December 18, 2016
One Nation will not field a candidate for the seat of Nanango in the next State election if it cannot find a “suitable” one.
One Nation’s state president senator Pauline Hanson formally announced on Sunday the party will begin its push “to win” the next Queensland election by initially standing candidates in 36 of Queensland’s 89 electorates.
The seats One Nation will contest are largely in Ipswich and the Lockyer Valley, the Gold and Sunshine coasts, their hinterlands and parts of regional Queensland, including Callide held by the LNP’s Jeff Seeney and Gympie, held by the LNP’s Tony Perrett.
The party’s long-serving state secretary Jim Savage will run in the seat of Lockyer currently held by retiring LNP MP Ian Rickuss.
Mr Savage is the sole survivor of One Nation’s disastrous 1998 debut into State politics when it won 11 seats, then rapidly disintegrated with bitter infighting into the now-defunct City Country Alliance.
This pattern was repeated a few years later when One Nation won seats in the West Australian state election, and is being repeated again in the Senate.
Mr Savage told the media One Nation was not committed to standing candidates in every Queensland electorate, and had learned it should focus on finding quality candidates.
“We will only contest a seat if we can find a good candidate. If we can’t, well we won’t,” he told Fairfax media.
One Nation will contest Albert, Beaudesert, Broadwater, Bulimba, Bundaberg, Bundamba, Burnett, Cairns, Callide, Caloundra, Condamine, Coomera, Currumbin, Glasshouse, Gregory, Gympie, Hervey Bay, Ipswich, Ipswich West, Kallangur, Keppel, Lockyer, Lytton, Mansfield, Maryborough, Mermaid Beach, Mirani, Morayfield, Mudgeeraba, Murrumba Downs, Mulgrave, Nicklin, Pine Rivers, Pumicestone, Redcliffe and Warrego.
A recent Galaxy poll conducted for The Courier-Mail found One Nation was currently polling at 16 per cent in Queensland.
One Nation won 22.68 per cent of the primary vote in the 1998 Queensland state election.
Ms Hanson said the party would be launching more candidates next month, including in north Queensland.
“This is only the first batch of candidates we are announcing today. We will be announcing more as time goes on – hopefully by mid to late January,” Mrs Hanson told the ABC.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has not called an election, and is not obliged to go to the polls until 2018.
