It could come to this: a forensic examination of Pauline Hanson's belly button.
The political candidate insists she is not the young woman posing in near-nude photos splashed across News Limited's Sunday newspapers. That woman had a very distinctive navel - what is affectionately called an "outie". Does Hanson have an "innie"? And is she willing to subject herself to such a comparison?
"I'm not going to belittle myself, to go into detail as far as that," she said at a news conference in Brisbane yesterday. But then she added: "I will if I need to."
And perhaps she will need to - when she takes News Limited and the Nine and Seven networks to court for defamation. It would be one of many humiliations in her public life, including her jailing for electoral fraud, for which she was later cleared.
Hanson, an independent candidate for the seat of Beaudesert in Saturday's Queensland election, gave a strident denial of The Sunday Telegraph's story and of the claims of its informant, 52-year-old Jack Johnson, who says he took the raunchy photos of Hanson when they had a fling in the mid-1970s. A self-described former army commando, Johnson says he has bone cancer and sold his pictures for $15,000 to pay for his treatment.
The Hanson reply: she has never met anyone called Jack Johnson; she has never dated an army man; she has never worked in a Brisbane grocery store, where Johnson claims he met her; she did not wear her hair so short until almost a decade later when she was in her 30s; the Pelican Beach Resort at Coffs Harbour, where the photos were supposedly taken, was not built until 1986; and what is more, "those pictures are not of me".
The men in Hanson's life might be able to settle the argument. Her first husband, Walter Zagorski, was with her around the time of the alleged liaison with Johnson, although Zagorski left her for the two years - between 1975 and 1977 - when Johnson says the photos were taken.
There is her second husband, Mark Hanson. There is her former political colleague in the One Nation party, David Oldfield, although he has denied Hanson's claim that they were intimate. Last year there was the country-and-western singer, Chris Callaghan. None could be contacted yesterday to proffer an opinion on the photos.
The Sunday Telegraph's editor, Neil Breen, said "we push the boundaries" and he knew his job was on the line if the photos were found to be fakes. But he insisted that was not the case.
"We spent all day Saturday checking, making sure the photos were not doctored," he told the Herald. They had put the images through Photoshop. "You can see changes in the pixels … if they've been doctored," he told radio 2UE.
But what if the photos were genuine - but of someone else, as Hanson insists? Johnson insists he had an affair with a woman called Pauline but what chance that it was a woman who looked remarkably like Hanson?
"Oh, about one in 5 million," Breen told the Herald. "The pics are of Pauline Hanson. She knew what we had and she chose not to respond, to say she didn't care about photos."
Breen suspects Hanson let it run because she knew it would elicit sympathy for her during her election campaign. It would be a wedge issue and "she's a wedge politician". Others have suggested the Hanson camp could have been behind the release of the photos - to win sympathy and votes.
"I don't have to stoop that low to get publicity," Hanson said yesterday.
A former campaign manager for One Nation and Hanson, Richard Rae, said: "Pauline Hanson is many things but she is not a liar." He had asked Hanson 10 years ago - as a barrister might quiz a client before entering court - if there were any surprises, anything from her past. Indiscreet photos?
"She never said there were any nude photos," Rae told the Herald. "She said there would be photos, like you and me have photos. But there was nothing that worried her."
Despite this, the Telegraph's website quoted Rae to support its case. It said: "Pauline Hanson always knew topless pictures taken more than 30 years ago could come back to haunt her - she just didn't care, her former campaign mastermind claims."
Jack Johnson, his face pixilated, appeared on Channel Seven's Today Tonight last night, saying: "I didn't lie. I told it straight up and now all my mates bloody hate me … I've never been the smartest cookie in the barrel."
The program insists it paid Johnson not a cent. Breen, asked if the $15,000 was money well spent, noted it was shared across the News Limited group. "I suspect so," he said, "but you never know where these stories are going to go. If she had said, 'I posed for some silly photos when I was a young woman', it would have stopped there. But she said she never posed for them, so we'll have to see where it goes."
The Telegraph website caught up with Hanson's denial at midday yesterday, but still bragged: "Hanson secret nude photo shoot revealed/Scroll down to see the images. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT."
Source: smh.com.au
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