One Nation leader Pauline Hanson insists she has no regrets about her infamous speech which outlined her party’s controversial policies on indigenous affairs and that the ‘issue of Aboriginality would no longer exist’.
Tuesday marks 20 years since she addressed the community of Longreach in Queensland’s central west, which sits on the traditional lands of the Iningai, Malintji and Kuunkari peoples.
Australia commemorated National Sorry Day for the the first time just months before her speech.
Ms Hanson claimed she has been dishonestly referred to as a racist and that her agenda was to ‘rattle the cage and rock the boat of elites’.
Pauline Hanson (pictured) said the ‘issue of Aboriginality would no longer exist’ when she unveiled her One Nation party’s policies during the 1998 federal election campaign
She revealed One Nation’s plans to abolish Native Title, ATSIC and Abstudy and unveiled her patriotic desire for Australians to ‘truly be One People under One Flag living and working together as One Nation.’
‘My simple points over what some believe to be complex issues were only the commonsense you would hear from any ordinary Australian and no amount of slur, insult or physical threat will ever stop me from giving those ordinary Australians a right to an opinion and a right for that opinion to be heard,’ she told the crowd.
The federal election was held three weeks later, where Ms Hanson failed to be re-elected to parliament.
The One Nation leader made several unsuccessful comebacks to politics before she finally returned to federal parliament as a federal Senator in 2016.
‘I fully stand by the sentiment and policy aims of my Longreach speech and I would happily give a similar speech tomorrow,’ Senator Hanson told NITV.
Twenty years on, Pauline Hanson (pictured) has no regrets about the controversial speech
In her 1998 Longreach speech, Ms Hanson said Aborigines had no right to claim more attachment to a place because their ancestors were there first.
‘You cannot claim a greater sense of belonging because your relative was here before the relative of another,’ she said.
‘You cannot claim to be more Australian than those who have lived here just as long as you have.’
She called for Abstudy and organisations such as ATSIC to be absorbed into existing agencies where all benefits were ‘based solely on individual need’.
Ms Hanson said Aborigines (pictured) had no right to claim more attachment to a place just because their ancestors were there first
Ms Hanson also described Native Title as a ‘shameless grab for land’ and that the issue of Aboriginality ‘would no longer exist as benefits by virtue of race would no longer exist’ under One Nation policy.
‘We should sit down as a nation and talk through these issues not as Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, but as Australians,’ Ms Hanson said.
‘We should speak without hate and greed and guilt and not of the past, but with understanding of our need to be one people and the future we must forge together.
‘Where Aboriginality is concerned I should add spirituality to pride but we should not accept the proposition of financial gain by means of racial discrimination.’
Three weeks after her 1998 Longreach speech, Pauline Hanson lost her seat in federal parliament