The brash anti-establishment mood sweeping Western democracies showed its first real fragility last week, just as its hubristic leader in this country overstepped the mark.

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In Australia, America and Britain, the implicit promise of outsider representation developed several cracks. The damage could be structural.

Even as the poll-topping Pauline Hanson graced the National Press Club (finally), her "north stars" in the Anglosphere seemed to be topping out, revealing themselves as incapable of constructive thought and not even that popular.

Buoyed by good polls, Hanson cumbersomely attacked the very battler base required for securing majority power.

Wage and salary earners were insulted as lazy but protected by employment law.

Women were told they did not need paid maternity leave nor was childcare worthy of higher wages and investment. Access to abortion would be restricted.

Migrants and their descendants who make up more than half the population, would be asked to pipe down. Their rich cultural offerings would be forsaken in creating Hanson's new monoculture, a joyless cultural soviet defined as "one nation under one flag".

Lauded by (too) many commentators as effective and as a test safely navigated, Hanson's long indignant address was heaved with own goals.

It will more likely mark the moment that her party's broadening appeal splintered - even allowing for the next couple of polls. That may read as a contradiction, but the aim in democratic politics isn't to win opinion surveys, it is to win general elections.

When the major parties and unions package up her loose anti-women, anti-migrant, anti-worker quotes, it will become clear that One Nation is not the fast vehicle for a new people power it pretends to be. Great for billionaire plane-providing donors, sure, but the rest?

It was the same week when Donald Trump's epic bravado........

© Canberra Times