Just one year later, and David Ettridge has been proved tragically wrong. Australia’s far-right extremists of every hue have found a new home in One Nation. White supremacists, conspiracy theorists, gun nuts and economic illiterates have flocked to the new party. And although some have been expelled – not necessarily because of their radical views - many more remain.

One Nation’s dream election run was thrown off track with the disendorsement of its Noosa candidate, publisher and journalist David Summers. The publisher of an occultist New Age conspiracy magazine, Exposure, Summers found himself in hot water after telling a journalist that Pope John Paul II had sold cyanide gas to the Nazis and that Jewish bankers had financed Hitler’s war machine.

Despite the fact that Summers’ unorthodox views were well known - after all, lengthy interviews with Ms Hanson had appeared in two separate issues of his magazine, alongside articles on the notorious anti-Jewish forgery The Protocols of Zion (which Summers sells), ads for books and video-tapes by League of Rights founder Eric Butler and his former deputy Jeremy Lee, edgy rants against Freemasons, and material promoting US militia groups -the party only decided to move against him because of the bad publicity he was attracting. Summers is now planning to reveal all about the inner workings of One Nation.

Summers was not the first One Nation candidate to be disendorsed; that honor went to David Ettridge’s own brother, Michael Ettridge, One Nation’s candidate for Mackay. He claimed that members of the paramilitary AUSI Freedom Scouts had joined One Nation and were plotting to manufacture rifles and take over the Townsville army barracks. "We had problems with Freedom Scouts and radical groups and general extremist groups causing problems in meetings," he said. "Freedom Scouts is one group that’s like a private army ... you’ve got all these ex-CAP people, which is Confederate Action Party." Much of Ms Hanson’s Queensland activist support base is built around the remnants of the now defunct Confederate Action Party (CAP), as confirmed by Cec Clark, a leader of CAP’s short-lived successor, The Australians.

The CAP first came to prominence in the 1992 Queensland Election when its 12 candidates polled an average of 10.13 per cent, against the Liberals’ 8 per cent. One of its highest polling candidates was Tony Pitt, now the secretary of One Nation’s Maryborough branch.

The CAP’s policies were far more radical than One Nation’s. It called for the reintroduction of the death penalty, the cancellation of refugee programs, and the use of convict labor for road and rail building. In August 1993, it collapsed amid allegations of financial impropriety, vote rigging, infighting and fraud. Media spokesman Steve Stringer said the leadership of the party was seeking deregistration because of "lunatic fringe elements". A leading dissident was Tony Pitt.

In 1991 Pitt had circulated a letter to far-right extremists which claimed that Australia was about to be deliberately destroyed. "The ALP is going to spring an early election," he wrote. "The coalition is going to deliberately throw the fight so their ALP cohorts can maintain progress on the plan the upper levels of the Libs and the ALP have in mind for us." Pitt attached a list of "organisations who will help to save us". These included: the League of Rights, Australians Against Further Immigration, the AUSI Freedom Scouts, the Libyan backed and funded Australian Peoples’ Conference, the Citizens’ Electoral Councils, and the Queensland Immigration Control Association, a division of the National Front of Australia. An updated version of this contact list - now including the neo-Nazi group National Action - can be found on Pitt’s website.

Pitt has also advocated the use of biological and atomic weapons against Asians, and in March 1993 told SBS TV’s Dateline program that he would put politicians on trial, after purging judges and police - "a filthy corrupt mob". His most recent claim is that the Port Arthur gunman, Martin Bryant, was drugged and set up by anti-gun lobbyists to kill his 35 victims.

Another prominent Confederate Action Party election candidate was Gold Coast retiree Bruce Whiteside, founder of the Pauline Hanson Support Movement. Whiteside was removed from Ms Hanson’s circle by David Ettridge for supposed organisational amateurism, although his political views were never a problem. Santo Ferraro, who is standing for One Nation in the seat of Nicklin, was the CAP’s candidate for Fairfax in the 1993 Federal Election.

