1/2 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/2026/09/19/who-gets-be-traitor " When Pauline Hanson labelled SAS veteran and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie a “traitor” eight times, then animated the insult and pinned it to the top of her social media feed, she did more than provoke outrage. She exposed the conditional nature of Australia’s reverence for military service and revealed how brittle our nationalist mythology becomes when it collides with powerful, wealthy political interests. This month, a grubby internet cartoon metastasised into a crisis of legitimacy for the Australian right. In 2022, Hastie was compelled by subpoena to testify in the defamation case brought by Ben Roberts-Smith. He told the court, “I don’t want to be here.” The court denied him protections afforded to other special forces witnesses, publicly identifying him. Justice Anthony Besanko described his evidence as “honest and straightforward”, whereas he characterised Roberts-Smith as a liar driven by “a fear of the truth”. Roberts-Smith now faces five war crime murder charges, which he denies. For fulfilling his legal obligation to tell the truth, One Nation denounced Hastie as a “gutless maggot” and a “traitor”. Hanson added “wanker”. When condemnation arrived from the Returned and Services League, Senator Jacqui Lambie and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Hanson refused to apologise. Barnaby Joyce issued an insincere, backhanded personal retreat from his leader’s disastrous grab for the title of White Queen of the Patriots. He and Hanson thoroughly deserve Hastie’s rejoinder: they are “lying cowards”. The speed of the backlash made one thing clear. “Traitor” – when directed at a genuine soldier – is the one accusation the Anzac myth cannot withstand. Its deployment here showed how brittle the mythology is and how quickly it fractures under political expediency. Australia’s conventional sense of patriotism falters the moment it is asked to apply its own standards consistently. Hanson and One Nation routinely deploy nationalist symbolism – flags, borders, the all-purpose slur “un-Australian” – and, at their rallies, demand incoherent immigration and border controls. Yet the moment a veteran’s testimony threatened accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, the digger became expendable. Hanson – whose key donor, Gina Rinehart, is another Roberts-Smith supporter – immediately launched a social media onslaught against Hastie. Hanson had recently condemned a satirical ABC video about Rinehart as grotesque. Then she defended her own cartoon as “satire”. The contradiction is not incidental: it is the whole story. This is patriotism as performance. It is a rhetorical device used to discipline opponents. Australia’s nationalism has always rested on an unstable foundation. Lacking a revolution, a founding document, or a unifying moment of democratic birth, the nation turned the military catastrophe of Gallipoli into its emotional bedrock. From this unlikely material, fought on a foreign beach, Australia built a civic religion, renewed each Anzac Day with dawn services, marches, medals and ritualised reverence. The legend’s peculiar power lies in its claim that the authentic nation resides not in parliament or constitution, but in the sacrificial body of the soldier. To be a “real” Australian is, at some level, to be imagined as a digger, or as someone who reveres the digger appropriately. Military service becomes the highest currency of national belonging. The Hanson–Hastie affair is instructive precisely because it puts that currency under pressure. Hastie is not a figurative stand-in for the digger; he is a literal one. Yet a party built on nationalist symbolism produced and then refused to delete a cartoon depicting him as a traitor. This contradiction reveals how thin and instrumental “patriotism” becomes when it collides with anything more complicated than a slogan. More disturbing than the disruption of military service as a national value is the billionaire apotheosis of Roberts-Smith. Rinehart and Kerry Stokes seem intent on elevating Roberts-Smith to an emblematic role in their culture war. Stokes privately bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s extraordinarily expensive defamation case against Nine Entertainment. The trial ran for years, cost millions and ended with a decisive judicial finding: the allegations of war crimes were substantially true to a civil standard. Stokes did not fund the subsequent appeal, but his earlier backing ensured Roberts-Smith could mount the most lavish legal defence available to any Australian soldier in history. Rinehart publicly defended Roberts-Smith as a “brave and patriotic man”, criticised the media for “gloating” and questioned the justification for the Australian Federal Police investigation that led to his arrest. She framed war crimes prosecutions as a threat to morale and argued that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on investigations should have been used “removing terrorists and their supporters from our country”. This year, Rinehart transformed her support into a physical monument. She purchased a Scarborough apartment block for $8.75 million, renamed it the Ben Roberts-Smith Beach Houses, erected large signage, and opened it as