Pauline Hanson Deposes Mark Latham as NSW Leader

UPDATE 22 August: NSW MLCs Mark Latham and Rod Roberts have announced their resignation from One Nation. They will continue to sit in the NSW Legislative Council but as Independents. Recently appointed Tania Mihailuk will remain a One Nation member. Tables in this post have been updated to reflect today’s events.

As has happened so often in the past, Pauline Hanson has fallen out with other MPs that represent One Nation.

Hanson has deposed One Nation’s NSW state executive and announced that Mark Latham is no longer the party’s state leader. This has led to Latham and Roberts resigning from the party.

Let me run through a series of question on where this dispute will go, and also the remarkable history of MPs leaving One Nation after falling out with Hanson and her backers.

A Few Points on Registered versus Parliamentary Parties

• Parties are registered to contest elections and this is distinct from the party affiliation that parliaments accept for elected members.
• There is also a legal distinction between political parties as unincorporated associations and how they interface with the Electoral Commission as registered parties. Pauline Hanson is listed as the party’s NSW Registered Officer and Party President. Whether she has acted according to the party’s constitution would be a matter for legal action in the courts rather than intervention by the NSW Electoral Commission, though I don’t doubt the Commission will take an interest in these events.
• If Mark Latham or Rod Roberts resign from the Legislative Council, the NSW Constitution requires their seats to be filled by a nominee of the party for which they were elected, which is One Nation. That’s another source of potential legal dispute over control of the party.
• Public funding for the 2023 election was paid on receipts so should not be accessed for legal action.
• Parties are entitled to limited NSW state funding for on-going administrative purposes which may be a matter of dispute here.
• Unlike at Federal elections, sitting members cannot register political parties. If the ex-One Nation MLCs choose to create their own party for contesting elections, it must have 750 members. It may be this split creates problems for One Nation’s current membership numbers for the purposes of registration.
• Of the three current MLCs, Mark Latham has a term that runs until 2031, Rod Roberts and Tania Mihailuk face election in 2027.
• Note that Pauline Hanson’s name did not appear on the ballot paper at the 2023 NSW election. The party nominated candidates under the registered abbreviation ‘One Nation’.
• Hanson’s criticised Latham for One Nation not polling well enough at March’s NSW election. One Nation’s Legislative Council vote declined from 6.9% at the 2019 NSW election to 5.9% in 2023, electing only one MLC compared to two in 2019. Yet the 2023 NSW result was better than the 4.1% Pauline Hanson’s One Nation polled at the 2022 Senate election in NSW, and better than 5.0% in 2019.
• Mark Latham led the party upper house ticket at both the 2019 and 2023 state elections. Latham resigned from the eight-year term he was elected to in 2019 to contest a new eight-year term in 2023. Tania Mihailuk was appointed to fill the four-year casual vacancy created by Latham resigning his 2019 seat.

Elected Members Leaving One Nation is Nothing New

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation burst on to the Australian political scene with a spectacular debut at the 1998 Queensland election.

The party polled 22.7% of the vote and elected 11 members. It was the strongest debut by a new political party since the emergence of the Country Party after the First World War.

Over the next three years the party elected members to the Senate and three state parliaments. It then largely disappeared until returning to elect four members to the Senate at the 2016 Federal election.

One Nation has rarely polled well when Pauline Hanson’s name was missing as a prefix to the party name.

In the decade after 2001 when Ms Hanson’s name was not associated with the party, One Nation became just another name in an already cluttered field of micro-parties.

The re-emergence of One Nation at the 2016 Federal election was due to Pauline Hanson re-joined and her name again prefixing the party’s name. The party’s success in 2016 was boosted by the lower quota for election at a double dissolution.

That One Nation has been unable to build on its initial success is overwhelmingly due to internal disputes that have resulted in the departure of most of the party’s elected members.

The disputes have almost always seen the party’s elected members in one corner, and Ms Hanson in the other supported by advisers including at various times David Ettridge, David Oldfield and James Ashby.

The record of One Nation members is remarkable.

• Overall there have been 31 members elected to state or Federal Parliaments, another four appointed to fill casual vacancies and one member defected to join the party.
• (Updated figures 22 August) Of the 36 members to represent the party, 22 left the party, one was disqualified before taking their seat, four stayed in the party long enough to be re-elected, six stayed but were defeated and three members still in the party are yet to face re-election. Only seven members lasted long enough to face re-election. An eighth was Mark Latham who now sits in the resigned column.
• Only five One Nation members have ever been re-elected for the party, Rosa Lee Long and Stephen Andrew to the Queensland Parliament, Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts to the Senate, and Mark Latham to the NSW Legislative Council.

The Full List

The table below lists all members elected or appointed to represent One Nation and what was their electoral fate.