Australian far-right candidates scrub anti-Muslim posts
One Nation's record Victoria campaign is dogged by candidates' past comments on Muslims and Indigenous Australians
MELBOURNE, Australia (MNTV) — As Pauline Hanson’s One Nation mounts its biggest-ever campaign in the Australian state of Victoria, several of its candidates have been quietly deleting old social-media posts — but journalists got to the material first.
One Nation, the right-wing anti-immigration party founded and still led by Queensland senator Hanson, unveiled its full Victorian election team at Melbourne’s Crown Casino on Saturday, fielding candidates in all 88 lower-house seats as well as the upper house ahead of the November state election.
The reporting was compiled by the anti-extremism outlet Searchlight Magazine, drawing on investigations by The Guardian and Crikey.
The Guardian found posts by Tammy Lindrum, the candidate for Albert Park in Melbourne, complaining of “Black and Muslim supremacy in Australia” and telling one person, “If you don’t like Bacon go back to a Muslim country.”
She also questioned support for Indigenous Australians.
Elita Dabrowski, the candidate for Sunbury and a self-described “functional health” practitioner, endorsed U.S. President Donald Trump’s unfounded claim linking paracetamol use in pregnancy to autism; her social-media presence was later cleaned up.
Perhaps the most awkward case, the outlets reported, is Mark Nicholson, an upper-house candidate and co-creator of One Nation’s “Please Explain” cartoons, who repeatedly described himself as a former “criminal lawyer.”
An investigation by Crikey found no record that he had ever been admitted to legal practice; his online biography later dropped the claim, replacing it with “previous work in criminal law.” At Saturday’s launch, Nicholson told supporters that former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews and his successor, Jacinta Allan, would, if he had his way, be “in prison by Christmas.”
The party’s Victorian operation is headed by state president Warren Pickering, an army veteran standing in Pakenham.
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