Pauline Hanson — who gets rooly, rooly upset when you accuse her of running for Parliament just for the cash — has received $213,000 in funding from the AEC in the wake of the 2007 federal election. This is a 12% improvement on her $189,000 haul at the 2004 election.

Nice work if you can get it. Run for Parliament every three years with a campaign budget of virtually zero and rake in a few hundred grand of taxpayer coin. Why a campaign budget of nothing? Well, Pauline doesn’t need to spend the money that other independents do on getting their name and face into the heads of voters; there’s a hardcore group of rusted-on Pauline voters out there who will continue to tick her name forever. And the media gives her a free run every time — the sort of advertising that other independents simply can’t buy.

In related news, independent candidate for the Senate in Victoria, Lachlan Connor, has missed out on AEC funding to offset the costs of his campaign. “Theoretically I was owed about six dollars for my two votes,” Mr Connor said. “But I fell a little short of the funding threshold so once again independents suffered and our democracy was weakened in Australia.”