Coalition MPs hoping to defect to One Nation may be disappointed with a former Liberal senator who switched parties revealing she had a longstanding friendship with party founder Pauline Hanson beforehand.
Hollie Hughes, who lost her Senate seat at last year’s elections, joined One Nation in May after being a member of the Liberal Party for more than two decades and serving one six-year term in Federal Parliament.
“Pauline has made it very clear she’s not taking opportunists who just want to jump ship, think it’s a way to save their seat,” she told The Nightly.
“I think that’s lovely because it’s the loyalty they’ve shown her, she’s going to reward that.”
Ms Hughes, who last year bought a pub at Rydal near Lithgow in the NSW central west, said she became closer friends with Senator Hanson in 2024, after they joined a small group of conservative senators who backed a motion endorsing medical care for babies that had survived abortions.
“Pauline and I, we’ve been friends for years and there were a couple of policy issues that came up in particular that I found myself sitting and voting with her,” she said.
Ms Hughes hasn’t ruled out running as a One Nation candidate in Calare against independent MP and former Nationals member Andrew Gee.
“I haven’t decided or really considered what I want to do going forward but I’ve certainly still got things to say,” she said.
She also had a dig at the previous career paths of Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, who respectively worked for McKinsey, a management consultancy, and the Institute of Public Affairs think tank before winning a seat in Parliament.
“If you look at it now, it’s predominately people coming out of think tanks or management consultancies - they’re not small businesses, they’re not running a payroll, they’re not planning to look at what the tax bills are,” Ms Hughes said.
For the first time in Newspoll’s history, One Nation is in the lead with 31 per cent support on primary votes, ahead of the ruling Labor Party on 30 per cent and the Coalition on 18 per cent.
Former Queensland Liberal Party vice president and campaign chairman Graham Young said the Liberal Party’s decision to disendorse Ms Hanson three decades ago in the then Ipswich-based seat of Oxley, south-west of Brisbane, led to the rise of One Nation, now leading several opinion polls.
“That’s the only way she would have got elected in Oxley,” he told The Nightly.
“So, she wouldn’t have had the platform, she wouldn’t have had the resources, I doubt whether the party would have existed.”
In 1995, Mr Young was one of five out of nine preselection council members who backed Ms Hanson’s bid to run in the safe Labor seat of Oxley ahead of the 1996 Federal election, when she ran a fish-and-chips shop.
Two of those votes in her favour came from the party executive with the local branch members on that preselection committee preferring another candidate.
After being disendorsed by the Liberal Party shortly before polling day for a series of comments about Aboriginal welfare to her local newspaper, Ms Hanson won former Labor leader Bill Hayden’s old seat with a 19 per cent swing to her, as outgoing prime minister Paul Keating’s Labor party lost in a landslide nationally to the John Howard-led Coalition.
“We made a martyr of her by disendorsing her and she was on the ballot - we couldn’t preselect someone else because nominations had closed so every Liberal was going to vote for her, they weren’t going to vote for Paul Keating,” Mr Young said.
“And there were a whole lot of Labor voters who wouldn’t have voted for her if she was a Liberal but now we’d taken the chains off her, they were happy to vote for her.”
A series of former Liberal Party members have recently defected to One Nation including Tina McQueen, a former Liberal Party Federal vice president.
Former NSW Liberal MP and government whip Nathaniel Smith has reportedly quit the Liberal Party with a view to joining One Nation, and is the son of former Liberal State attorney-general Greg Smith.
Former Nationals deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce quit his old party last year and joined One Nation while former Liberal MP Craig Kelly briefly joined One Nation in 2024 after losing his seat as a United Australia Party candidate.
At a State level in NSW, former Federal Labor leader Mark Latham was elected as a One Nation Upper House MP in 2019 but was kicked out of the party in 2023.
Former State Labor Opposition frontbencher Tania Mihailuk filled his casual vacancy only to herself leave the party in 2024.
In Queensland, former Liberal National Party State MPs Neil Symes, Michael Pucci, Sam Cox and Steve Dickson defected to One Nation after former LNP premier Campbell Newman lost the 2015 election.
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