Pauline Hanson’s man in Florida and the $172,000 legal debt

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson lays claim to being the Aussiest senator of them all.

In our mind, there are few things more un-Australian than an elected representative missing two weeks of parliament to attend a foreign leader’s garish party (celebrating a foreign holiday), and then trashing her own country in a speech delivered to a conference organised by an overseas pressure group.

Yet Hanson is very proud of her sojourn to US President Donald Trump’s golf club at Mar-a-Lago, where (as first revealed by this column) she attended a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party before addressing a Conservative Political Action Conference event and hanging out with right-wing celebrity Nigel “Mr Brexit” Farage.

This is not where the un-Australian-ness ended. Appearing with Hanson after her speech at Mar-a-Lago was Andrew Cooper, who runs the local CPAC spin-off along with perennial Liberal preselection hopeful Nyunggai Warren Mundine.

Cooper, like the Sky News types that regularly grace his conference, is another True Blue Aussie patriot. So True Blue that in 2021, his think tank LibertyWorks, which ran CPAC Australia, sued the Commonwealth twice. The first legal battle was an attempt to challenge the constitutional validity of foreign influence laws, which LibertyWorks blamed on the Labor Party (the laws were implemented by the Turnbull coalition government). That challenge failed. So did LibertyWorks’ attempt to overturn Australia’s COVID-era travel ban.

The upshot of those two cases was that the organisation owed the Commonwealth $172,000 in legal costs. Four years later, it has not paid a cent. This, we hear, is not from lack of effort on the part of the Attorney-General’s Department.

But the government’s efforts to get its money have been complicated by the fact LibertyWorks was put into liquidation in August this year. Weeks before LibertyWorks lost its two court cases, the “Conservative Political Action Network” was registered with the regulator, with Cooper and Mundine both listed as directors.

Is Cooper ever planning to pay up? If so, he didn’t tell us, failing to return our calls.

Gift Wrapped

While Anthony Albanese’s White House meeting with US President Donald Trump in October was deemed a major triumph for little Australia, the prime minister remained remarkably coy about one aspect of the encounter – the obligatory exchange of gifts.

Albo eventually, and rather reluctantly, revealed to journalists that Australia had gifted Melania Trump some jewellery while the Don was given a model submarine – a handy AUKUS tie-in.

But what came our way?

At the time, Albo quickly ended his press conference after telling reporters that he’d have to wait three years for his present to clear security. Turns out we didn’t have to wait that long.

This week, the PM updated his register of members’ interests to reveal the Don gave him a “Desk Set with Stationery from The Honorable Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America”. PM31 elected not to keep the present, surrendering it to be displayed in the Commonwealth/Parliamentary offices.

We suspect that Albo didn’t want any comparisons between Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, who gave Albanese a custom-made VPI record turntable made by a family-owned New Jersey firm. And at another meeting, a brown leather-wrapped Shinola watch that Albo wore to the Oval Office… while meeting Trump.

CBD has no comment on whether the PM was dudded by a stingy Commander-in-Chief. But it’s light years from the nadir of presidential gift giving, when Barack Obama gave short-lived British prime minister Gordon Brown 25 DVDs – which didn’t work in UK DVD players.

Baby Cossack

For over 1000 days, Sydney-born Kremlin propagandist Simeon Boikov, better known as “The Aussie Cossack”, has been holed up in the Russian consulate in Woollahra.

Boikov’s ordeal began while he was on parole for breaching a suppression order by revealing the identity of a Russian Orthodox priest who has since been convicted of child sexual abuse.

The Cossack, a regular fixture at anti-lockdown rallies in the COVID era and known for his YouTube screeds praising Vladimir Putin, got into an altercation with pro-Ukrainian protesters while out buying thermal underwear ahead of an approved trip to Russia. Facing arrest, Boikov fled to the consulate, where he’s lived with his wife ever since.

But Boikov now has a friend on Macquarie Street, with Libertarian upper house MP John Ruddick raising his case in parliament and calling for Attorney-General Michael Daley to have him released.

The pair bonded while attending anti-lockdown protests, with Ruddick revealing he had visited Boikov, who is now expecting his first child, at the Russian consulate.

“It was a welfare check on a mate. It’s a drab, old Soviet-style building. He’s effectively in solitary confinement,” Ruddick said.

“He is fearful of leaving the consulate, and being arrested and returned to jail, and again being subject to unfair legal malice, revenge for him being right on COVID and the political class being wrong.”

If Boikov did decide to leave the consulate, he’d probably serve just a few months in prison. But that would ruin the whole martyr schtick.

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