Another Hansonite organiser who fell foul of the party machine was Peter Archer. His booklet The Australian Crisis, claimed that popular singer John Williamson was "really a Socialist One Worlder using deception as the Pied Piper did to lead us into the New World Order and world government". In 1994 he helped organise that year’s Inverell Forum, an annual gathering of League of Rights supporters. He was also a staff writer for The Strategy, described by Senator Ron Boswell in a parliamentary speech as an "anti-Semitic, racist and extremist rag".

Despite being exposed as an extremist in Federal Parliament, Archer remained One Nation’s Hunter Valley region president for some months, before being expelled in late 1997 after Tony Pitt secretly recorded him criticising the party leadership. Archer subsequently formed the breakaway One Nation Australia Party.

Fellow Inverell Forum organiser Ross Provis is One Nation’s candidate for the NSW seat of New England. In 1993, Provis told the Sydney Morning Herald that he and his colleagues in the Australian Community Movement were armed and ready in the event of a possible invasion of Australia. "We have armed ourselves and we are ready to go," he said. "We have has truckfulls (sic) of ex-military weapons shipped into the Inverell area. We have heavy and light machine guns, mortars and artillery pieces. (We) will be backed up by an army made up of farmers and people unhappy with the current political situation in Australia". His candidacy for One Nation is now being reviewed. Provis’s Australian Community Movement was established as a League of Rights front group in the early 1990s to make up for the League’s loss of the Citizens’ Electoral Councils - a League front established in Kingaroy in the mid 1980s, which itself was hijacked by supporters of a convicted US con-man, one-time Trotskyist turned fascist and fanatical Anglophobe Lyndon LaRouche.

In December 1996, sacked Hanson staffer Jeff Babb told Melbourne Herald Sun columnist Paul Gray that "a sign of the ineptness of her remaining close supporters is that they’ve let in extreme LaRouchite and League of Rights-style conspiracy theorists, who have established footholds in her support organisation".

Pauline Hanson has been the focus of much controversy over her recent claims that a UN treaty aims to establish a taxpayer-funded Aboriginal state. She first made this claim in a speech to Parliament in October 1997. Then as now she attacked Peter Jull, adjunct associate professor at the University of Queensland’s Centre of Democracy. Jull wrote in the Courier Mail on 31 October that Ms Hanson’s words "yield clues as to her source of ideas. An American-sourced extremist ‘newspaper’ published in Melbourne in early 1995 used the same words. The newspaper had an eight-page section headed: ‘Aboriginal land rights: Prince Philip’s indigenist plot to destroy Australia’." The newspaper was The New Citizen, published by the LaRouchite Citizens’ Electoral Councils.

This is not the only instance where Ms Hanson has relied on LaRouche sourced material. A press release issued by Ms Hanson on 14 August 1997, headed "North Korean men, women and children are starving to death -send Australian food now", was based on an interview with German aid worker Hubertus Rueffer of Deutschen Welfhungerhilfe published exclusively in the German LaRouche newspaper Neue Solidaritat (New Solidarity) dated week-ending 13 August 1997. The LaRouche website warmly praised Ms Hanson for her intervention and detailed how Australian LaRouche operatives had been despatched to Canberra to lobby MPs.

One Nation’s website features research on the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment "by Global Web Builders (owned by Hanson supporter and webmaster Scott Balson) on behalf of Pauline Hanson MP". One piece of research is headed "Lyndon LaRouche on George Soros - the IMF and big money", in which LaRouche describes the US fund manager as "a pestilence ... very dangerous ... a British-controlled entity ... promoting drug trafficking." Don Veitch, a leading CEC member who left to form the David Syme College of National System Economics, came to the attention of David Ettridge after writing Hansonism: Trick or Treat? a curious conspiratorial volume that even the League of Rights dismissed as extreme. Jews featured prominently in this supposed conspiracy. According to former Hanson adviser John Pasquarelli, David Ettridge bought 100 copies of this book (at $40 each) and sent them to branch members around the country. A Brisbane-based journalist has confirmed that he received a copy from Ettridge. Material from the book was also cited on One Nation’s web site, managed by Hanson supporter Scott Balson.

