Meeting Tommy Robinson no different from Albanese meeting Xi, says Pauline Hanson

Australian far right leader Pauline Hanson has been heavily criticised for guesting on the podcast of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the football thug who likes to go by the name Tommy Robinson.

But the One Nation leader has defended herself with a curious parallel – how is a senator meeting a British rabble-rouser with a string of convictions for assault, threats, harassment and fraud any different from PM Anthony Albanese’s meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping?

Hanson appeared on Robinson’s podcast while in the UK to appear at Liz Truss’s CPAC conference, where she spoke about Muslims and transgender issues and described Australia as “stupid” to a near-empty hall.

While she avoided speaking to the Australian media following what is thought to be only her second speech outside her home country, she did find time to visit Luton to be interviewed by Yaxley-Lennon, the serial criminal and far right activist.

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But she has now defended herself, telling digital newspaper The Nightly: “I’m not going to back away from that. I’m not going to apologise to anyone, who I meet, who I talk to, who I associate with, and if it means that I’m going to get an understanding from someone who’s on the ground, then I’ll do it.

“He has issues but I didn’t come to discuss them, and I’ve been convicted myself and I’ve been to prison, wrongfully imprisoned. Okay, so what they say about me, the stories too, the truth isn’t told to the general public as well.” (Hanson spent 11 weeks in jail for electoral fraud in 2003, but her convictions were later overturned by the Queensland Court of Appeal).

“I’m not here to defend what he’s done or hasn’t done,” she went on. “I was actually given a tour of his town that he grew up in. He showed me how it’s changed. There’s 45 mosques in Luton, he said, ‘you know, this is supposed to be an Islamic centre, is it terrorist, right, this is where terrorism starts here’’.” (Luton has 26 mosques.)

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And when pressed on exactly why she needed a convicted criminal to lead what she described as a “fact-finding mission” to the UK, she likened it to the Albanese meeting Xi, the president of China.

“I’ll tell you what, Albanese meets with Jinping [sic],” she said. “What about his threatening to take over Taiwan?

“So we accept it because he’s the leader of a nation, because we trade with them. So it’s okay for Albanese to meet and associate with him and lay out the red carpet for him.”

Quite. Some may say the Australian premier meeting his Chinese counterpart is not a direct parallel with travelling to Luton to be on a right wing yob’s podcast, but let them scoff!