Hidden-camera sting: far-right One Nation party caught lobbying for US$20 million in US NRA donations to weaken Australian gun laws
- One Nation figures James Ashby and Steve Dickson said in the Al Jazeera sting that their party could seize the balance of power in Australia with NRA funding
- The lobbying came at the same time One Nation was publicly supporting a proposed ban on foreign political donations
Senior figures in Australia’s far-right One Nation party, James Ashby and Steve Dickson, have been caught seeking millions of dollars of political donations from US gun rights group the National Rifle Association, in a bid to seize the balance of power and weaken Australia’s gun laws.
The revelations are contained in an Al Jazeera investigation which used hidden cameras and a journalist posing as a grass roots gun campaigner to expose the party’s extraordinary efforts to secure funding in Washington DC in September.
The footage captures Dickson, the party’s Queensland state leader and formerly a Liberal-National minister in Queensland, and Ashby, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff, endorsing NRA counter-attack lines in the event of a gun massacre.
The investigation is likely to damage One Nation both because the party was publicly supporting the proposed ban on foreign political donations at the time and because weakening gun laws has become even more politically toxic in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack.
The trade minister, Simon Birmingham, has seized on the revelations to argue One Nation is a “risk to Australia’s national harmony” and the ban on foreign donations. The expose adds fuel to a brawl within the governing conservative coalition about preferencing One Nation at the upcoming federal election.
In the footage, Ashby suggests his aims in meeting the NRA are to ask the group “to rally their supporters within Australia”, adding “I’d love to get my hands on their software … [and] if they can help us with donations, super”.