George Christensen has changed his mind about retiring from politics and will now run for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party at the upcoming federal election.
The announcement of Christensen’s backflip on leaving the parliament was made in the News Corp newspapers and a formal announcement is expected later this morning.
One Nation will aim to have a candidate in every lower house seat, their most ambitious election effort to date. It is not clear at this point if Christensen will run for his Queensland electorate of Dawson or join leader Pauline Hanson on the party’s senate ticket.
“We just marked the 25th anniversary of the founding of One Nation,” Senator Hanson said. “We’ve been part of Australia’s political landscape for a whole generation now and we’re ready to offer every Australian voter the chance to elect a One Nation candidate.
“It’s taken almost 12 months to bed down the team we’re taking to voters at this election. It’s a significant step up from the 2019 election when we fielded candidates in about a third of Australian electorates.
“It’s been made possible only with enormous support from One Nation’s membership, which has grown exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns forced onto Australian communities the past two years.” Senator Hanson said.
Christensen announced his resignation from the Liberal National party last week, publicly posting a scathing assessment of the party’s direction in recent years arguing it needed to return to conservative values.
In a video posted to his website Christensen said he’d made the party switch because One Nation aligned more with his values.
“The more I queried into One Nation’s policies and looked at their constitution, their core beliefs, the things that Pauline has been campaigning on recently, just about everything aligned with my views,” he said.
“Bizarrely the question really didn’t float into my mind as to why am I doing this, the question that floated into my mind was, why hadn’t I done this a long time ago?”
His decision to contest the election will be cause for concern for the Morrison government who need to retain seats, and pick up a few new ones, to return as a majority government.
Pauline Hanson says she’ll be touring the nation during the election campaign, but will not be coming to Western Australia because she has not received any Covid-19 vaccinations.
The party ran a large number of candidates in the 2017 Western Australian state election but ran into trouble when poorly vetted candidates caused a series of media headaches.
They included a candidate who suggested same-sex marriage certificates should be called “poof proof certificates”, another who suggested that marriage equality would lead to incest, and one who believed that gay people had secret mind control powers developed by the Nazi Party while also describing families of gay couples as “fake families“.
OIP Staff, 13-04-22 8:51 report updated to include comment from George Christensen.
You can support our work by subscribing to our Patreon
or contributing to our GoFundMe campaign.
