A One Nation candidate for the upcoming Queensland election lasted less than two days before a standoff with a party official over an “inappropriate” tweet triggered his withdrawal.
Gold Coast financial adviser Andy Semple pulled out as a candidate for the seat of Currumbin on Monday night, announcing on Twitter: “It seems [Pauline Hanson’s One Nation] only likes certain types of Freedom of Expression.”
The bone of contention was a Twitter post Semple made in September using a picture that circulated during the Trump presidency campaign in the US: a T-shirt representing the acronym LGBT with images of the Statue of Liberty, a gun, a beer and a pair of “tits” respectively to represent the four letters.
Semple had tweeted: “Now that’s a LGBT cause I can get behind. Queue [sic] Pink Mafia Outrage in 3, 2, 1…”
Semple said he was disappointed the party had succumbed to “political correctness”, with One Nation national secretary Jim Savage instructing him by text just before 8pm on Monday to remove the tweet.
That was despite Savage “actually admitting to me that he hadn’t read it himself so he didn’t even know the context”, Semple told Guardian Australia.
Semple replied, “So it begins…”, before deciding to withdraw and head off any possible further requests to muzzle his social media commentary, he said.
The exchange took place hours after Hanson declared the party had tightened up its vetting after losing senator Rodney Culleton, and she was “as confident as anyone can be” that 36 state candidates announced on Sunday would pass muster.
Semple said he was not pushed out by One Nation but “forced their hand” on a principle of free speech.
“I know how the machine works, as in they’ll find something else and then tomorrow there’ll be another one: ‘Andy, we’ve got to have a serious talk, your whole Twitter account’s got to go’,” he said.
“I’m just disappointed the party didn’t have the ability or the ticker to back me and go, look, we’ve reprimanded him, we’ve seen it, we don’t think it was funny. Come out firm on that, I wouldn’t have been upset whatsoever. But respect my fundamental right to have an opinion.”
Semple said regardless of what others thought of his LGBT joke, he was “not a homophobe”.
“But I like to poke fun at any other type of group like the Greens or the global warming guys just so there’s a degree of balance to say, ‘hang on you’re not always there’.
“Someone can look at that and go, ‘that really wasn’t that humorous on reflection, you’re a dickhead’ – fine. What I’m concerned about is the party said no, that’s the end of it. I said guys, if you let this happen, all you are doing is emboldening those people that don’t like you, now that they’ll get a victory out of this.”
Savage told the Courier-Mail that he took responsibility for the loss of a candidate because “I was the man who interviewed this gentleman and it got past me”.
“I became aware last night that he had tweeted something that we considered inappropriate for the standards One Nation likes to set,” Savage said.
He described it as an “inappropriate comment on an LGBTI joke”.
Semple’s twitter feed, bearing the description “Political Correctness Stops Here”, features a variety of right-leaning comments on Muslim dress, immigration, climate change and racial discrimination laws.
Semple said he disclosed the account to One Nation during a three-hour candidate vetting session on 10 November and again later when he signed a “social media acknowledgement form”.
“So they knew about it. It’s not for me to say to them, oh, by the way, out of 28,000 tweets, look at this, this and this,” he said.
Semple said his withdrawal well before any election campaign was “the best thing for me and the best thing for the party”.
Polling this year has shown One Nation on 16% of the primary vote in Queensland. Hanson has rejected suggestions that the internal ructions of Culleton’s departure, following a string of controversies including his previously undisclosed legal matters, would affect the party’s popular vote.
Guardian Australia reported on Monday that Culleton had not disclosed a 2014 arrest by Queensland police, as the party revealed it would go from state-based to national police checks for its candidates.
