1st December 1999
One Nation members cannot understand why I have taken such a strong stand against the two Davids in recent days. Let me remind them that it was because of the deregistration of One Nation in Queensland that I started asking questions and discovered a termites nest.
All One Nation members have ever received from Manly over this ruling was this strange letter from David Ettridge claiming "we committed no fraud".
Now before taking the link below let us remember that Pauline Hanson has entrusted herself to the two Davids and that Justice Atkinson found in her ruling that a constitutional flaw was the basis of her decision that there were only three members in Pauline Hanson's One Nation Queensland, the party registered by Hanson with the Queensland Electoral Commission prior to the state elections.
Manly have never referred to this "constitutional flaw"... just inferred that the Judge was politically biased.
Pauline had done the right thing and included with her application a list of over five hundred "members" who the Judge ruled were actually members of a separate entity called Pauline Hanson's One Nation Members Inc. It is this attachment of 500 members that has created all the confusion - confusion that Ettridge in his letter is happy to exploit. Confusion because people believed, wrongly according to Atkinson, that they were members of a political party, Pauline Hanson's One Nation. Pauline could have included 100,000 names of members but, according to Atkinson, they would have still been from the separate legal entity known as Pauline Hanson's One Nation Members Inc (a support group) and not Pauline Hanson's One Nation (the political party) because of the flawed constitution compiled by the two Davids.
It has now come to my attention that David Ettridge knew all along that there was a fatal flaw in the way the party was registered and that this was deliberate. Ettridge must have known when Pauline Hanson registered One Nation Queensland in the way that she did that the registration was fatally flawed putting her at enormous personal risk.
In this letter dated 20th November 1997 he spells out the flawed structure to the branch president of Ipswich branch and explains why it had been "designed" this way. (I was a member of Ipswich branch at this time).
It was designed that way to ensure that you, as members, had no real say in Pauline Hanson's One Nation - to "sanitise" the "people's party from "white ants" - to ensure that only three people - Pauline Hanson and the two Davids had any say.
Let us revisit what Judge Rosalyn Atkinson ruled when deregistering One Nation in Queensland:
1. Pauline Hanson One Nation Ltd ACN 079 986 913 (the company). There were five subscribers to the Memorandum and Articles of Association, Pauline Hanson, David Ettridge, David Oldfield, Andrew Carne and Stephen Menagh.
2. The unincorporated political party known as Pauline Hanson's One Nation of which Pauline Hanson, David Ettridge and David Oldfield were the only members.
3. The incorporated support group known after the 3 February 1998 as Pauline Hanson's One Nation Members Inc. By design the members voting rights of this group are obviously confined to the support group and they have no voting rights in the actual political party.
It was under this same structure that Pauline Hanson, I would suggest, innocently registered the Queensland branch of One Nation. There is an appeal before the Supreme Court - which resumes tomorrow on 2nd December. According to Ettridge the cases brought against the party have so far cost about Au$700,000 - add to that our $80,000 constitution and you start heading towards a million precious dollars wasted because of the incompetence and autocratic modus operandi of the Manly office under its current management. And this has gone unquestioned!
Pauline Hanson could be personally sued for nearly $500,000 (after she took out a personal guarantee) and could also lose any chance of a political career in the future if she is charged with fraud because she lodged the documents and ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.
Meanwhile Ettridge says diddly-squad and David Oldfield has distanced himself from "Queensland's problems".
It should be quite clear to One Nation members where the problems (the 2Ds) lie and until they are clinically removed and the party structure changed they will continue to decimate the people's party.
I remain dedicated to the issues the party stands for but unable to participate while so many unanswered questions remain unanswered at the top.
We have to remove this cancer eating away at the party.
It is time for members of the party's national executive and state executives to join together and call on the two Davids to step aside from their executive positions in the party so that an independent body can investigate the growing number of claims and well based allegations being raised about the management of the "people's party".
If the executive do not the membership will judge them by their inaction when the sword finally falls.
If an investigation is undertaken and the dead and rotten wood cleared away One Nation will be able to pick itself up and fight on with new and focussed energy. If it doesn't there won't be any dead wood left for the so-called "white ants" to pick at.
Comment: Ted Briggs who joined Terry Sharples in the action against One Nation died of a heart attack last week. Briggs helped Pauline Hanson lodge the flawed application at the QEC.