veteran housing. Roberts-Smith’s parents cut the ribbon. Tenants were quoted thanking Rinehart in emotional terms. She described Roberts-Smith as a hero “looked up to by Australians across our country”. This is not loyalty. It is myth-making – the deliberate elevation of an accused war criminal into a symbol of national virtue. It constructs an alternative narrative in which judicial findings, AFP investigations and the testimony of fellow soldiers are reframed as an attack on Australia itself. In this narrative, Roberts-Smith is not an accused murderer; he is a martyr of the culture wars, a vessel for billionaire anxieties about national decline and media scrutiny. The Hanson–Hastie dispute cannot be separated from the billionaire-driven myth-making around Ben Roberts-Smith. This is the big right-wing flex, and it costs millions of dollars. Last year, the booing of Aboriginal veterans and the far-right disruption of Anzac Day were further attempts to recast Australian nationalism and patriotism as a whites-only affair. The brittleness of Australia’s nationalist consensus was evident again this Anzac Day, when Aboriginal people delivering the Welcome to Country, including Pastor Ray Minniecon, himself a veteran, were booed at ceremonies across the country. Minniecon, who spent decades reminding the nation of Indigenous servicemen and women and advocating for their recognition, stood on the steps of the Sydney dawn service and was jeered by some who claimed the Welcome was “political”. This disruption of the solemnity of the dawn service revealed, with startling clarity, who some Australians believe Anzac Day is for and who they believe it is not for. The booing was not spontaneous. It was amplified by far-right networks online and encouraged by One Nation figures who had railed against the “politicisation” of Anzac Day. Neo-Nazi groups, animated by culture war rhetoric, staged unprecedented disruptions at dawn services in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. They marched near cenotaphs, unfurled banners and attempted to drown out Indigenous speakers. Police intervened at several sites. Veterans’ organisations condemned the behaviour as a desecration of the day. The spectacle made one thing clear: the same movement that claims to be the guardian of the Anzac legend is willing to disrupt its most sacred rituals – and boo an Aboriginal veteran – when a ceremony does not align with its preferred narrative. The contradiction is not peripheral; it is central to understanding the Hanson–Hastie dispute. The far-right’s “patriotism” is not about honouring service. It is about controlling the story of who counts as Australian and who does not. It is no great coincidence that at the same time as Hanson is using the Anzac myth to mock Hastie, comments have resurfaced of her mocking First Nations people. In a podcast last year she brought out the old line about Aboriginal people not inventing the wheel. “There was nothing there. What are we actually holding up? A few, you know, rock paintings,” she said. “Sorry – they’re the most primitive race on Earth and we’re supposed to be holding them up and saying what they’ve achieved? They’ve achieved nothing.” So, who owns the Anzac legend? While political leaders rushed to defend the sanctity of the Anzac legend, almost none addressed the fundamental question: Sacred to whom, and built upon whose memory? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men served at Gallipoli. They rode with the Light Horse. They fought on the Western Front. Yet for a century, the nation that now invokes “the Anzac spirit” to determine who counts as a real Australian scarcely acknowledged their presence. Under the Defence Act, Aboriginal men were barred from enlisting unless they could pass as “substantially of European origin”. They enlisted anyway. Between 800 and 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men served in World War I. Men such as Private William Reginald Rawlings, an Aboriginal horse-breaker from Purnim, Victoria, were decorated for bravery. Rawlings earnt the Military Medal for his role in a bombing team that cleared an enemy trench at Morlancourt Ridge. He was killed on August 9, 1918, aged 27, and buried beside his friend, Corporal Harry Thorpe, also a Military Medal recipient. A veteran later recalled: “The AIF judged a man not by his colour, but by his worth.” Then the survivors returned home, to a country that refused to recognise them as Australian. They were denied soldier settlement land grants. Many were barred from RSL clubs. They could not vote. They were not counted in the census. They were deprived of many citizenship rights and many did not have the right to vote until 1984. This is the truth Australia still struggles to confront: the Anzac legend Hanson claims to defend was constructed around a white digger. At the same time, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men who served beside him were erased. So, too, were Australians with Chinese, Indian and other non-British heritage. This is why the current controversy is so instructive. Hanson seeks to weaponise “traitor” against a white veteran whose testimony was inconvenient, while the institutions now expressing outrage spent a century erasing Aboriginal service. " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead