John Pasquarelli

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John Pasquarelli, born 15 February 1937 in Brisbane, is an Australian former politician. He served in the House of Assembly of Papua and New Guinea from 1964 to 1968, as the member for Angoram. He studied at Ballarat Grammar School and the University of Queensland, where he studied law. After working in opal mining at Coober Pedy for a year, he became a cadet patrol officer in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1961. He left that job in 1962 to work as a crocodile hunter and to start an artefacts business, donating many items to the Papua New Guinea Museum. A right‑wing conservative who supported Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, he won the 1964 election in Angoram, the first election under universal suffrage for the territory. He did not seek re‑election in 1968, frustrated by a lack of development in the Sepik region, and returned to Australia.

Back home, Pasquarelli ran as the Liberal candidate for Jagajaga in the 1987 federal election but lost to Labor's Peter Staples. In 1996 he moved to Western Australia to help anti‑immigration former Labor MP Graeme Campbell in his re‑election bid and then became an adviser to Pauline Hanson after she was elected. He is said to have written Hanson's maiden speech. Hanson dismissed him in December 1996, which he attributed to David Oldfield. He later spoke as a commentator on Hanson and One Nation, though he remained personally supportive of Hanson. He published a book in 1998 titled The Pauline Hanson Story: By the Man Who Knows.

Pasquarelli ran as an independent in Bendigo in the 2001 federal election and finished eighth of nine candidates with 1,073 votes. In 2017 he worked as an adviser to Liberal National Party MP George Christensen.