Politics

One Nation Accidentally Posted A Massive Sledge Of Pauline Hanson On Their Website

When we called them out on it...they sneakily deleted it.

by Sam Langford  9 November 2017
Pauline Hanson

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There’s nothing sweeter than a great self-own. This legendary one comes to you from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who accidentally put a massive sledge of Hanson on their online store, then sneakily deleted it when Twitter brought it to their attention.

How does a political party manage to accidentally call its leader “turgid” and an embarrassment to the polity on an official website? Who knows, but here’s the story:

Yesterday afternoon, I was perusing the One Nation online store for strictly journalistic purposes when I stumbled across the opportunity to buy a signed copy of Pauline Hanson’s 2007 autobiography Untamed & Unashamed. This seemed like a potential bargain, so I clicked through to read more about the product.

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I found the accompanying blurb…surprising. The second sentence, for example, read “In this turgid autobiography she wants to ‘put the truth on record’ and invites the reader to be the judge. Why bother?”

This did not seem like a positive description of the book, but perhaps I was just misunderstanding it. Accordingly, I looked up the dictionary definition of turgid, just to check. And, ah, yep, it meant exactly what I thought it did — either “swollen and distended or congested”, or “tediously pompous or bombastic”. It’s a really good roast, actually, which made me wonder why One Nation was using it to describe their own leader on their official online store.

It wasn’t just that one unfortunate word, either. The blurb contained a number of pretty savage sledges of Hanson and her literary and political pursuits — it ends by saying that “aided and abetted by some bizarre characters, Pauline’s confected persona has haunted and embarrassed our polity.”

Basically, it read less like a blurb and more like a…negative review of Pauline’s book, copied-and-pasted by an unwitting staffer who mistakenly read it as positive. So I searched the text on Google, and voila — here’s the original review, by Mary Delahunty and published in The Age (none of whom were credited on One Nation’s online store).

The original review is even more clearly negative — it opens by saying that “the turgid telling of [Hanson’s] own life story makes for dull reading indeed”. It also has a second page, which features lines like “her verbal bullets are flaccid” and “the chapters on the circus of deregistration and keystone cops at the national office of One Nation would be hilarious if they were better written.”

It then concludes with this: “This is a gormless autobiography. Why bother? Don’t bother.”

Naturally, I found this hilarious and tweeted about it, around 2.30pm yesterday. When I checked back in on the online store two hours later, I noticed that they had quietly removed the blurb. Thankfully, the cached version of the page lives on here.

Was the hasty removal an admission that they actually hadn’t realised the review was negative? Was it an indication that One Nation are reading my tweets? I emailed One Nation to try to find out, but they did not respond to my requests for comment except to ask where I got the screenshots I tweeted.

Apparently their Battler Bus has broken down though, so they’re probably a bit preoccupied right now. Pauline, if you’d like to please explain at any point in the future, my DMs are always open.