Yes, Tony Abbott Did Set Up a $100,000 Fund to Legally Destroy One Nation — He Admitted It

Tony Abbott did help establish a fund of approximately $100,000 designed to finance legal challenges against One Nation before the 1998 federal election. This is not a rumour or a smear — Abbott acknowledged it himself when the story resurfaced in 2019, and it has been confirmed by multiple major outlets including the ABC, The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian.

The fund was called the Australians for Honest Politics Trust. According to ABC News Australia and The Guardian, it was used to support legal action aimed at deregistering One Nation and pursuing its leadership. Those efforts eventually contributed to the prosecution of Pauline Hanson and One Nation co-founder David Ettridge for electoral fraud. Both were convicted and briefly jailed — though the Queensland Court of Appeal overturned those convictions in 2003.

Abbott's own admission, reported by The Australian's Niki Savva in 2019, is the clearest piece of evidence here. He did not deny the fund existed or that he played a role in setting it up. His defence was essentially that he believed One Nation was a threat to Australian democracy and that the legal challenges were legitimate. Whether you accept that reasoning is a separate question from whether the facts are true — and they are.

It is worth being precise about what the fund was and was not. It was not a government fund, and it was not secret in the sense of being hidden from all scrutiny — it was a private trust. The word "slush fund" carries connotations of corruption, but the core factual claim — that Abbott helped raise around $100,000 to fund legal action against One Nation — is accurate and uncontested.

This story keeps coming back because it creates an obvious political tension: a senior Liberal figure spending serious money to legally destroy a right-wing populist party, only for the Liberal Party to later consider preference deals with that same party. When those preference discussions heated up in 2019, journalists and political opponents had every reason to revisit Abbott's earlier actions. Watch for this story being used selectively — the facts are real, but the framing often depends on who is telling it and why.