Veitch fancied himself as a player in One Nation, but he had a very poor reputation among other factions in the local extreme-right because of his role in the removal of teenagers to America for indoctrination at LaRouche training camps. True to form, he soon turned against the party, issuing an open letter in late 1997 accusing Ettridge of consorting with League of Rights activists and supporters of the far-right American John Birch Society.

This letter was sent to disaffected Hanson supporters meeting at the Cessnock Leagues Club last December. According to Pasquarelli, a letter was then sent out under Pauline Hanson’s name to One Nation branches ordering that Veitch’s book not be referred to again.

Another Victorian with a radical past who has hitched his star to Pauline’s wagon is Brendan Gidley, a One Nation branch committee member in the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood. Gidley stood for a Victorian Senate seat in 1993 for the Republican Party of Australia. He is also the founder of the tiny National Republican Movement, an anti-immigrant group that was active in the early 1990s, and which modelled itself on National Action. The NRM issued posters using artwork from the US-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. One of its stickers read: "Mass Third World immigration: Enriching our culture by TB, syphilis, AIDS, hepatitis, rabies, leprosy." The NRM is still active, and is listed on a new far-right website as a supplier of "nationalist literature" written by former National Action and National Socialist (Nazi) Party leader Jim Saleam. The address given is Gidley’s PO Box in the Melbourne suburb of Kew.

"It’s ridiculous to suggest any political party doesn’t have people that they would rather not have," David Oldfield said last June. "But they won’t have any effect on the policy direction or literature of One Nation." Yet in May this year, Oldfield told the Courier Mail’s Glenis Green that the radical Firearms Owners Association (FOAA) had "partly influenced" One Nation’s firearms policy. This followed a heated private meeting held on 1 August 1997 between Mr Oldfield and key members of the lunar-right, to discuss Ms Hanson’s firearms policy.

The meeting had been called by Ian McNiven of the FOAA, and Brett Hocking, One Nation convenor for the Sunshine Coast. Mr McNiven had earlier courted nation-wide controversy when he told a FOAA rally in May 1996 that "Little Jackboot Johnnie (the Prime Minister) is launching a brutal totalitarian attack on our fundamental freedoms ... Once it’s given up, it must be bought back and you can only buy it back with the most expensive currency in the world. The only currency you can buy your freedom back with is blood." Also present at the meeting were Ron Owen, publisher of radical gun magazine Lock, Stock and Barrel (L, S & B) and national president of the radical FOAA; Tony Pitt; Ray Smith, editor of the lunar right It’s Time newspaper; John Challenger of L, S & B; and Chris Raye, a gun lobbyist.

Ron Owen insisted "we need guns for our defence from the Government". Ray Smith added: "the Government cannot just write law it likes; the Government either obeys the law or it doesn’t. If the Government does not obey the law then it is wrong; it’s in our hands to change it". David Oldfield: "Well, how are you going to change it?" Smith: "Well, it may come to blood in the streets. We would like to change it politically, but ..." Oldfield: "You have just said that on a tape recording. That is one of the most nonsensical things I have heard."

During the meeting, Mr Owen told Mr Oldfield: "Near enough every one of our (FOAA) members is in your organisation (One Nation). We share in your branches from South Australia, Western Australia, Charters Towers, Brisbane, Ipswich, Bathurst, Wodonga, Gold Coast." Messrs Owen and McNiven argued strongly against licensing guns. The following issue of Lock, Stock and Barrel (28) called on readers to "go to One Nation meetings, make it known that would like a greater expansion of these principles in contract form before you give them your full allegiance". One Nation’s firearms policy, announced mid-May, reflects these demands.

Mr Owen has now come out in strong support of One Nation’s Gympie candidate, Ian Petersen. "We all want to see the Nationals get gutted now because of their betrayal," he recently said. AUSI Freedom Scouts leader Ian Murphy also told the media "we support One Nation’s gun policy wholeheartedly", adding that members of his shadowy paramilitary outfit unanimously backed One Nation.

