The ‘new Byron Bay’ favoured by Pauline Hanson and her most powerful aide

We’ve been in Rockhampton only a couple of hours and finished one interview when a text arrives, out of the blue, from James Ashby.

“Welcome to town,” says the One Nation party director. He recommends the lamb at a restaurant in nearby Yeppoon, a small coastal community 40 minutes up the road.

This part of central Queensland is Ashby country.

The 47-year-old former radio presenter, who grew up on the Sunshine Coast, has spent the past decade criss-crossing the country as Pauline Hanson’s closest adviser while calling Yeppoon home.

The restaurant he recommends? It hosted a fundraising dinner for his failed bid to win the local state seat of Keppel in the 2024 Queensland election. The event was attended by Hanson and the party’s billionaire benefactor, Gina Rinehart.

The $1.5 million plane Rinehart donated to One Nation this year? It’s kept in Rockhampton so Ashby can soon serve as One Nation’s chief pilot, the party says.

The $56,000 shed on his property outside Yeppoon? One Nation says the party paid for it to house a new alcoholic spirits business.

Hanson has travelled to the region twice this year, claiming taxpayer funds for flights to and from Rockhampton, although she refuses to say why she made one of the trips.

She also owns land in Yeppoon, described by property developers and news outlets as a “new Byron Bay” due to its natural beauty, expanding population and house price growth.

Together, she and Ashby boast about extracting tens of millions of dollars in grants for the area from the previous Coalition government – grants that account for half her listed “infrastructure achievements”.

“Am I meant to beat him over the head with a stick for playing an active, positive role in his community?” the Queensland senator posed in a statement about Ashby. “I wish more political staffers did the same.”

The pool

Whichever One Nation candidate runs for the seat of Capricornia at the next federal election could find themselves in a fight watched around the country. Nationals leader Matt Canavan, a Yeppoon local, has not ruled out a move from the Senate to the lower house.

It risks becoming, in the words of one federal MP, “a f—ing war zone”.

Already it’s been the scene of a hyper-local row over a pool opening.

Hanson visited Cooee Bay pool in Yeppoon in April, dropping in to film a social media video at the nearly finished project. She trailed her fingers in the water, pleased with the temperature, thrilled with the entire facility.

Hanson claims she was the one who clinched $13 million from the Morrison government for the upgrade, now billed as a One Nation project by a billboard on the outskirts of town.

Flickering between delighted and angry, she railed in the video against “all these other dickheads” claiming credit.

She also said the local shire had banned her from attending the pool’s upcoming opening, a claim Ashby had made on social media.

Livingstone Shire Council strongly denied any ban. It said One Nation’s allegation led to “significant abuse” of councillors, council staff and their families, including the daughter of Mayor Adam Belot, who was confronted by a “very irate individual” in a carpark.

Councillor Wade Rothery, a former One Nation candidate and Ashby’s former brother-in-law, addressed Hanson online, saying “you know 100 per cent you are not banned”.

The need for a new pool appeared beyond doubt after a bleak structural report.

Liberal National local member Michelle Landry said she worked hard to fix the pool where her children had learnt to swim, securing a $13 million Commonwealth Community Development grant in 2021.

Ashby, who has owned several properties in Cooee Bay, tells it differently. He argues One Nation secured the money in 2020 when it held the balance of power in the Senate. The council had lost ratepayer revenue after the Defence Force acquired land in the area.

A party spokesperson said: “It was the Livingstone Shire Council who opted for the money to be spent on upgrading the Cooee Bay Pool Complex, not Senator Hanson or Mr Ashby.”

After arguing for the grant money, Hanson bought a vacant block of land in Cooee Bay in 2021 for $580,000, with no mortgage. She had planned to develop a block of units on it. But since January, she’s been trying to sell, for upwards of $1 million.

Yeppoon real estate agent Ravi Ramswarup said there had been a “ridiculous amount of interest” in Hanson’s land.

“She’s bought in Cooee Bay, which has had some of the biggest growth in the region by a long way,” Ramswarup said, adding that sea-changers had helped push up prices. The pool does not feature in the property’s ad campaign. “She’s not going to get an extra quarter of a million because that pool is there,” said the agent.

Ashby has sold out of Cooee Bay. But he soon bought a block in nearby countryside and began work on a home.

As first reported by The Guardian, his $56,000 shed application was made by Small Batch Brewing, a company run by Ashby, Hanson and party official Alex Jones. It was among several businesses Hanson publicly declared only after they were revealed by this masthead in January.

One Nation announced last week it had approved party funds for a shed on Ashby’s land to “minimise costs, including commercial rent”, while projecting up to $500,000 in annual revenue from the micro-distillery.

This year, One Nation briefly considered applying for a second electorate office for Hanson in Yeppoon (population 7000 at the last census). But the idea has since died.

Canavan, the Nationals leader, chided Hanson at the time for living near Brisbane and not moving up the coast, as he had. “She wants to be a fly-in fly-out member,” he said.

The plane

One Nation cited “security reasons” in June when declining to say where the party housed its new light plane, a gift from Australia’s richest woman. It had already applied to have the Cirrus SR-22 aircraft removed from flight tracking websites.

