With what is very likely to be the ex-senator Malcolm Roberts in a few weeks, One Nation will yet again confirm that its biggest enemy is its own stupidity and bitter internal fights.

Count One Nation’s parliamentary disasters. It lost its entire complement of Queensland state MPs from the 1998 election there, lost putative Senator Heather Hill because she was a Brit, lost Rod Culleton because he was a bankrupt, and looks almost certain to lose Malcolm Roberts because he’s a Brit, too. Only in Western Australia has the party held together so far, with its three upper house representatives, in the months since the election (although the WA branch of One Nation shattered during the campaign there. Give them time.)

Roberts’ High Court performance yesterday, which saw his own lawyer suggesting his credibility had been damaged, was classic One Nation. The drawbridge migrant who wasn’t born here but who hates immigration. The truculent denialist who insisted that he thought he was Australian despite any amount of documentary evidence, including forms he’d signed himself, to the contrary. The half-smart strategist arguing both that he could never have had any idea he was anything but Australian, but also that he took steps to make sure he wasn’t British. The Luddite sending emails central to his being able to stand for Parliament to dud addresses he’d cut and pasted off the internet.

This is a bloke who can cherry-pick a climate data point to misrepresent at 100 paces but can’t find a way to contact the British government’s extensive diplomatic representation in Australia, instead firing off emails into the ether, demanding to know if he’s British.

You’d think that, as a conspiracy theorist, Malcolm Roberts would be a little more careful. After all, this is a world where Jewish banking families and privately owned central banks are engaged in a global-scale fraud involving the entire financial system, the UN and the hoax of climate change. The agents of this sinister conspiracy are littered throughout academia, the bureaucracy, governments and the media. It commands vast resources to use against those who would expose it. Surely, Roberts wouldn’t be so stupid as to hand them a ready-made excuse to boot him from Parliament simply by not getting his affairs in order before he nominated for election? The Rothschilds didn’t even need to deploy some of their vast, ill-gotten wealth to silence this truth-teller, this relentless scourge of elites, this Emissary of Empirical Evidence — he’s going to do it himself.

With any luck, James Ashby will have his affairs in order if he decides to take the looming vacancy. That will send Roberts back to where he came from, the Awaiting Moderation queue at Andrew Bolt’s blog.