Having addressed the position of the ever-shrivelling teals last week, I was well into drafting a piece turning to focus on the Greens’ new leader, David Shoebridge, and his own contribution to the escalating populist cacophonies. Yet Hanson’s Victorian campaign launch, and her comments afterwards, cannot pass without an unequivocal rebuke from true conservatives.

On Friday, on 2GB we listened to Shoebridge spruik economic ignorance and contemptible anti-Israel rubbish. But the lawyer in me was especially triggered by his lament that there had been only three prosecutions arising from the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s work. Yet he supplied no example of an offence which ought to have been prosecuted and had not been. He just wanted more convictions! After all the wailing about supposedly corrupt conservative ministers during the Morrison years, this was another frolic from Shoebridge undermining the rule of law, inviting assumptions of criminal wrongdoing without the slightest evidence. The former barrister knows better. But he doesn’t care.

That was last Friday. But on Saturday, in Victoria One Nation went quite a lot further. Mark Nicholson, its Northern Metropolitan candidate, co-creator of the admittedly brilliant Please Explain cartoons, said he wanted Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan in prison by Christmas. Afterwards, Hanson told Rebel News: ‘But if we take Victoria back, then we can lock them up.’ She added: ‘So you’ve got to do it in sequence.’

She has said it herself. Taking government, by her account, is the first step towards imprisoning her opponents. Stop now with the ‘Oh, she didn’t mean what she said’. This was utterly calculated.

I am on rinse and repeat when I say that I understand the grievances driving people towards One Nation. Cost-of-living pressures are making life difficult for people who work hard and reasonably expect something better. There is also immense frustration about cultural questions which some Coalition politicians have preferred to avoid. Hanson is prepared to go hard on those questions. Conservatives know our societies are in decay, and they want it fixed.

I have written about One Nation’s concentration of authority around Hanson and its stated intention to never cost its policies – which for me is disqualifying. But voters can assess these things for themselves. If they overlook them, they will discover that promises cannot be delivered and the repair work that is required is not done. But this latest development concerns something more fundamental and more frightening for our polity: what Hanson says acquiring political power entitles her to do.

There are obvious questions for Andrews and Allan to answer. Investigate them properly. If the evidence warrants criminal charges, lay them and let the courts determine guilt. Tim Wilson was right to insist the next day on due process and that nobody is above the law. But neither an election victory nor an adverse inquiry finding establishes criminal guilt. Between allegations and imprisonment stand an indictment, committal, admissible evidence, and jury assessing proof to the criminal standard. A government elected on 28 November cannot deliver convictions and imprisonment by Christmas. Hanson knows that. Like Shoebridge, she does not care.

I once taught undergraduate public law, constitutional law and evidence. During the pandemic, I also designed a ten-hour crash course at a Sydney University residential college, largely for undergraduate students who had never encountered the fundamentals of our democratic system, even at school. We took a trip from the ancient Greek philosophers through Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, the Enlightenment and the American Declaration of Independence, drawing along the way on political thinkers from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill. We then dived deep into two core values, freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence, spending time on why each really mattered. The kids loved it.

The pleasure of watching the lights go on for those first discovering how our system was won and why it was worth fighting for, is something to cherish. So many helped develop this inheritance; so many beheadings, wars, revolutions, so much blood spilt to secure and preserve it. Watching students come to understand why an accusation can never establish guilt, and why the process mattered even when they wanted a particular result, is a joy. Seeing political leaders of any stripe encourage disregard for these elementary principles is for me, both devastating and frightening.

Let’s face it, from Hanson this is cheap, unimaginative, intentional copying and pasting from Donald Trump, who, in 2016, expressly endorsed the ‘Lock her up!’ cries about Hillary Clinton. Later, in the lead up to 2024, his opponents engaged in much worse and disgraceful lawfare against him, while some Democrats proposed an obscene expansion of the Supreme Court to change its balance. It was outrageous and backfired badly. Not to be outdone again, Trump subsequently pressed his attorney general to pursue his own enemies, including James Comey and Letitia James. Their 2025 indictments were dismissed because the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed.

Love him or loathe him, Trump is a consequential President. Some achievements, particularly on the cultural front, should not be dismissed merely because they are his. A conservative can approve of them, and support Republicans when faced with the electoral alternative, while utterly rejecting his conduct towards political enemies. His opponents’ behaviour provides no justification. The whole business has been beyond contemptible. It weakens and undermines everything our societies stand upon. What’s left of them, that is.

Months ago I wrote in these pages about the danger of Australian conservatives adopting the left’s habits of cancellation. There is nothing conservative about copying them. But it is even less conservative – and more reprehensible – to turn criminal justice into a means of satisfying political anger. It tears at institutions, rules and conventions developed over centuries – long before Blackstone’s Commentaries and our Constitution. We start to lose everything when we cheer the abandonment of the presumption of innocence just because the target is somebody we despise.

Hanson herself spent eleven weeks in prison in 2003 before the Queensland Court of Appeal quashed her electoral fraud convictions and acquitted her. It was clear at the time it was a grave injustice. But she was prosecuted, tried before a judge and jury, and sentenced by a court. Her convictions were then overturned by a court. Her experience cannot justify an aspiring government promising to imprison its opponents. Instead, it should make her especially robust in respecting the system.

We are better than this. Stop it. Stop it now.