Awoke

REMEMBER THIS: Pauline Hanson was jailed in 2003 after being convicted over the registration of One Nation in Queensland. She was sentenced to three years in prison. She was handcuffed, taken into custody, strip searched and sent to a women’s prison. Eleven weeks later, the Queensland Court of Appeal set the convictions aside and she walked free. Bronwyn Bishop described Hanson as a political prisoner and called the jailing unacceptable, saying Australians did not have to agree with Hanson to understand that freedom of speech was at stake. That part of the story is too often buried. A woman who had challenged the political establishment was humiliated, imprisoned and separated from her family before the case collapsed on appeal. Hanson later said the experience broke her so badly that she contemplated suicide while in jail, but thoughts of her children kept her going. That history explains why she has never stopped fighting. For single parents. For veterans. For pensioners. For Australians abandoned by the parties that pretend to speak for them. Never forget what they did to Pauline Hanson.