One Nation wins two upper house seats in the NSW Parliament, page-2

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    An article from a month ago:


    By Nick O'Malley

    March 17, 2019 — 12.00am

    disallowed/nsw-election-2019/i-m-going-to-ring-a-bell-latham-to-use-seat-to-change-public-debate-20190316-p514rf.html


    Mark Latham says if elected to the NSW upperhouse next weekend as expected he would use his office’s resources to gatherinformation to launch media campaigns on key issues outside the confines ofgovernment.

    “Too many people get elected [to the upper house]and doze off for eight years. I’m going to ring a bell and wake them up,” hesaid.

    Most analysts believe MarkLatham will be elected to the NSW upper house next weekend.CREDIT:DOMINICLORRIMER

    Mr Latham said that as an upper house crossbencher hewould likely not have the power to directly make the changes he believes thestate needs, but that he could use parliamentary resources and the “bullypulpit” of his position to make the case for change via his media presence.

    Mr Latham,who now leads Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in NSW, has a Twitter following ofmore than 26,000 and still appears as a guest on the Sky News Outsiders programhe was sacked from hosting in 2017. He also makes regular appearances on SevenSunrise.

    It he were elected he would receive aparliamentary allowance, two staff, travel and access to the parliamentarylibrary.

    Mr Latham said he was moved to return to politics after his soncame across the Safe Schools anti-bullying program at school. After readingbackground material he became concerned that the program was part of a leftistpost-modernist plan to cause distress to students by making them question theirgender identity in order to shape them into social activists.

    He said he is concerned that formerly fixed ideas,concepts and values were being attacked across the board by activists promotingnotions of fluidity. This included not only gender but notions of wrong andright, truth and untruth. He believes the corruption arose from the left but hasinfected both major parties and in one of the driving causes of the splinteringof major-party politics around the world.

    He said One Nation was a party that understood the problem andgave him a platform from which he could fight to preserve the intellectualframework of western civilisation.

    Mr Latham plans to focus much of his activism on the educationsystem, which he says needs complete reform in NSW. He is championing theadoption of publicly funded private schools.

    So far the policy that has attracted the most attention for MrLatham was his proposal to test the DNA of people seeking to identify asAboriginal, a notion that has widely been dismissed as not only impractical butoutright racist.

    But Mr Latham disagrees and says that One Nation is not aracist party.

    “Parties change and evolve. Before I joined, it dropped its Muslimban,” he said.

    “Ten years before I joined the Labor Party it was the party of theWhite Australia policy; you don’t hear people calling the Labor Party racist.”

    Given the name recognition of both Mr Latham himself and OneNation most analysts believe he will easily win enough votes to take a singleupper house seat for One Nation. The party is competing with the ChristianDemocrats, the Liberal Democrats and the Australian Conservatives for populistand right-wing votes.

 
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