Liam Bartlett went to Britain to make a program about immigration. He came home with a program built to take down Pauline Hanson, along with everyone who stood beside her. What Bartlett still doesn't grasp is that no matter how hard the mainstream media goes on the attack, it only drives people further from what it's trying to manufacture and manipulate.
Last Sunday night on Seven's Spotlight special, "Pauline Goes Global", beat 60 Minutes in the ratings, and within 48 hours One Nation had branded it a "stitch-up" and Hanson had leaked the email that on its own terms, makes her case for her.
For an hour, Bartlett hammered Tommy Robinson over telling the truth and put Pauline Hanson's past and fitness to govern on trial. The leaked email shows the network asking those questions was the dishonest one, from a pitch that promised one program to the government grants it never disclosed.
But the moment that gave the game away never went to air. Off camera, by the account of Hanson's own chief of staff, James Ashby, even the reporter Seven sent to take her down admitted what he was really looking at. Which leaves the question the network would rather nobody asked. Does Liam Bartlett believe the story he sold Seven, or was the hit simply the job?
The email was written in November by Spotlight producer Luke Mortimer. It pitched "a full-hour show on Australia's recent years of record-breaking net migration", 415,760 in nine months on the figures he cited, and promised to enlighten viewers on "the scale of the issue we are facing and what we might face if we don't take back control of who comes to our country". Nigel Farage would host Hanson in Britain to show her "where he believes Australia is headed". Start to finish, it is a pitch about immigration.
When we previewed the special, we questioned whether Sunday would show viewers what Hanson saw in Britain, or just the argument. The answer confirms it was just the argument and an attempt to take down Pauline Hanson along with One Nation.
Re: Full-hour immigration special with Pauline Hanson
Sent: November 2025
As discussed, here's the outline for a full-show story with Pauline Hanson and our reporter Liam Bartlett for our return to ratings next year.
Liam is over from Perth next week and the week after, and if you and Ms Hanson are free, we could meet the first week of December in person in Brisbane or Central Queensland to discuss.
But first, we'll chat tomorrow.
We want to do a full-hour show on Australia's recent years of record-breaking net migration - already in the nine months to September 30 it's 415,760, according to the IPA.
I don't think we need to read the tea leaves too closely to see, uncontrolled immigration is shaping up as next year's defining issue, just as "net zero" has been this year, and will also be next year too.
The Coalition's conservatives, in particular Andrew Hastie from the backbench, have already put it on the agenda as their second "objective" after ticking off their first objective, to scrap net zero.
Ms Hanson, yourself, and the rest of One Nation, is out in front of this issue, putting uncontrolled immigration front and centre this year.
The show, ideally, will further enlighten our viewers to the scale of the issue we are facing and what we might face if we don't take back control of who comes to our country.
It is well and truly bubbling away in Australia, and it has been the whole year.
It's boiled over in much of Europe, and in particular, Britain - who are five years down the track from where Australia could be. 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.
The only reason the Starmer Government is now promising to turn around those boats and is introducing Europe's toughest pathway to citizenship for asylum seekers is because Reform UK has forced their hand.
For the beginning of our story, we want Nigel Farage to invite Ms Hanson to Britain and to show her where he believes Australia is headed if we continue down our current path of uncontrolled immigration, accepting more than a half a million migrants every year.
We can discuss travel arrangements for you and Pauline to the UK.
As some initial thoughts: we want to visit, with Ms Hanson and Mr Farage, a British seaside town - such as Bournemouth - that has seen a surge of more than 50% of foreign born residents, thousands of which are being housed in hotels at the taxpayers expense. (I will do some due diligence to identify the most visually appealing town). Mr Farage has even reported from the British Channel to illustrate to his voters how the French navy politely hands over migrants, who claim refugee status, to the British navy:
facebook.com/watch/?v=3587710444695608
We would also want to visit the heartland of Britain's industrial revolution and its modern-day prosperity - Birmingham. Britain's second largest city has an overseas-born population of well over 30%, the vast majority of which are from Pakistan and India.
I'm sure you would have ideas too, which I would be keen to discuss.
