New Zealand-born Bruce Whiteside migrated to Australia in 1979 and settled on the Gold Coast. In 1988 he founded the organisation Heart of a Nation to campaign against Japanese investment and land ownership in Australia. At the time, Japan ranked third as a source of foreign investment in Australia, well behind the United States and the United Kingdom.

After the demise of Heart of a Nation, Whiteside remained politically active. In the early 1990s he unsuccessfully stood as a candidate for the far right Confederate Action Party. After the election of Pauline Hanson to the Australian parliament in 1996, Whiteside became a vocal supporter, believing he had found in Hanson an effective national advocate for his own views against Asian immigration and investment. In October of that year he founded The Pauline Hanson Support Movement. At the organisation's public launch Whiteside praised Hanson for representing 'the man in the street' against the threat he claimed was posed by Asians, Aboriginal leaders, socialism and multiculturalism.

The Support Movement attracted national attention, but Whiteside's relationship with Hanson soured. Early in 1997, Hanson and her advisors David Ettridge and David Oldfield orchestrated a takeover of the Support Movement and then used its membership list to register the political party, Pauline Hanson's One Nation, with Hanson as the leader. Whiteside was expelled from the Support Movement. Subsequently, the Supreme Court of Queensland ruled that One Nation had been fraudulently registered. This led to fraud charges against Hanson and Ettridge, and in August 2003 they were convicted and gaoled. Three months later the Court of Appeal set aside their convictions.

After his expulsion from the Support Movement, Whiteside continued to follow Hanson's political career, periodically proclaiming in public statements and private correspondence that she had lost touch with her support base. In 2000, he wrote in his online book Destiny Aborted: How They Eliminated the People's Politician, 'that Hanson was being 'compromised and exploited' by her advisors. Her naivety, he wrote, guaranteed that she would never fulfill her early promise.