It was a small rural New South Wales town. A few houses, shops and a school on a minor highway. We sipped coffee and ate steak sandwiches in a cafe where every table had a jar of Vegemite, and the TV in the corner was tuned to the Saturday arvo sports. Good Aussie tucker in the very heart of the country.
But this was no ordinary group of people, and this was no ordinary cafe. The building had begun life as a bank branch, built in 1913, the new owner told us, where generations of farmers had taken out loans and cashed their wheat cheques. Once upon a time schoolkids would have banked their weekly sixpences into a passbook, but there weren't a lot of children in town any more. Where we ate was the old manager's office, and the massive old bank safe had been converted into a walk-in pantry. No worries about rats getting into the bread in this cafe!
And the diners were a most unlikely bunch of Canberrans. The executive of the ACT One Nation branch were doing double duty as co-ordinators of the Southern New South Wales Regional Council. A new branch had just been launched at Cootamundra, the birthplace of Sir Donald Bradman, and we had pulled stumps and set off for Temora, an hour's drive west, where we were to do the same at an evening meeting at the bowls club.
It is now just over a year since Pauline Hanson's One Nation was launched in Canberra to considerable media interest, not to mention the attention of over a thousand protesters. The man who stood up and addressed that first meeting, Shaun Nelson, is now an elected member of parliament in Queensland, and many of those who devoted their time to the party since then are now candidates for the next Federal election, becoming familiar faces in the media as local One Nation spokesmen.
Chris Spence was only a few hours behind Shaun in contacting Pauline to set up a Canberra branch. He was elected Vice-President, and took over as President when Shaun returned to North Queensland for family reasons. He is standing for the seat of Fraser, and also wears the hat of Chairman of the Regional Council. A glance at his diary reveals that he takes his job seriously, and will be visiting towns throughout the region at least three days a week for the foreseeable future.
Burl Doble sat in the audience at the first meeting, and moved into the executive six months later as Vice-President. He was announced as the candidate for Canberra by Pauline Hanson and has left his small business to devote himself full-time to campaigning for the election.
Adam Miller, as Treasurer, has kept an eye on the accounts. He's also kept an eye on his home town in Eurobodalla and has been announced as the candidate for the seat of Eden-Monaro. He works in the newspaper industry and has been invaluable in advising on how best to work with the media. At a recent public meeting in Bega he was the only representative of a political party who wasn't booed from the stage.
Secretary Jerry Leyland has always impressed with his solid, common-sense view of the world. His studies in psychology give him a feel for humanity and if sometimes it is hard to understand our opponents, he has an insight. His trade-marked "mindless optimism" rarely lets him down. He bought ten bottles of champagne for a party on the night of the Queensland election, and as a guest brought along another, he had one to celebrate each seat won by One Nation. A magic night.
This night, Jerry was accompanying his long-time friend David Barton on yet another drive through the southern New South Wales. This evening he was off to Wagga, where he gained the approval of the local branch and with it pre-selection to the seat of Riverina. David has run his own research and lobbying firm for some time, and he brings a depth of experience to the branch, including many years work in remote Aboriginal communities. His broad smile in a colour photo on the front page of the Wagga newspaper as he pulled aside his jacket to reveal a Pauline Hanson logo beneath said it all.
This evening our guide was a local grazier. Don Tarlington had just been nominated as the founding President of the Cootamundra branch, and has been active in the local branch and Regional Council for some time. He knows the problems faced by the rural community, and his anger at they way that successive governments have let down country folk is genuine.
Estelle is the campaign manager at the Hume office, a working mother who has taken the time out from her career to give us her time and skills. She has years of experience in studying constitutional law as a hobby, with a special interest in Australia's international position. She talks in a matter-of-fact way about how our sovereignty has been eroded by the thousands of treaties our governments have signed with little public discussion or approval. She is seeking pre-selection for the ACT Senate ticket, and it would be good to see somebody in that House who knows what they are talking about.
And then there are many others, happy to labour in the background, handing out leaflets, doing the newsletter, answering phones and so on. Not all of us like or want our faces on television.
We'd spent much of Tuesday tramping up and down the hilly streets of Yass, handing out and letterboxing flyers for the Friday evening launch. The response, from around a thousand leaflets, was fantastic, with around a hundred people showing up for the launch. This sort of one in ten response is unprecedented in Australian politics. There were two protesters, who sat quietly in the back row.
The protesters were more organised, but just as quiet, the following day in Cootamundra, where we met in the Council Chambers. I suspect the local ALP branch decided to mount a protest, more as a social event than out of any deep feeling. Certainly there were none of the bullhorns, chants and hate-filled faces we have come to expect from the local Rentacrowd.
We stopped for dinner in the old banking chambers before going on to Temora. A small crowd with no protesters, but those who turned up were every bit as keen as their brothers and sisters in Cootamundra and Yass. And Goulburn, Wagga, Bega, Batemans Bay, Cooma....
For too long this country, this great country, has been sold out by cynical politicians appealing to the millions of city voters. Every three years they make their promises, and every three years the people forget about the reductions in services and vote for one or the other of the major parties. Well, it's ordinary people who are supporting Pauline Hanson, and not one of the executive members imagined that they would have such enormous media interest this time a year ago. None of them are the sort of professional politician we have grown accustomed to. None of them have served their time in smoke-filled backrooms, or gone from law school to parliament. Like Pauline Hanson, fish and chip shop lady, we are all everyday people with everyday jobs and interests.
We are ordinary Australians, in the heart of the country, listening and talking about a subject we hold very dear. The future of our country.