Many Australians would be shocked to know our figures are already further down the line - 38.1% of Greater Sydney was born overseas. Council areas such as Strathfield have a population of almost 60% that was born overseas.
Many Australians will ask - why do we need such high levels of uncontrolled immigration, when the next highest comparable western country, Canada, has 22.2% of its population born overseas, according to the ABS? The next is Germany at 19.8%.
The only countries in the world that have more than us are oil rich nations - Saudi, Kuwait, UAE, and Jordan - who import all their labour on the strict understanding that once the job is done, they are returning home.
In 1947, 9.3% of Australia's population was born overseas, according to the ABS, but policies from consecutive governments have seen that surge to 31.5% of Australian residents.
The figures - over decades and in the last few years - substantiate a strong case for uncontrolled immigration. This is the backbone of our story - based in fact.
That brings me to the second part of our story in Australia. My initial thoughts of how we could illustrate this uncontrolled immigration in Australia - join one of Tony Burke's "citizenship ceremony blitz's" early next year.
Many Australians would be shocked to know that, to deal with the influx of migration, councils across the country are holding citizenship ceremonies once a month, such as the Inner West Council, the City of Sydney, and North Sydney Council.
The waiting times to attend these ceremonies is 3 - 6 months because of the demand.
It would be interesting to talk to these new citizens, and refine some key questions that go to the heart of this issue: what are their politics? What are their views on key geo-political issues such as China, the middle east, and more? Where do they plan to live? And what do they plan to do for work?
I have more thoughts on how we can illustrate the strain uncontrolled immigration is placing on our infrastructure, which we can discuss.
This is an issue that will resonate with mainstream Australia - they care about their children's ability to rent and eventually buy a home; the pressure it has places on our schools, hospitals, and every other essential service; and most importantly, the way it is culturally changing our communities - with the exception of New Zealand and England migrants, none of the key countries, with the largest migrant numbers, are western liberal democracies.
I'm in no hurry to produce this: I want it to be as close to our air-date as possible, and with a proper plan.
I thought, perhaps, we could arrange for a day or two shooting with Nigel in the UK for late January, early February and then shoot in Australia in the second half of February.
But first, we will chat tomorrow.
Thanks,
Luke
Luke Mortimer
Senior Producer, Spotlight
Liam Bartlett changed the subject from the story Seven sent him to tell
The Britain Luke Mortimer wrote about, the boats in the Channel, the seaside towns turned into asylum hotels, the cities remade by migration, barely rated a mention. Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe tried to put the substance on the table, the rape-gang report his party produced, which he urged people to read. Its own estimate put the number of victims across Britain as high as 250,000, a figure official records cannot confirm but which the inquiry built out from the 1,400 girls documented in Rotherham alone, and the hundreds more in Telford, Oxfordshire, Derby and Newcastle. That, and what Lowe called the destruction of the "high-trust society" Britain used to have, was the story Bartlett had flown in to tell. He did not follow it. He changed the subject, to Lowe himself.
Bartlett's whip-around edit: warm to Rupert Lowe's face, a knife in the back from the voiceover
Watch the full episode and you will see how Bartlett handled Lowe and the method that runs through the whole hour. On camera he is friendly. In the voiceover, cut in after the handshake, he tells the audience the man he has just been so chummy with "allows members of British fascist organisations into the ranks of his party".
He presses Lowe on whether people linked to "white supremacy groups" would be welcome to join. Lowe's answer is that his members are free to sign up and "part with £20". Bartlett needles him over the phrase "Anglo-Saxon", suggesting some could read it as white supremacy. "I don't think it's a case of white supremacy," Lowe replies.
Video: 7NEWS Spotlight. Pauline Hanson's UK tour has provided her with a 'warning and political war plan' for One Nation.
Then comes the giveaway, the line that moves the audience along: "the man Pauline really came to the UK to see isn't Rupert." It is the same move he runs on everyone. Hanson is grilled over putting her "reputation" on the line to meet Robinson. Her deputy Barnaby Joyce is asked, to his face, whether his leader has the "intellectual capacity" to run the country, a question even Sky's Paul Murray said he "can't imagine being asked of any other political leader". Warm to the face, damaging in the edit.
