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Independent senator Jacqui Lambie has backed Liberal MP Andrew Hastie as his stoush with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson intensifies.
Hastie called Hanson a “lying coward” on Wednesday after One Nation’s Please Explain cartoon labelled the former SAS captain a traitor for testifying in Ben Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation action against this masthead.
Hanson said on Wednesday she did not think Hastie was a traitor and had never personally called him one but refused to take the animation down.
Lambie, herself a veteran, defended Hastie on Thursday.
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“I love Andrew to death, and this is an attack on a veteran. What [Hanson’s] doing in those cartoons is absolutely disgusting. They are full of bloody violence. I mean, how people can watch that rubbish is beyond me,” Lambie told ABC radio.
“Attacking Andrew Hastie, a veteran that has served in our Afghanistan war, or any other veteran, is the lowest you can possibly do. That woman is nothing less than a bloody coward, she always has been and she always will be. She wouldn’t last one day in that goddamn uniform. Leave our veterans alone.”
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Hastie, who said on Thursday he thought it was unlikely he would be called as a witness in Roberts-Smith’s coming war crimes trial, said Hanson’s fiery exchange on News24 (formerly Sky News) on Wednesday showed she was not leadership material.
“I think she showed herself to be brittle. She’s happy to make cartoons that are highly defamatory of other people, and then as soon as she gets a bit of pushback she goes to water,” Hastie said.
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“She talks up [a] big game about being prime minister of this country. Yet I think she showed herself yesterday to be weak, glass-jawed and unable to take responsibility for her actions.”
Hanson shouted over News24’s Chris Kenny on Wednesday as he quizzed her over her criticism of Hastie, and as she defended the minor party’s Victorian leader, who admitted this week to using illegal drugs in the past.
“It is a satirical cartoon, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Barnaby Joyce was classified as a beetroot.”
Hastie said on Thursday Hanson’s argument that she had never called him a traitor was “BS”.
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“She posted it and pinned it on her X account, and she authorised it,” he said. “So to play dumb is just ridiculous, which is why I called her a lying coward yesterday.”
Hastie told Radio National he had endured “five months of abuse from these people, and this week is about drawing a line under it all”.
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Emily Kaine is a national news blogger at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.Brittany Busch is a federal politics reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.AdvertisementAdvertisement