MARK RILEY: Knuckleheaded GetUp! stunt at National Press Club plays into Pauline Hanson’s hands

GetUp! can get stuffed.

The stunt the activist group pulled at the National Press Club this week wasn’t just juvenile, it was stupidly counterproductive.

That banner it lowered behind Pauline Hanson as she made her first-ever address to the club has immediately become a juicy piece of red meat for the One Nation base.

It is a symbol of everything they see as being wrong with the system.

In the eyes of Hanson’s growing band of supporters, that dumb act simply proves they are being marginalised, ridiculed and denigrated by the “mainstream”, its institutions and the ruling elite.

Instead of elevating the inherent contradictions between what Hanson says about representing working Australians and what she actually does in the Parliament, it has become another rallying cry for her party’s cause.

Well done, GetUp! What a bunch of knuckleheads.

A growing band of Australian voters are demanding change from a system they do not believe is working in their interests.

They are increasingly looking to Hanson as their one-woman democratic demolition crew.

This incident has given them added incentive to do so.

And it’s not as if the National Press Club is some sanctified place that should be afforded special protections.

The right to protest is a legitimate part of a free and open democracy.

Protesters have been interrupting political events since God’s dog was a pup.

Climate and human rights activists have often gatecrashed politicians’ speeches to grandstand about their causes.

But this stunt was more elaborate. It sounded like the result of a black ops campaign. And in the Press Club’s view it was possibly criminal.

CEO Maurice Reilly released a statement on Wednesday night alleging that two people had gained unauthorised access to the club’s main events room on Tuesday afternoon and installed a remote-controlled drop-down screen behind the stage.

He said “it was evident that a further person present during the address activated a remote device to trigger the unfurling of the coiled banner.”

Reilly separately noted that GetUp!’s representative at the lunch was David Sharaz, husband of former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins and the protest group’s newly appointed campaigns director.

The statement says Sharaz was seen filming the incident on his phone.

7NEWS’s cameras caught him soon after leaving the venue in a hurry.

The club has asked for a criminal investigation and says it’s considering its legal options, including recovering costs for the “significant damage” the stunt inflicted.

To Hanson, though, the whole thing is just like water off a duck’s back.

She has seen a few protests in her time. She’s orchestrated even more.

The banner carried a stylised image of Hanson wearing “thug life” striped sunglasses.

If it was supposed to offend Hanson, it failed miserably.

Her principal strategist, James Ashby, immediately embraced it as her updated profile photo on Facebook.

All this only attracts more attention, more support and more momentum for Hanson as the chosen disrupter who is determined to finally destroy the two-party system.

The opposite of GetUp!’s intention.

And it diverts attention from the substance of Hanson’s speech in which she hammered her favourite targets of migration, climate change and transgender politics.

It was replete with contradictions and misinformation.

Hanson says she represents “working Australians”, yet is critical of minimum wage rises, voted against same work same pay, wage theft and paid parental leave laws and wants to make it easier for bosses to sack workers.

She seriously misquoted author Ed Husain in claiming he’d written that “Islam is not a religion, it’s a political movement”.

Husain did not say that. He said “Islamism” was a political movement. In other words the radical, jihadist version of extremist Islam spewed by hate preachers and groups like ISIS that all political parties and mainstream Islam itself utterly reject as an abomination.

And her description of an Australian “monoculture” rather than Australian “multiculturalism” has obvious overtones of racial and social exclusion, despite her vehement denials.

But Hanson’s supporters forgive her all these inconsistencies and inaccuracies for the greater promise she represents of ending what she calls the “uni-party” power structure that has been shared for so long between Labor and Liberals.

Her central commitment is that change is coming.

And if the major parties don’t deliver that change first, it will be them and their hold on power that will be changed.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor