The Feb. 10 state election in Western Australia saw the biggest political shift in the history of the state, when the Australian Labor Party (ALP) won an unprecedented 13 seats to capture government. Reacting to high petrol prices, the burden of the regressive consumption tax, and a crisis in the public hospital system, voters set out to punish the government of Liberal Party Premier Richard Court. Yet incredibly, the ALP, led by Third Way fruitcake Geoff Gallop, one of Tony Blair's closest friends from their Oxford days together, attracted just 37.6% of the vote. 9.6% of the State's voters chose the anti-globalization Pauline Hanson's One Nation party and, under Australia's preferential voting system, directed their preference votes away from sitting House of Representatives MPs, to the ALP. The deposed Richard Court rued, "With the preferences directed largely against our sitting members, it's been bang-bang, you're gone."

The most remarkable aspect of the poll, was that just six months ago, One Nation was politically dead. As a party, it had fallen a long way from the heights of June 1998, when it won 24% of the vote and 11 seats in the Queensland State election. The Party's electoral power was a dangerous threat to the establishment, but, paradoxically, it was also entirely a creation of that establishment, and its media moguls, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, who had raised her to the status of national icon through billions of dollars of free press.

The establishment's real concern was LaRouche in Australia. In 1996, just prior to creating the Pauline Hanson phenomenon, the Establishment tried to smash LaRouche's voice on the Australian continent, including threats of criminal investigations into LaRouche's Australian associates, the Citizens Electoral Council. Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer stated at the time, "There is no place in Australia for the sort of ideas associated with Lyndon LaRouche." The attempt failed, but it was followed up by a total media blackout of LaRouche and the CEC for the next four years—replaced by Pauline Hanson.

However, when One Nation won seats in Queensland, all hell broke loose. The party was pushing policies of re-industrialization and opposition to Aboriginal land rights, which were not part of the establishment's plan. Much worse for them, though, was the source: on Aug. 26, 1998, Rupert Murdoch's Courier-Mail gasped, "But she does have ideas, alas, and her ideas are essentially those of the CEC." But, because the party was mostly media hype, with almost no mass-based organization, as quickly as it had made her, the establishment was able to break her. In the October 1998 Federal election, One Nation polled 1.2 million votes nation-wide—outpolling the more established National Party, Democrats and the Greens—but were restricted to just one Senate seat after the major parties ganged up to direct preference votes away from them. Then, following a vicious media onslaught, the party internally self-destructed: it was de-registered, all 11 of its Queensland representatives defected, and its leadership disintegrated. For the next two years, the Hanson phenomenon existed as a memory, registering at just 2% in the polls.

The purpose of this recent resurrection of Pauline Hanson's One Nation was, again, LaRouche and the CEC. The political establishment was rocked in April 2000, when the CEC, and the Executive of the Municipal Employees Union of WA, co-founded a new political party, the Curtin Labor Alliance. Not only had the CEC politically survived the years of media blackout, but through mass-organizing, it had won support among the traditional constituency of the ALP—trade unions! CLA WA chairman Adrian Bennett predicted, "This new party will change the course of this nation.... The likelihood is ... the establishment will start screaming bloody murder about the CLA."

It did more than scream. The WA government immediately prepared new laws to block the registration of the CLA. Then, on Aug. 29, 2000, media mogul Kerry Packer's flagship magazine, The Bulletin ran a glossy, four-page cover story headlined, "Pauline Hanson, can this souffle rise twice", which effectively brought the genie back out of the bottle. Even Lynton Crosby, the director of the Liberal Party, freaked: "She may be off the radar screen right now," he said, "but if you start putting her on the cover of The Bulletin..." In November, One Nation was the only minor party to be granted registration under WA's new electoral laws (it also overcame opposition from the Electoral Commission to win last-minute registration in Queensland for the Feb. 17 election).

By election day, the clear choice the voters could have had, of the establishment parties' status quo, or LaRouche economic policies to survive depression, had been distorted by a flood of media coverage of policy-void Hanson populism. Still, the CLA's 21 candidates polled a hard-core vote of up to 7% in 5-, 6-, and 7-way races. In one seat, the combined vote of the CLA's Jean Robinson, with 7.65%, and her One Nation opponent's 21%, was more than the 27.47% of votes won by the winner. "How did [the One Nation vote] happen..." asked Liberal Party commentator Christopher Pearson in the Feb. 12 Australian Financial Review. "The re-invigoration of a 'party' bereft of ideas ... is a tribute to the power of the media...," he wrote. According to Pearson, between mid-December and Feb. 8, no fewer than "174 press or electronic media reports which could be construed as talking up One Nation's electoral prospects".