. She was introduced as “my friend Jess, who is helping me out”.
One week later, Scott’s unsubstantiated allegations landed on the Australian’s front page. Cue a fortnight of wall-to-wall smear against the man running One Nation’s Victorian campaign. If it looked like a co-ordinated campaign, that’s because it so clearly was. The suspicion all along was that it was aimed solely at saving the Liberal Party in Victoria from losing an unlosable election. The presence of a former Queensland Liberal staffer in the behind-the-scenes shenanigans does nothing to dispel those suspicions.
That staffer, Christmas, is the richest part of this farce. She once sat on the LNP State Council, helped midwife the 2008 merger, chaired the Brisbane City branch and advised Langbroek. In May 2010 she tore up her party card in a letter of high moral dudgeon, quoting a senior colleague’s recipe for politics: “If you throw enough mud at the f@*%wits, it will stick.” She called digging into an MP’s wife’s children “absolutely and utterly despicable and shameful”. She would not, she swore, be part of any premeditated effort to “crush and destroy” rivals “and their wives and children as well.”
Fast forward 16 years and the righteous principles have completely evaporated. Christmas now serves, the paper reports, as Jo Scott’s go-between with the media and has had her staying at her home, while Scott weaponises claims from their family break up against Warren Pickering.
To make the hypocrisy even richer, Christmas recently attempted to volunteer for One Nation’s campaign, including during the Nepean by-election in May.
It’s no suspicion, meanwhile, that Scott set out to ambush Pickering. She was thick enough to openly say so, on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Scott was busy floating bizarre ambush plans on her now private Facebook account, musing about travelling to Victoria in disguise to confront Pickering in public, waiting for “the perfect moment” to “take my wig or hat and glasses off” just to watch his reaction, before signing off with the shameless request:
“Anyone wanna fund my trip lol.”
It looks like someone in the legacy media or the Liberal backrooms took up the offer.
Pickering said the approach to Scott’s son was just more evidence of “a blatant attempt to take me out of the Victorian election from day one”, adding that “it has all the hallmarks of a political hit job and stinks to high heaven”.
Hanson has seen this movie. Jail her, smear her, starve the party of staff, then send the dirt units after whoever she puts in front. The method never changes.
And it never stops driving One Nation’s poll numbers higher.
