The week which history may yet look back upon as being The Era When One Nation Went Full Conspiracy Nutter continues! And look, we didn’t expect to spend so much time on it either, but it really is the gift that keeps on ranting.
Yesterday the world was treated to one of the oddest press conferences in recent history when an increasingly panicked Pauline Hanson realised that she might have gone too far for even her notoriously accommodating supporters by suggesting that the Port Arthur Massacre was a government conspiracy carried out specifically to take away people’s guns.
For most of Australia the tragedy was a pivotal moment where we stepped up to take action against unthinkable violence and made legislative changes which have a) saved Australian lives in the decades since and b) given us an easy, smug response to Americans whenever they have another horrific mass shooting in their country.
And perhaps Hanson realised that she was never going to get another softball interview on morning television if everyone thought she was a paranoid fantasist using the murder of children to score political points and enrich her party. And thus she took to Sky News to make her case.
After alleging that the footage in How To Sell A Massacre was not just edited but actually dubbed while also repeating her claim that she’s never even seen the documentary in question, she wanted to clear the air about the conspiracy stuff.
And that went about as well as you’d expect.
“I want to tell those families [affected by the Port Arthur Massacre] that I do not support any conspiracy theory,” she told Andrew Bolt. And then, literally 60 seconds later, she was supporting the conspiracy that the Port Arthur shooter didn’t work alone because “I saw some pictures of him also, Andrew, of him holding the gun [and] he wasn’t up close to all these people.”
WATCH: One Nation’s @PaulineHansonOz says she does not support ‘any conspiracy theory’ about the Port Arthur massacre. #theboltreport @SkyNewsAust
MORE: https://t.co/hsV68hmnDj pic.twitter.com/0go8NN7P7h
— The Bolt Report (@theboltreport) March 28, 2019
Even Bolt – a man who has historically not been unsympathetic to Hanson – is looking exasperated at her word salad. Do you know what you have to do to be too incoherent for Andrew Bolt?
And on Friday she went on Today to repeat the claims to an increasingly astonished Deborah Knight. When Knight is playing hardball with you, you know that you’ve crossed a line.
Can things get weirder from here? We’d be fools to even guess.