Hanson aide scraps with senator

Australian Senate President Scott Ryan has launched an urgent investigation into an ugly fight between United Australia Party senator Brian Burston and fellow senator Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff.

Ryan has spoken to House of Representatives Speaker Tony Smith about the physical clash between Burston and James Ashby outside a dinner at Parliament House on Wednesday. ‘‘We will be looking into this matter as a matter of urgency. We both regard this as a grave matter,’’ he told parliament yesterday.

He said a range of issues were raised by the incident, including the use of media, assault claims, and potential privileges concerns around senators being prevented from going about their business.

Ashby filmed Burston in the lead-up to the altercation, which left the One Nation defector with a bandaged hand when he arrived at work yesterday.

Images appear to show Hanson’s office door smeared with streaks of blood.

The stoush erupted after Hanson on Tuesday night used parliamentary privilege to accuse an unnamed senator of sexually harassing at least six staff. Burston outed himself as the mystery alleged culprit, telling News Corp it was ‘‘bulls...’’, and going on to claim that he left One Nation after being sexually harassed by Hanson.

He claimed Hanson had once ‘‘rubbed her fingers up my spine’’ while listening to the national anthem, and propositioned him after he was elected in 2016 at her home in Queensland and in Canberra.

The One Nation leader laughed off the allegations, saying she was ‘‘not that desperate’’.

Hanson said yesterday Burston needed to ‘‘get some anger management’’.

Burston claimed Ashby approached him as he and his wife were leaving the function, and he was injured when he tried to grab a phone Ashby was waving in his face.

‘‘I lost it,’’ he said. ‘‘I grabbed him and I pushed him up against the wall.’’

He said he had reported the incident to Australian Federal Police. – AAP The first British saint of modern times is to be created, after Pope Francis gave final approval for the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

The Victorian priest, theologian and poet cleared the final hurdle to sainthood when Francis said that a pregnant American woman with internal bleeding had been healed after praying to Newman to ask him to seek God’s aid.

This was the second miracle attributed to the clergyman from London, qualifying him for sainthood more than 60 years after it was first proposed in 1958.

Newman, who quit the Church of England to convert to Catholicism in 1845, died in 1890. He will now be canonised at a Vatican ceremony, probably in October, a church source said, becoming the first Briton to have lived in the past 300 years to be made a saint.

The first miracle attributed to Newman was made official by the Vatican in 2010, leading to his beatification, the step before canonisation. Jack Sullivan, a Catholic deacon in Massachusetts, recovered from a spinal cord disorder after praying to him.

Newman will be the first Briton to be canonised since Scottish Catholic martyr John Ogilvie, who was hanged in 1615. He became a saint in 1976.

– The Times