But a public database contains the answer. It shows journeys to Albury, Cessnock, Brisbane, Melbourne, Dubbo and Newcastle over the past four months, with the plane returning time and again to where it was first unveiled in April: Rockhampton.

Ashby, a keen aviator, disputes a media report that he is its “main pilot”.

“I’m still in the process of upgrading my pilot’s licence, so I have not flown the Cirrus with passengers – only a commercial instructor,” he said.

He is well aware of the rules. The air safety regulator previously investigated him for possible criminal offences when he used a recreational licence to fly the party’s old plane (which was registered in his name and has now disappeared).

A One Nation spokesperson said the Cirrus was in Rockhampton “where Mr Ashby will assume the role of chief pilot once he completes his final exam”.

In defending Rinehart’s generosity, including various flights on her personal jet, Hanson argues it saves taxpayer money.

But parliamentary travel records show Hanson charged the taxpayer to fly back to Brisbane after celebrating the plane’s grand reveal in Rockhampton.

Three days later, in early May, she made another trip to Rockhampton. Again, she claimed taxpayer funds for the flights.

The new plane shuttled back and forth to Rockhampton making similar journeys to the ones Hanson made commercially.

One Nation declined to say who was in the Cirrus plane on these journeys and failed to explain what Hanson was doing in Rockhampton on the second trip. A spokesperson said that on the first trip Hanson “visited Yeppoon to inspect the new Cooee Bay Pool and met with locals ahead of the pool’s official opening”.

Hanson’s website records six infrastructure achievements relating to specific places. Of these, three are in the Rockhampton/Yeppoon area.

They include $23 million for a 16,000-seat Rockhampton sports venue, another Commonwealth grant with echoing announcements from the LNP and One Nation.

Hanson personally presented an oversized novelty cheque to the Rocky Sports Club, which adjoined the stadium site, in 2020 at a ceremony attended by a Liberal National candidate.

Robert Schwarten, a former state Labor minister and once influential powerbroker, described the scene as bizarre.

“I’ve never seen a political enemy turn up with a government cheque,” said Schwarten, who was born and raised in Rockhampton and was once approached by Ashby with a preference deal proposal. “To me, [One Nation] have been fostered by the very people they’re trying to crucify.”

Asked if One Nation spent its political capital in central Queensland, Ashby’s home base, at the expense of other places, Hanson said she felt “very comfortable” with the party’s advocacy.

“Every project supported by One Nation has provided a solid business case, supported by the council, the community and stakeholder,” she said.

It’s normally governments, not minor parties, answering questions about public spending. This month, the federal Labor government’s $560 million community grants program was labelled pork-barrelling by the Centre for Public Integrity, while Hanson this week blasted a separate multicultural grants program as “truly staggering”.

In 2020, one person holding Hanson’s novelty cheque was Gavin Shuker, who owns the land beneath the Rocky Sports Club. He said when he pitched the stadium idea to Hanson she told him, “if I don’t think it’s a good idea, I won’t support it”, but came back with full support two days later.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more honest than Pauline,” said Shuker, our first interviewee in town, who described himself as a friend of Ashby’s but politically unaligned.

Funding for the project was cancelled after the federal Labor government came to power

Hanson and Ashby would tell The Sunday Mail in 2024 they were part-owners of Shuker’s Heritage Hotel in Rockhampton, alongside a syndicate of other investors. Today, all three say that Hanson and Ashby’s investments never eventuated.

Shuker, who runs several venues in town, declined to comment on criminal charges he is facing regarding unlicensed liquor trading, as they are still before the courts.

The campaign

Brittany Lauga knew One Nation could get personal. In 2019, the party had attacked the sitting Labor MP with a billboard saying “Dear Brittany, you can’t be trusted”.

But her research on One Nation told her that “calling them names is not something that works well with their voters”. Instead, she said, politicians had to listen to their voters.

Lauga came up against Ashby in the seat of Keppel at the last state election.

“I’m not some Brisbane lackey who takes orders from down south,” he declared, campaigning on youth crime and housing affordability. He pushed for a youth detention centre on North Keppel Island, a new school, and better access to nursing homes.

He lost, coming third. But the Labor stronghold fell to the Liberal Nationals, as the federal seat had a decade earlier.

Lauga, who lost after three terms, said Central Queensland would be a natural place for One Nation to gain momentum, “because we already feel that sense of being left out”.

Canavan told The Conversation this month he would run for the lower house if needed and “won’t die wondering”. The widely held view in the Liberal National Party is Landry, the federal member for Capricornia, will not contest the next federal election, according to a number of party insiders speaking on condition of anonymity.

Colleagues have privately raised concerns about the toll of adversarial and hostile politics in a region that could become One Nation heartland.

Landry said she would reveal her intentions at a later date. Given the personal popularity of the MP, who has held the seat for five successive elections, long-time Nationals insiders say her loss would leave Capricornia prime for a One Nation invasion.

The One Nation spokesperson said Ashby had not considered a tilt himself.

But as the man with national campaign responsibility, he will be surveying the terrain with a bird’s-eye view, possibly from the cockpit of the Cirrus.

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