Jo The Impaler

Last night, David Farley MP brought the following matters to the attention of the leadership of One Nation. Over the past few weeks, the Prime Minister has met with David privately. The Prime Minister initiated these meetings. This week, David received a letter from the Prime Minister stating that he had allocated David a personal staff position outside of One Nation’s unresolved staffing request. David did not request this allocation of staff. No reason was provided by the Prime Minister for the provision of this staff. Following these discussions, senior ministers raised grant funding under the Sustainable Communities Program for the Murray Darling Basin. David did not initiate the discussion regarding this program. Taken together, these actions have left David and One Nation deeply concerned that the government is seeking to use taxpayer funds to exert undue political influence over politicians. We have decided to expose these grubby dealings because the public deserves to know what the Albanese Labor government is doing behind closed doors. For months, One Nation has been fighting for fair, transparent and objective allocation of staffing for parliamentarians. The Prime Minister has refused to respond to these calls. Yet astonishingly, this week the Prime Minister provided a letter to David directly granting a Personal Adviser 3 position, paid up to $200,000, effective immediately. David has rejected this unsolicited allocation. Last month, One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson stood alongside the Member for Fowler, Dai Le MP and Senator for Western Australia, Fatima Payman to demand consistent, transparent and independently determined staffing allocations. They stood together despite their political differences because this matters to our democracy. The Prime Minister should not personally control the resources available to his political opponents. While this power has always been open to abuse, it has, in our view, been weaponised to an unprecedented extent under this Labor Government and this Prime Minister. One Nation introduced our Safe Staffing Guarantee Bill to stop this abuse of power. Labor, the Coalition and the Greens all united to block the Bill. This is the type of politics that Australians are sick of. The Prime Minister is trying to drag One Nation down to his level of grubby politics. One Nation will have no part of it. The second issue that needs to be brought into the open is the way in which the Albanese Labor government appears to be using public grant money to achieve their political objectives and paper over policy failures. The government has directly raised the prospect of grants available to the Murray Darling Basin under the Sustainable Communities Program as compensation for water buybacks. David and One Nation will always fight for Farrer’s fair share of public resources, but we will never allow grant funding to buy cooperation or silence on the issue of water advocacy, implicit or otherwise. We know the number one thing Farrer and other basin communities need is water. One Nation does not accept that devastating water buybacks are a foregone conclusion. A future One Nation government will end water buybacks. This government’s actions are the type of broken politics that undermines the confidence Australians have in our democracy. It’s what Professor Anne Twomey has described as ‘grey corruption’. One Nation will always stand up for the interests of all Australians. We won’t be bought or divided by this Prime Minister. ENDS