Hanson shares Seven pitch for Spotlight special that says program would highlight ‘uncontrolled immigration’

A Seven producer urged Pauline Hanson to travel to Britain to meet Nigel Farage and film a Spotlight special highlighting so-called “uncontrolled immigration”, according to a pitch posted to social media by the One Nation leader.

The pitch also suggested that Seven might cover some of the travel costs for the One Nation leader and her team and that the program wanted the Reform UK leader to “invite Ms Hanson to Britain”. The current affairs program strongly endorsed an anti-immigration position, and said they had the facts to prove what was “the backbone of our story”. The email used the phrase “uncontrolled immigration” seven times.

The senior producer Luke Mortimer said the program would “illustrate the strain uncontrolled immigration is placing on our infrastructure” and demonstrate what Australia is allegedly facing “if we don’t take back control of who comes to our country”. “Voters in Britain are seeing pictures of boatloads of migrants, often young men from the Middle East and Africa, crossing the British Channel, and they’re seeing their seaside towns turned into camps for people who claim refugee status,” Mortimer said, in a pitch Hanson shared on her Facebook page on Monday.

Despite the sympathetic approach of the producer, Hanson was lobbied by reporter Liam Bartlett about why she met Tommy Robinson, a man who has violent criminal convictions and is considered too extreme for Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK party. Bartlett told viewers Hanson was supposed to meet Farage but the meeting was overtaken by events when he resigned from the UK parliament and called a byelection in the face of financial scrutiny.

The program proposed taking Farage and Hanson to the UK seaside town of Bournemouth, which it claimed “has seen a surge of more than 50% of foreign-born residents, thousands of which are being housed in hotels at the taxpayers expense”. Instead, the program filmed Hanson and Robinson walking through Luton, 50km north of London, which has a significant Muslim population, and Hanson even expressed her distaste for the community’s population.

The One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce defended Hanson’s decision to meet Robinson when he appeared on ABC’s 7.30 on Monday night. Asked for his position on Hanson’s comments about Muslims, Joyce first acknowledged Robinson had done “some things” that were “basically against the law” but said Hanson was not “condoning every action of Tommy Robinson. I don’t think that was ever said.”

Seven has confirmed it was a Spotlight pitch but distanced itself from the leaked email by saying it was one of hundreds of communications between Seven and Hanson’s team in the run-up to the show.