Read the rest of this entry… »

Oldfield called reporter Luke McIlveen yesterday to reveal he frequently brought “young ladies'’ back to his room at the Sundown Village Motel - but Hanson was not one of them.

Hanson claims in her new autobiography that she was staying at the Sundown in 1996 when Oldfield came around to cook her dinner and ended up staying the night.

“I’ve checked and that’s where I was staying at the time, but I’m 99 per cent sure Pauline never stayed at the Sundown,'’ Oldfield said.

He said he visited Hanson just once at a “multi-storey block'’ in 1996, whereas the the Sundown is a single-storey establishment.

Of course, it goes without saying that absolutely nothing of an intimate nature occurred between them on that occasion or any other.

How Oldfield’s revelation supports his case that he never bedded the Oxley fox is unclear, but all this talk about his steamy affair (which of course never happened) has got the bespectacled stud reminiscing about past conquests.

“There were other young ladies who visited me at my room at the Sundown, but not Pauline,'’ he said yesterday.

“I particularly remember waking up one morning with someone’s secretary. Her boss was an MP, he was standing on the balcony having a smoke and this girl had to stay in my room until he left.'’

Lucky girl. Maybe she got some of that toast that arrives cold in a paper bag for brekky.

It’s a bit creepy, really.

« Hide it

Read the rest of this entry… »

Mr Oldfield’s rejection of Ms Hanson’s claims coincided with him packing up his state parliamentary office this week at the end of his term as a member of the Legislative Council.

Ms Hanson has written in her biography, Untamed and Unashamed, that she and Mr Oldfield began an affair after he cooked dinner at her motel unit in Canberra in 1996. She was not surprised he was now denying it.

“He would say that, wouldn’t he?” Ms Hanson said yesterday. “However, I’m not saying any more about the book. I’ve written the book, so people can read about it in it.”

Mr Oldfield’s wife since 2001, Lisa, compared Ms Hanson to cinema’s most infamous stalker. “This is real Glenn Close Fatal Attraction stuff,” she told News Ltd papers.

There had been speculation about Ms Hanson’s relationship with Mr Oldfield since she shot to prominence after winning the seat of Oxley at the 1996 federal election. She established One Nation with Mr Oldfield and David Ettridge the next year.

At the time, Mr Oldfield was working for the Liberal MP for Warringah, Tony Abbott. Until now both had either denied any physical relationship, or refused to comment.

In extracts from her biography published yesterday, Ms Hanson said Mr Oldfield came to her unit at the Sundowner Village Motel in the Canberra suburb of Narrabundah one night in 1996.

Their alleged trysting spot is now called the Sundown Motel Resort and is opposite the Canberra Greyhound Racing Club track. Peacocks once wandered the grounds and walked noisily over the tin roofs of the units.

Ms Hanson said her younger swain bought food and wine to her unit and prepared it, and they talked until the wee hours when they went to bed together.

The relationship, she said, was over in a couple of weeks.

Mr Oldfield dismissed Ms Hanson’s allegations as fanciful.

“I’ve always said it did not happen but Pauline’s got a book coming out and she’s trying to attract attention,” he said. “She’s good at that. For Pauline, it’s always about money. There have been a couple of biographies on Pauline over the years and now it’s her turn and she wants publicity.”

Ms Hanson announced last month that she intended standing as a Queensland Senate candidate in the federal election.

Ms Hanson collected $200,000 in taxpayer-funded electoral expenses when she stood for the Senate in 2004. She lost, but won 4.54 per cent of the primary vote, enough to clear the 4 per cent hurdle that made her eligible for public funding.

Mr Oldfield leaves NSW politics this week after spending eight years in the upper house.

He was elected as a One Nation MP in 1999 but was apparently expelled by Ms Hanson the following year as they argued and the party continued to unravel in Queensland. He founded a separate NSW One Nation but left to become an independent in 2004.

“I now leave Pauline and politics forever and hope to concentrate on looking after my family and developing some assets in the Manly area,” he said.

« Hide it

Read the rest of this entry… »

They’re in their 80s now and, in the arrogance of comparative youth, it is difficult to imagine them other than elegantly dressed, gracious, courteous and, I guess, comfortable.

Yet, they suffered almost indescribable degradation and survived one of the most appalling episodes in history. They escaped the Holocaust, came to Australia, worked, studied and nurtured a productive and thoroughly Australian family.

Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt, was not a concentration camp in the accepted meaning of the word.

But according to Holocaust survivor and author Ruth Kluger, it was “the stable that supplied the slaughterhouse”.

The slaughterhouse was the dark domain of the extermination camps in the east – most infamously Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Of the 139,667 Jews who were sent to Terezin, about 34,396 died there. Another 86,934 were sent to the east and, according to one account, only 3586 survived.

Among those who died in the Holocaust were just about the entire family – close and extended – of my friends. They disappeared, their remains the cold ashes of the crematoria.

By virtue of their survival, my friends cannot testify to the fate of their own friends and their families.

But the weight of history and the burden of common sense, is that there was a Holocaust. There was an assembly line of industrialised murder and the systematic destruction of bodies and evidence.

There are photographs, there is film, there is meticulous Nazi documentation, there is first-hand testimony, there are ruins and – most of all – there are memories and the great voids of nothingness in the families of millions of Jews and other undesirables.

I have seen in half a dozen European cities the remaining evidence of the Nazi machinery of genocide.

The evidence is more solid, the collective memory larger, the documentation more thorough than that pertaining to the torment, starvation, brutality and slavery that beset Australian prisoners in the hands of Japan.

There is nothing to mark the martyrdom of slaves on the Burma-Thailand railway at Hellfire Pass except a cutting in the rock, yet we believe, because we trust the testimony of those who were there.

But still we are subjected to the putrid fantasies, conspiracies and inventions of Holocaust deniers, who dress their obsession in spurious science and carry it around the world to spin to those of similar gullibility and filled with the same hate.

The strength of the denial industry is growing in direct proportion to the fading first-hand memory of the Holocaust. As age takes it toll on those who suffered, the deniers are becoming bolder in their claims.

The web is awash with their nonsensical claims, their filth washes over into the literature and propaganda of extreme right and racist organisations, and they are courted and given strength by nations who cannot discern the difference between anti-Zionism and a crusade against truth.

And they gather around them fools and pawns who unwittingly give strength to their fevered fantasies.

Now we read that Pauline Hanson, a woman in search of relevance and a pay cheque, is to share a platform with a prominent Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi activist.

She will be a special guest at the Inverell Forum, a song-and-dance session for extremists, along with Richard Krege, whose speciality is bringing dodgy science into the so-called denial debate.

He recently attended the notorious Holocaust Conference in Tehran, an Iranian Government-sponsored denial talkfest, along with the equally hateful and discredited Fredrick Toben.

Krege’s speciality is using ground-penetrating radar to prove that Treblinka was not a death camp and, therefore, a large chunk of the Holocaust history is bunkum.

Toben likes defiling the ruins of Auschwitz in pursuit of his claims that it was all a scam.

Together, they trot out a scale model of Auschwitz to prove, I dunno, that they can build scale models.

They are vandals of history but, if you don’t know the truth or don’t care for the truth, they can be dangerously persuasive.

It is an important time in our history when we must forever cement the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust and stand up to those who would chip them away.

Nobody in public life – and that includes Ms Hanson – should give credibility to these noxious deniers of truth by sharing a platform, a room or even a thought with them.

If she persists in giving comfort to these people, she is either a fool or a scoundrel. I prefer to think she is a fool.

« Hide it