May 13, 2026 — 5:00am
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It was a line straight out of US President Donald Trump’s playbook. “Bye bye to the ABC,” Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, said as he ejected two journalists working for the public broadcaster’s rural service from a media event on Friday, less than 24 hours before polls opened in the NSW byelection for Farrer.
The words that followed between Ashby and his boss were a giveaway that something deeper was at play. The One Nation founder said the reporters “shouldn’t have gone” because they were from the local ABC bureau, based in Wodonga. Ashby darkly insisted they were reporting back to the broadcaster’s federal politics team in Canberra.
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