Tommy Robinson took Bartlett's best shot and turned it back
The Tommy Robinson sit-down, the meeting Seven built the back half of its promotion around, was spent almost entirely on Robinson's criminal record rather than the scandal he has spent years documenting. Bartlett insisted that what Robinson describes "is not happening here", then went to the rap sheet. Robinson named it in real time: "This is exactly the fake stream media." He did not dodge his past either. He owned it in a single breath: "I wish I hadn't been in ten prisons ... unfortunately, everyone was silent about the rape of our whole country. I wasn't." And he left Bartlett with a question that never got an answer: "Should any Australian town end up like Pakistan?"
Australians have seen this play before. When Karl Stefanovic gave Robinson a fair hearing, the episode was taken down overnight and it helped cost him his place at Nine. A fair interview cost a man his job. A hit job won the night against 60 Minutes. That is the incentive structure of Australian current affairs, laid bare.
Video: 7NEWS Spotlight. Tommy Robinson answers Liam Bartlett on air.
James Ashby's version: a "stitch-up" Seven did not get to edit
One Nation chief of staff James Ashby put it plainly to Paul Murray. Channel 7 made the pitch back in November last year, he said, and it wanted one thing.
They made it very clear they wanted a program on immigration, pure and simple. It was nothing of what we saw last night.
Ashby branded the result a "stitch-up", but "a bit of an own goal for Spotlight", adding: "I don't think it did the damage that they hoped it would do."
The awkward part for Seven is how the Robinson meeting came about. Ashby says that when Farage pulled out, producer Luke Mortimer worried the whole trip was wasted, and it was Seven that set up the replacement.
The suggestion came from Channel 7, who I had given the contact of Tommy Robinson to. They lined it all up. They paid for the room, £700, they paid for the security.
Ashby gave Seven Robinson's number himself, but says it was the network that pushed for the meeting and paid to make it happen. Then he lands his real point. In the car into Luton, Ashby says, the same Bartlett who spent the special grilling Hanson turned to him and acknowledged what he was looking at:
The only thing missing from it was camels.
For Ashby, that is the tell. Off camera, he says, even Bartlett could see how far uncontrolled immigration has changed these cities, whatever line he took on air. Britain, as Ashby puts it, is "no longer Great Britain, it's just Britain".
Video: Sky News. James Ashby tells Paul Murray the Spotlight special was a "stitch-up".
Seven tells it differently about the Tommy Robinson interview. The network says it was Hanson's team who suggested Robinson, and in Bartlett's own written account it was her "right-hand" who "suggested a meeting and then a chance to film her participation in Tommy's ... podcast".
A Seven spokesperson pointed to "hundreds of emails ... over more than six months", and said Spotlight had "fairly quizzed Senator Hanson but also allowed her views to be explored and heard", thanking her for her "candid access". Bartlett also challenged Hanson on several of her figures on air. On who set up Robinson, it is his word against theirs, but we know who we would believe.
The part Seven did not disclose: the taxpayer helped pay for it
Here's the detail Spotlight did not put to air. The company that broadcasts it, Seven Network (Operations) Limited, the entity behind 7NEWS and 7plus, banked $5,594,160 from Communications Minister Anika Wells' $67.6 million Journalism Assistance Fund, 7.52% of the entire pool. Across the Seven side of the newly merged Southern Cross group, the total is $11,329,890. These are wage subsidies, paid by the Commonwealth, running to 2028, and no funded newsroom is required to tell you it is on the books.
So a network the taxpayer helps fund produced an hour built to tear down the leader of the one party campaigning to cut immigration, and never disclosed whose money helps pay the reporter who made it. In the same fortnight, not one funded masthead was obliged to mention any of that while the pack piled on Hanson over a European holiday, one we have written about here, that cost taxpayers nothing.
The irony writes itself. For an hour, Bartlett demanded honesty and transparency from Pauline Hanson, pressing her on her associations, her figures and her fitness to lead. Seven never held itself to the same test. It pitched one program and aired another, sent a taxpayer part-funded crew across Britain for a fortnight, Jeremy Clarkson's Cotswolds pub included, and never told viewers whose money helps pay the reporter asking the questions. The network that built an hour around honesty and transparency practised neither.
