Creativity is important, which is why cover versions are almost never as good as the original song.
Hence it's no surprise that reviewers are already describing the crumbling of Pauline Hanson's One Nation's senate bloc as being "derivative", "uninspired" and "a poor copy of the Palmer United Party's far more urgent and thrilling slide into irrelevancy".
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He's a pain in my backside: Hanson
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has had an extraordinary spray at Rod Culleton after he quit her party. Courtesy Channel 7.
Yes, the first resignation has happened with Western Australian senator Rod Culleton taking to Twitter to reveal that he and Pauline Hanson are no longer BFFs, because she's a bit too "un-Australian". Burn!
"Policy decisions have been run in morning media, with no consultation, discussion or agreement from the party room and personal attacks and undermining, un-Australian behaviour towards myself and my team, has been ongoing and terms dictated to the team," he groused.
![Illustration: Dionne Gain](/web/20161222075654im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/e/d/i/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtdwvj.png/1482316700866.jpg)
"I can no longer tolerate the lack of party support for my positive initiatives, including the recent abandonment of PHON's pre-election commitment to a banking royal commission."
And while it's disappointing that Culleton's resignation doesn't contain much of the lunatic poetry he'd brought to so many of his other public statements (where are the accusations that the Constitution was hidden in 1975 and everyone's been covering up its absence since?), at least he's set what would appear to be a new record. After all, Jacqui Lambie remained with PUP for over a year between her election and her furious resignation.
You might recall that PUP elected four parliamentary representatives in 2013 before scoring their triumphant result of zero in 2016, which might look eerily like foreshadowing if the situation here wasn't so completely different.
After all, PUP was a populist Queensland-based right wing minor party named after its colourful, ego-driven founder who continually claimed to be fighting shadowy elites, and whose senators were known solely for saying provocatively silly things in public and then huffily resigning from the party. By contrast, One Nation is… um…
![Pauline Hanson spent 11 weeks in prison in 2003 before her conviction for electoral fraud was quashed.](/web/20161222075654im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/2/0/c/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtdwvj.png/1482316700866.jpg)
Now, it's important to remember that Culleton may well be about to be sent packing by the High Court over whether or not he was eligible to run for the senate at all.
If it is determined that his election was illegal then there'll be a recount of the WA senate ballot and a new 11th senator for the state. That will probably be another One Nation candidate, assuming that someone at One Nation actually checked that there weren't any upcoming court appearances over missing car keys. Might be worth getting someone to double check that, actually.
![Senator Rod Culleton returns to his office after meeting with Senator Hanson in November.](/web/20161222075654im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/v/r/s/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtdwvj.png/1482316700866.jpg)
If Culleton stays, that's yet another nightmarish difficulty for Malcolm Turnbull - the Prime Minister whose playful decision to take the country to a double dissolution election led to Culleton getting into the Senate in the first place, along with 10 other crossbenchers, all but guaranteeing that his epoch as PM will be characterised as "the era that made Billy McMahon look like a decisive political go-getter".
But Culleton represents a problem for Pauline Hanson regardless, even if he's kicked out of parliament, because One Nation has always been based upon wild, personality-driven instability. That's not a bug that can be fixed; it's the entire raison d'etre of the party.
![One Nation Senator Rod Culleton is congratulated by Pauline Hanson after giving his first speech in October.](/web/20161222075654im_/http://www.watoday.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/g/9/d/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtdwvj.png/1482316700866.jpg)
The entire reason that people vote One Nation is to elect maverick outsiders who promise to shake up the system, so it's hardly a surprise that these combative renegades with fresh, bold, often utterly nonsensical ideas about politics and reality aren't the most reasonable people with whom to run a political operation.
People who are serious about contributing to Australian politics and are good at working as part of a team don't typically join parties like One Nation. They join the Liberals and Labor and the Nationals and the Greens, where they can get the internal organisational support required to enjoy solid professional and political progress.
One Nation doesn't attract those sorts of people. They attract chancers with insane ideas about climate science and conspiracy theories about how the Constitution works. These are people most Australians wouldn't trust to join their carpool, much less their Parliament.
And sure, One Nation are planning to run at least 36 candidates in the Queensland election next year, which they hope will give them the balance of power in the state - but anyone ambitiously expecting a One Nation golden age should have a quick look at history.
One Nation won 11 seats in the Queensland election of 1998, and promptly split in half (creating the City-Country Alliance, which also rapidly disintegrated) before losing eight seats in 2001 and another two in 2003. Their heydays in NT and WA were similarly brief, fiery, and self-destructive.
Hanson spent a decade and a half in the wilderness before the double dissolution handed her a lifeline – and it's taken all of four-and-a-bit months for One Nation to go from angrily fighting the system to bitterly fighting each other.
To be fair, it's nice to see people doing what they do best.
Be like George Brandis and grab copies of Andrew P Street's The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott and The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat!
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