Any doubt that One Nation is in Gina Rinehart’s pocket is put to rest by Sarah Martin’s gripping new Guardian podcast, The Populist. Sarah is the reporter Pauline Hanson viciously attacked during her notorious Press Club appearance. It was clear from that clash that the pair have history. What we now know is that Hanson spat the dummy because Martin has been on the One Nation leader’s case for some months, following her around the country and asking questions that she does her best not to answer. Martin is especially concerned with Hanson’s intimate relationship with her cash cow, WA mining magnate Gina Rinehart. The one-hour podcast begins with Hanson declaring to Martin that she is not being backed by Rinehart. It was a flat-out lie, with Martin spending the rest of this first episode on the rise of One Nation revealing that Rinehart is no ordinary wealthy political donor. She is as important to the party as the leader herself. Hancock wanted an Australian political party after falling out with the Liberals, and Pauline’s faltering One Nation became the organisation that she bought, according to Martin. Even those policies that, on the surface, would anger Rinehart, such as the export tax on gas, are revealed to be in the magnate’s favour. Hanson has no interest in supporting a gas tax to favour Australian people, but one that minimises what Rinehart has to pay. Martin also deals with the question that caused the explosion at the Press Club: Did Hanson intervene to get her daughter, Lee Hanson, a $150,000-a-year job advising a New South Wales senator? Lee lives in Tasmania yet is working for a politician in another state, which Martin reveals is against parliamentary regulations. The whole thing stinks, and Martin was right to ask the question. Hanson has built her career railing against corruption, and she is up to her neck in it (barely a day passes without questions around finance being asked). It’s great work by Sarah, but what is depressing is that One Nation’s supporters either don’t believe the facts when they are presented to them, such as Hanson’s hiring of a convicted racist, or simply don’t care. It is also depressing to see how thuggish and devoted Hanson’s supporters are. They spend most of the time stopping Martin from getting anywhere near Hanson, even though she represents a major news organisation. Kudos to Martin for keeping it together while dealing with these bullies. Have a listen. It’s gripping stuff. #Guardian #Populist #sarahmartin theguardian.com/news/series/…

After landing at Sydney Cove it took the British just 38 years to turn their own drinking water into a sewer. How civilised. Pauline Hanson reckons Aboriginal people are the most primitive race on Earth because they never invented the wheel. So let's have a look at some history and see who is really primitive. In 1788, the First Fleet landed at a freshwater creek called the Tank Stream, clean water looked after by the Gadigal for thousands of years. Governors took a range of measures to protect the stream but none of it worked. By 1826, the colony had to abandon its own water supply because it had become an open sewer. Today it runs under the city as a stormwater drain. Tens of thousands of years of care to keep that water clean, and 38 years of "civilisation" to destroy it. At Madjedbebe in Mirarr country, the scientific journal 'Nature' puts people on this continent making ground-edge axes 65,000 years ago. Those axes are the oldest found anywhere on Earth. Somebody standing on this soil invented them. At Budj Bim in Gunditjmara country there are stone channels, dams and weirs built to farm eels, running for at least 6,600 years. Engineers Australia rates it among the greatest engineering works ever built in this country. It is older than the pyramids and it still works. 65,000 years, and the water was still clean, the soil was still there, and the fish still plentiful. First Nations land management was so advanced that when the British colonists arrived, they didn't even know what they were looking at. Now let's look at 238 years of Pauline's "civilisation". 100 native species have been wiped out for good, and Australia holds the worst mammal extinction record on the planet. In Queensland alone, hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush are bulldozed every year to run cattle, which is why Australia is the only wealthy country on the world's list of deforestation hotspots. The rivers are dying, the topsoil is stripped, the reefs are bleached, and the forests are burning. How civilised. Europe got rich through the export of violence and theft, then built a story afterwards to make the violence sound like progress. Pauline is still regurgitating that story because without it, she is just an ignorant and bitter woman who inherited a stolen country, and is still trying to whitewash history. Stand with First Nations people against these colonial lies.