Following the attack on the Freedom Scouts by Michael Ettridge, One Nation website co-ordinator Scott Balson claimed the Scouts was simply a Christian group that taught its members self-defence. However, an April-May 1993 Scouts advertisement in Lock, Stock and Barrel suggested that Jesus Christ’s injunction to turn the other cheek is not high on the Scouts’ agenda. It was headed "Take our weapons and we will take your life." Scott Balson, an Internet site developer who is close to David Ettridge and Ms Hanson, also produces a "News of the Day" website, which is accessible through One Nation’s page. The site prominently advertises The Strategy. For US$120 a year readers can take out a joint subscription to Mr Balson’s web site and the electronic version of The Strategy.

Each issue of The Strategy features a review of The Spotlight, published by America’s Liberty Lobby, an organisation found by US courts to be anti-Jewish. The Strategy’s March 1993 issue claimed that "the Hebrew crime community is working overtime to silence the voice of the Christian church in Australia..." and reprinted sections from the Protocols of Zion. Its January 1997 issue questioned the Holocaust. David Summers’ Exposure magazine is a regular advertiser in The Strategy, as is Ray Smith’s It’s Time.

Holocaust denial looms large in the minds of some One Nation supporters. In June 1997, the Northern Territory’s Bob Collins told the Senate that NT residents responding to a newspaper advertisement in support of One Nation had received not only membership application forms but also a newsletter An Eye For An Eye, which denied the Holocaust, claimed that the Hale Bopp comet would overthrow the "global dictatorship and religious hierarchy" of Pope John Paul II ("one of the 13 masterminds behind the New World Order"), racially abused the golfer Tiger Woods and demanded that "repugnant and pregnant Nicky Buckley (be) removed from Sale of the Century".

For his troubles, Senator Collins received an abusive letter from the newsletter’s publisher, one Blitz Stark, who wrote "while you were still in nappies Senator Collins, I was an active soldier in Nazi Germany. I was witnessing exactly what was happening to the Jews, Senator Collins, and I have researched for a very long time the ‘truth’ behind the holocaust. So do not try to patronise me with your extremely limited life experience and knowledge about Hitler and the Jews." Ms Hanson recently appointed Australians Against Further Immigration co-founder Robyn Spencer as the party’s Victorian leader and national immigration spokeswoman. AAFI members are now likely to join One Nation en masse. Previous AAFI election candidates have included a prominent Holocaust denier removed from radio after making anti-Semitic broadcasts,an inveterate writer of anti-Semitic letters to newspapers, a distributor of US militia propaganda, and a former executive committee member of National Action’s predecessor organisation, National Alliance.

Ms Spencer and her husband Rod earlier found themselves at the centre of controversy when they were named as supporters of a NSW extremist publication, The National Reporter, which featured a series of racist and anti-Jewish cartoons. One showed an Asian tied to a barbecue spit, being roasted alive. Another AAFI leader named in the publication was researcher (and now staffer for Graeme Campbell) Denis McCormack. He is best known for brandishing a magazine from a Chinese SKS machine gun at a League of Rights meeting in Toowoomba, arguing that if immigration was not restricted "it could come to this". Mr McCormack, who in July 1997 boasted of advising David Oldfield, also identified himself as the proof-reader of Pauline Hanson: The Truth.

David Ettridge betrayed his political naivete when he claimed last year that he could weed out extremist infiltrators. Extremists of all political persuasions are tireless activists and are consequently likely to rise to positions of power. One Nation’s leadership - in particular Ms Hanson - has little practical knowledge of Australia’s radical right, and has already allowed a number of significant long-time activists disproportionate influence. These activists are happy to stay in the background while more "respectable" figures occupy the public spotlight.

If One Nation wants some idea of its likely future, it should perhaps look to one of Ms Hanson’s more notorious overseas admirers: John Tyndall of the neo-Nazi British National Party. In the mid-1960s, a collection of conservative and anti-immigration groupings came together to form the BNP’s predecessor, the National Front.

At an early meeting, chairman Philip Maxwell told the assembled audience: "There is a rumour that the NF is thinking about including in its ranks a neo-Nazi movement. This is not true. No neo-Nazi movement will be included in the NF." Less than one year later, John Tyndall – former deputy in the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement - was in the NF. Two years later, he and his cronies had taken control of the movement.