Gina Rinehart brought a whole wagyu sirloin to James Ashby’s post-Christmas fundraising dinner at a restaurant in Yeppoon.
Australia’s richest person was the guest of honour at the event, hosted by Ashby, Pauline Hanson’s controversial chief of staff, who is now running as the One Nation candidate for the Queensland seat of Keppel.
The guest list included petrol station owners, graziers and tank distributors. Fundraising disclosures show some paid Ashby $2,500 for “event tickets” in the weeks before they sat down to a dinner featuring Rinehart’s own branded 9+ marbled beef.
Since Hanson’s first heyday in the late 1990s, One Nation campaigns in Queensland have tended to be low-budget affairs. Candidates have been asked to sign contracts and pay upfront fees to cover costs.
Electoral funding disclosures show the Queensland branch of One Nation has only received one donation – for less than $1,000 – in more than two years.
But now that Ashby is on the ballot, rather than running things behind the scenes, he has quickly brought cash and clout to the race for Keppel.
In the month since he announced his run, Ashby has banked $22,700 in his campaign account, mostly from the Rinehart event. That is more than the party raised in the 12 months before the 2020 state election.
Some of Ashby’s donors at the dinner include local Liberal National party figures. Peta Credlin, the former chief of staff to Tony Abbott, has also given Ashby airtime on her Sky News talkback show, and last month gave him a ringing endorsement.
Hanson – the One Nation founder and president for life – turns 70 this year and her loyalist Senate colleague, Malcolm Roberts, is a year younger.
Ashby, 44, is emerging as a potential successor. But not everyone – inside the party and out – is happy.
‘People want to get rid of Labor’
The LNP has preselected the former Livingstone shire deputy mayor, Nigel Hutton, to run in Keppel. Hutton is relatively young, has a profile in Yeppoon, and is well regarded in the party.
The seat – held by Labor’s assistant health minister, Brittany Lauga – has been high on the LNP’s target list in the lead-up to the October election.
Hutton did not return calls but local LNP sources said that for all Ashby’s regular appearances on Sky News – with the Yeppoon coastline in the background – he lacked much of a community profile.
“[The Ashby campaign] is a distraction that was not needed,” one LNP source said. “People want to get rid of Labor and that was well under way before all of this.”
In an appearance on Credlin’s show last month, Ashby said he would “rather drink arsenic than do a deal with Labor ahead of this next election”.
One Nation outpolled the LNP in Keppel in 2017; its best result in the seat was 46.9% of the two-party-preferred vote, achieved with a candidate who was announced in the local newspaper alongside a photo of him in costume at a middle ages historical re-enactment event.
Some in the party have raised concern that Ashby – who has been central to One Nation’s political strategy for close to a decade – was personally fundraising for his own high-profile campaign, while other One Nation candidates often struggled for resources. The party’s only state MP – Stephen Andrew, who holds the neighbouring seat of Mirani – has never raised any personal political donations, according to the Electoral Commission of Queensland’s donor register.
Ashby said in a text message that he was not the state or federal campaign director for One Nation, and that “candidates from all parties are encouraged to raise funds for their individual campaign”.
“I have gone above and beyond to date by publicly disclosing all donations to my campaign.”
‘A very talented political operator’
Former One Nation candidates say Ashby is downplaying the extent of his influence and involvement in prior campaigns.
In 2017 candidates were dumped or resigned for refusing to pay thousands of dollars in upfront fees, at a time when campaign materials were being printed by a company owned by Ashby. Disendorsed candidates have also previously claimed Ashby and Hanson pushed them out without due process. Hanson dismissed claims Ashby was pulling the strings, declaring, “I’m the leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and I have the final say on who represents One Nation.”
Earlier in 2017 a secretly recorded comment from Ashby that One Nation could “make some money” on its campaign packages for Queensland election candidates was part of “a brainstorming session that has been taken right out of context”, he later said. Ashby added it “was a silly idea and a poor choice of words and I’ll be the first to admit it”, and “clearly not an idea that we went forward with”.
One former candidate, who did not want to be named, said there were “many, many people” who had previously run for One Nation who felt frustrated by Ashby, particularly when it came to how their campaigns were run and funded.
The idea that the adviser is building his individual campaign coffers – and dining with the country’s richest person – is “not going to sit well at all”, the former candidate said.
Paul Williams, a political commentator from Griffith University, said One Nation had previously run election campaigns designed to buttress Hanson’s political base rather than win seats.
While he did not think Ashby would win in Keppel, Williams said it was clear the adviser was positioning himself as Hanson’s successor.
“There’s no doubt Ashby is a very talented political operator,” Williams said. “The future of the party is grim when Pauline retires but, if anyone can keep it going, it’s Ashby.”
Williams said One Nation had become “like a big scoop truck, trying to pick up malcontent and grievance” among voters.
In a press release announcing his candidacy, Ashby said he would “work to deliver the policies needed to reduce cost-of-living pressures, improve housing availability and affordability, arrest youth crime and restore a long-term vision for Queensland.”
Ashby did not respond to questions about whether he thought support from the likes of Rinehart and Credlin would make a difference to voters in Keppel.
