Hanson’s comments on Indigenous Australians hang over MP’s first day in WA parliament
New Secret Harbour MP Luke Herdegen’s swearing in was met with cheers and half a standing ovation from a crowd of about 40 supporters, who filled the public gallery at Harvest Terrace to watch WA’s first-ever lower-house One Nation MP take his chair in parliament.
Herdegen replaced former Labor minister Paul Papalia, and his election to parliament grows the crossbench and reduces Labor’s presence in the chamber – but the party still has a commanding presence of 45 seats.
However, the first day of the new MP’s job was slightly overshadowed by the furore surrounding the party’s national leader Pauline Hanson over past comments she made about Indigenous Australians and for a One Nation cartoon describing federal WA Liberal MP Andrew Hastie as a “traitor”.
Herdegen was asked whether he supported the comments Hanson made a year ago describing Indigenous Australians as “the most primitive race on Earth”, which have been widely condemned by all sides of politics including Northern Territory Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Premier Roger Cook welcomed Herdegen to parliament, but said he needed to respond to Hanson’s comments.
“It’s his leader; he’s the one that should respond to what she’s saying, and saying deeply offensive things, [that are] quite frankly, racist,” Cook said.
But Herdegen would not be drawn on whether Hanson’s comments were appropriate.
“I don’t want to comment on anything that Pauline Hanson said. I haven’t heard the podcast, so I’m not going to comment,” he said.
On Hastie, he said: “I don’t think about Andrew Hastie at all.”
When pressed on his party’s involvement in the cartoon, Herdegen replied: “If you want to comment on those comments, ask the people that made the comments.”
One Nation WA leader Rod Caddies lashed the scrutiny of Hanson’s comment on Indigenous Australians, before deflecting to reporting in The Australian around complaints from child protection workers that their concerns about Indigenous girls being raped were not being followed up by the government.
“People are outraged by something [Hanson] said, pretty much out of context because what she was talking about was sort of history,” he said.
“What I’m outraged about is that a child protection worker in the north has come out saying four children were allegedly raped and reported, and nothing supposedly nothing done about 23 child notifications.”
Herdegen, who was late to his first question time by 15 minutes, said the first issue on his to-do list was the fortnightly collection of rubbish bins in his electorate.
He said he would start a petition to push for red-top rubbish bins to be collected by the City of Rockingham weekly again.
Herdegen was sat next to Liberal-turned-independent Nedlands MP Jonathan Huston, who is the brother of Herdegen’s newly employed adviser Michael Huston.
After his byelection win, Herdegen visited parliament during question time sessions last week, and at the time said he had a newfound respect for Cook.
“I was really impressed. You know, there’s certainly some good performers in there. A lot of respect for Roger. I thought he’s a really good performer on the floor, and I was impressed,” he said.
“A lot of respect there, and hopefully, I can earn some respect.”
Hunter returns after four-day suspension
Meanwhile, Nationals MP and resident troublemaker, Lachlan Hunter, has also returned to WA parliament after finishing his four-day suspension for repeatedly interjecting during question time last month.
“It’s good to be back,” he told reporters outside parliament on Tuesday.
Asked if he would be curtailing his behaviour in light of the suspension, he replied: “Absolutely not. We need a strong opposition in the state parliament.”
“When I was kicked out of the state parliament just a little while ago, that was prior to the Secret Harbor by-election, and we just saw ... the Labor Party got their arse handed to them around that electoral result,” he said.
“If the Labor Party want to use their majority numbers to silence what the majority of Western Australians are thinking, then good luck to them.”
Asked if he could have competition as parliament’s biggest troublemaker from Herdegen, Hunter said he was looking forward to having another voice on the opposition benches.
“Hopefully we can give him a few tips and tricks about how to stir up the government,” he said.
But Hunter criticised One Nation for its push to slash 750,000 temporary visa holders over three years to push the country into net-negative migration, warning it could impact WA farmers.
“This is the first piece of detail that we’ve ever seen from a grievance political party from the ’90s. So, good luck to them,” he said.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.