Investigations editor Ross Jones met with Brian Burston prior to the election, to discuss details of the UAP candidate's colourful parting of the ways with Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
If you think you’re depressed over the election result, spare a thought for Brian "Beagle Boy" Burston. Not the biggest goose to ever grace an Australian Parliamentary chamber, but certainly up with the frontrunners. (Honest personal opinion.)
As an aside, the undisputed number one in this regard – that is, in goosedom – is the looney-tunes fruit loop (honest personal opinion) Malcolm Roberts, who, thanks to Hanson and her traitorous One Nation with its assorted creatures-from-the deep, will again stain the Senate benches with his oozing stupidity.
I am sure we will hear plenty from – and about – Malcolm in the next three years and I, for one, await his prognostications with bated breath.
But for now, back to Burston.
It was Monday, 13 May 2019, five days before the election, when I had lunch with the then UAP Senator at Sydney’s Vibe Hotel.
Over chicken burgers and beer, Brian was convinced he would be re-elected as a UAP senator. After all, Clive was spending an absolute fortune and there is no doubt intestine-yellow is the colour du jour. Is there?
What Brian wanted to talk about was James Ashby. More precisely, Ashby’s demise.
Interestingly, that is the same reason Fraser Anning gave for wanting to meet with me back in February 2018. Fraser got done at this election too.
I’ve got to say I have a certain disappointment Brian wasn’t re-elected because he told me he was gearing up to dump a bucket-load of scandal all over James under the burqa of parliamentary privilege.
Brian and his able former assistant – whose business card credits her with being 'Adviser/Strategist/Negotiator' for Senator Brian Burston – told me stuff that curled the wilted lettuce in my burger.
A couple of images I still can’t get out of my mind, so vividly were they described. And apparently some very tangled relationships at the highest levels of the party!
Burston has publicly alleged Pauline put it on him several times:
‘Senator Burston made a series of claims in The Daily Telegraph about Senator Hanson's behaviour towards him over the course of the past two decades, alleging she had acted inappropriately towards him numerous times.’
Over lunch, Burston repeated those allegations and then some, adding enough unpublished detail to start sounding almost believable. Make your skin crawl.
It would have been wonderful to see Burston rise, possibly not exactly imperiously, from his Senate seat and deliver into Hansard the lurid viscera of One Nation.
Alas, it is not to be. Brian got done like a dinner in the anti-UAP landslide.
The worst thing is that, over lunch, Burston’s Adviser/Strategist/Negotiator ordered, with the then Senator nodding agreement, two copies of the Ashbygate book. The Adviser/Strategist/Negotiator told me she wanted, for various reasons, to give a copy to Mathias Cormann. Lunch finished, I went back to the office, packed two books for dispatch, wrote a nice with comps slip, threw in an invoice and popped the whole lot in the mail.
Since then, Brian has met the electoral grim reaper and I haven’t heard a peep from him or his Adviser/Strategist/Negotiator since.
But how can you be angry when poor Brian and his Adviser/Strategist/Negotiator have just parted company with the gravy train?
The first tailings from Clive’s new mine.
Investigations editor Ross Jones is a licensed private enquiry agent the author of 'Ashbygate: The Plot to Destroy Australia's Speaker'. You can follow Ross on Twitter @RPZJones.
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