Barnaby Joyce says One Nation doesn’t want return of White Australia policy but backs Pauline Hanson on mass deportations | One Nation

Barnaby Joyce says he does not support Pauline Hanson’s White Australia policy but her support for “mass deportation” of visa overstayers.

Hanson and his colleagues spent days clarifying, explaining or going back on headline-grabbing parts of the One Nation leader’s European trip, including a podcast interview with far-right prisoner Tommy Robinson, his attendance at a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show and time spent by a hotel pool in Italy with mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.

Channel Seven’s Spotlight program on Sunday showed Hanson meeting Rupert Lowe, leader of far-right party Restore Britain. Lowe handed him a party pamphlet titled “mass deportations” and Hanson said they were “on the same page”.

The Seven reporter Liam Bartlett asked Hanson “whether this concept of mass deportation is a good concept”.

He replied: “I love him.” One Nation’s website states that the party wants to “deport 75,000 illegal immigrants.”

Joyce did not back down from those comments on Monday. Although he did not repeat the term “mass deportation”, he told Sunrise: “As it becomes clear that they are not supposed to be here, they will be put on a plane and sent back to where they should be.”

Asked how One Nation would implement such a policy, Joyce said: “We need to make sure that people are taken out of the country when they are presenting for medical issues or other things.”

Joyce and Hanson’s daughter Lee again claimed party leaders had been taken out of context on Monday, blaming the end of the White Australia policy for creating what she saw as immigration problems during the Robinson podcast.

To Robinson’s question about “the changing face of Australia due to Islamic immigration”, Hanson replied: “They opened the White Australia policy and got rid of it, then they started bringing in different immigrants.”

Hanson posted two social media videos over the weekend responding to media attention on her trip, criticizing “left-wing media and their false, clickbait stories” for their White Australia policy comments.

On Sunday evening, Lee Hanson, who works for One Nation senator Sean Bell, defended his mother, claiming she had been “misinterpreted”.

“He did not say in any way that he wished the White Australia policy had not changed,” he said. “He doesn’t support it and doesn’t want it back. So I believe it was taken out of context.”

He acknowledged that his mother “may not have been the most eloquent person in the world.”

On Channel Seven’s Sunrise programme, Joyce offered a similar defense. While Joyce said One Nation “does not support the White Australia policy”, he claimed that there had been a “chain of events” that had led to bad consequences since the removal of this policy.

“This is a statement of fact, and Pauline said in the beginning that it all started like this: [Harold] Holt, it’s actually a very good thing that the White Australia policy is over,” Joyce said.

“And initially there were really no problems with that. But over time we ended up with a group of people who didn’t really want to assimilate into Australia, who didn’t want to work within the guardrails of Australia.”

Labor Minister Tanya Plibersek said on Sunrise that Hanson “will say anything, and then when that statement is challenged, he wants to put his head in the sand and pretend he never said it.”

“He spends time with convicted criminals, trashes Australia abroad, then says he’s all for a White Australia and mass deportations, but apparently not today,” he said.

Despite the controversy surrounding Hanson’s trip and increasing scrutiny over his colleague Malcolm Roberts’ advocacy of conspiracy theories, One Nation has improved its position in the poll and is now tied with Labor in the primary poll in the latest News poll.