Mark Latham has been dumped as the One Nation leader in New South Wales after the party’s federal leader, Pauline Hanson, staged an intervention in the state branch.
Hanson last week installed a new state executive in NSW and made herself the branch’s temporary leader after disbanding the former state executive in order to axe Latham from the leadership position.
Her intervention leaves One Nation without an official leader in the NSW parliament, where the rightwing party is represented by three upper house MPs; Latham, Rod Roberts and Tania Mihailuk.
In a letter to members of One Nation’s NSW leadership team, Hanson cited the party’s failure to meet expectations at the March election as one of the main reasons for ousting Latham as leader.
A senior party official told Guardian Australia Hanson had dumped Latham because it was not viable to have a leader that the media refused to deal with.
Latham, a former federal Labor leader, posted a lengthy statement to Facebook on Monday afternoon saying the move from Hanson was done “without consultation or due process”.
“She has installed her own new state executive with people from Queensland and Tasmania,” he said.
“Good party members who worked exceptionally hard for One Nation have been kicked off the executive.”
He said Hanson justified the takeover due to the fall in the party’s upper house vote.
“In June, NSW One Nation conducted a thorough post-election review involving all our state candidates,” Latham said.
“Last month Senator Hanson was briefed on the review’s findings. Our NSW party was moving forward in a sensible, cooperative way but has now been turned upside down by the Queensland intervention.”
He also said the decision was “not about performance” but about money and made claims he had stopped the misuse of taxpayer funds while in the top job.
“As NSW One Nation Leader I have stood in the way of attempts to misuse our funds, especially the administration money contributed by NSW taxpayers through the Electoral Commission,” he said.
“I will continue to fight for the proper, ethical use of this money.”
A spokesperson for Hanson denied the claims of attempts to misuse funds.
They said the party had seen a vote drop at the March state election and the priority was to review the structure before future elections.
“The new executive’s priority is a comprehensive review of the party’s organisation ahead of future election campaigns, with a focus on the relationship between the organisation and parliamentary wings of the party, and the performance of the parliamentary wing,” the spokesperson said on Monday.
“The national executive of the party has also declared vacant the position of NSW parliamentary leader while the review takes place. No one has been sacked as a member of One Nation.”
Hanson will consider opening the leader position for nominations when she is “confident the organisation and parliamentary wings of the party have established an effective, strong and collaborative working relationship under her leadership”.
Earlier this year, Hanson called on Latham to apologise following a tweet about his parliamentary college, Alex Greenwich. Greenwich is now suing Latham for defamation.
Latham has faced sustained criticism for the comment about Greenwich and subsequent remarks on the topic.
Last week Latham lodged a defence briefing with the court outlining how he planned to defend the defamation action.
He will argue he was offering an “honest opinion” when he posted the graphic and homophobic tweet.
It came after Greenwich filed a statement of claim in June, in which the Sydney MP argued he had been subjected to “threats, repeated jibes, hatred, homophobic comments and contempt and ridicule” as a result of Latham’s comments.
Latham’s team will argue the initial comment posted on Twitter – the platform now known as X – was an “honest opinion” and related to “a matter of public interest”, being comments Greenwich had previously made about Latham.
