On Jan. 20, detectives from the state of Queensland's Major Fraud Squad raided the offices of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in Queensland and New South Wales (N.S.W.), and seized 20 boxes of documents and computer files. The action was ostensibly motivated by a Queensland Supreme Court decision on Aug. 16, 1999, that One Nation had illegally registered for the 1998 state elections. In reality, the raid is the latest in a series of court actions and media charges of malfeasance and corruption against One Nation's founders-former federal Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson, retiring national director David Ettridge, and N.S.W. state MP David Oldfield—which are designed to crush the party.

The modus operandi of the operation against One Nation is identical to that of the "Clean Hands" campaign which destroyed Italy's major parties, and that is now decimating Germany's postwar political structures, the purpose of which is to eliminate potential opposition to the British-American-Commonwealth (BAC) financier oligarchy, as the world hurtles toward financial collapse.

One Nation director Ettridge blasted the raids as a "politically motivated stunt," and demanded, "Why would the police want to conduct a raid today? Why wouldn't they wait three or four weeks until the Appeals Court has handed down its decision, because that would determine whether a raid was necessary?" Oldfield accurately charged, "This is the first time a political party in Australia has been treated like this."

One Nation burst out of nowhere on June 13, 1998 to win 11 out of 89 seats in the Queensland state parliament. The party promised to: restore tariffs; establish a national bank; "reindustrialize" Australia; and reject "indigenist" Aboriginal land rights claims, which have already tied up 50% of the country. Because both major parties, Labor and the Liberal/National coalition, had long embraced the free trade, privatisation, deregulation, and indigenist policies which had savaged Australia for the last two decades, One Nation struck a deep chord in working class and rural Australia.

When polls showed that the new party might take as many as 10-15 seats in federal elections, politicians in the establishment's Labor and Liberal/National parties backpedalled on globalism, privatisations, and land rights. The major media predicted that the new party would rapidly fade, but it garnered 1.2 million votes in the federal elections on Oct. 3 1998, though it won only one federal senate seat due to Australia's arcane system of voting. In March 1998, One Nation's Oldfield won a senate seat in N.S.W., while other One Nation candidates scored high percentages as well.

Unable to crush One Nation at the ballot box, the Labor and Liberal parties turned to the courts. On Aug. 16, 1999, a Labor Party-appointed Queensland Supreme Court judge delivered a rigged decision, that Hanson, Ettridge, and Oldfield had secured the party's representation "by fraud or misrepresentation," despite the fact that the Queensland Electoral Commission had previously investigated One Nation's required 500 state members, and had certified the party. The court challenge was financed by the Liberal Party, through a trust set up by federal Cabinet minister, free trade lunatic, and welfare-slasher Tony Abbott.

One Nation's leaders now face a paradox: On the one hand, they have repeatedly charged that Australia is being taken over by multinationals and other "globalist" forces, yet, they insist that their current predicament is due merely to the machinations of Queensland, or maybe politicians at the national level, at most. As populists who generally refuse to look at the global strategic situation, Hanson et al. miss the significance of events right under their noses.

For example, when leading figures in the Protestant and Catholic churches, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Business Council of Australia, top bankers, and senior politicians announced their commitment last year to destroy One Nation, the press conference was chaired by Sir Gustav Nossal, director of the world's largest mining company, Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto stands to make tens of billions of dollars from mineral deposits secured through its sponsorship of the very "land rights" which Hanson has attacked, and it is also running a campaign to destroy Australia's trade unions (see "The Queen Is Coming!" EIR, Jan. 21, 2000). Rio Tinto's single largest shareholder is Queen Elisabeth II, whom many One Nation members revere, and whom the populist Hanson would therefore never dare attack. Yet, Her Majesty is the boss, both of Rio Tinto, and of that BAC cabal which is determined to wipe out any nationalist resistance to its global rule, such as Hanson. So long as Hanson and her friends refuse to name their real enemies, they will, as in a Classical tragedy, be "hoist on the petard" of their own axioms.