The former prime minister Tony Abbott has called on One Nation to remove a cartoon labelling the Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie a “traitor” or accept it’s playing a double standard.
Senior Liberals along with the independent senator Jacqui Lambie and RSL Australia joined in condemnation of the cartoon on Thursday and with the opposition leader Angus Taylor’s call for it to be taken down.
“If it was right – and it was – for the ABC to apologise and withdraw its offensive ‘satire’ against Gina Rinehart, it’s also right for [One Nation] to do likewise with this offensive satire,” Abbott, the federal president of the Liberal party, told Guardian Australia.
The One Nation animated cartoon posted to social media in late July depicts Hastie as a pitiful and paranoid opposition leader manipulated by Anthony Albanese into taking on One Nation.
Hastie is also repeatedly described as a “traitor” for giving evidence against the Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith in his failed defamation case.
RSL Australia said the word is particularly offensive for veterans as it “sends a corrosive message to the wider veteran community: that your service can be recast as betrayal the moment it’s politically convenient”.
This week the veteran SAS commander Hastie chose to face One Nation’s attack campaign head on, describing Hanson as “weak and glass-jawed” for refusing to call him a traitor directly or to take the video down.
“She’s not fit to govern this country,” he told ABC radio. “And she’s also cast a massive slur on veterans around the country who think that Australian soldiers should hold high standards of conduct on the battlefield.”
The One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said he didn’t believe Hastie was a traitor, describing it as an “absurdity”. But he said he wouldn’t be taking the cartoon offline.
“That’s beyond my pay grade … I’m not responsible for putting the cartoons up, and I’m not responsible for taking them down,” he told News24.
In July, a four-minute documentary aired on the ABC program Race Around the World became the subject of scrutiny by Hanson after it included crude, offensive and violent comments about Rinehart.
The scene was later removed and the ABC issued an apology to the mining magnate after she threatened the public broadcaster with legal action.
In an interview on News24 in August, Hanson said the ABC’s description of the scene as “satirical” was a “a load of rubbish and a cover-up”.
“It was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, what they allowed – and [it’s] still up there – to say about Gina Rinehart, or any Australian for that matter, regardless of whether [it’s] Gina Rinehart, any Australian,” she said.
At the time of Hanson’s interview with News24, One Nation’s cartoon featuring Hastie had been online for more than a fortnight.
Hanson said she and her team knew the limits of political satirical and “when to pull back”.
On Wednesday she described the saga as a “storm in a teacup”.
