Pauline Hanson has been a fixture of Australian politics since 1996, when she appeared with piercing, shrill bravado as the federal member for Oxley, having been disendorsed for making remarks about Aboriginals by the Liberal Party that may, in time, be slain by her current fortunes.  Since then, she has been attacked for her bigotry, her class, her sex, her shock of red hair, her speech, her general crassness, her fantastic imperviousness to reading (she is napalm to libraries, a virus to erudition), and any claim that she would ever engage, at any length, with something resembling the grand idea.  Her views, roughly expressed, were deftly purloined by the conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who shared a good deal of her sentiments without ever explicitly stating so.  But plagiarists are never generous about their borrowings.  

In politics, however, none of this need matter; to be a representative is to be the conduit between sentiment, the representative and the vote.  This is a link she has in spades, buckets and any other body of measure.  She has survived for three decades in a line of work that many shrivel in after a term, time decaying them with heartless indifference.  She has been a slow burn to the trends of the world: the right-wing paroxysms of Brexit Britain, anti-immigrant Europe, and the United States of Donald Trump; the anti-establishment rage that is merely masquerading as an establishment under another name.  

Having seized the day with social media, her messages can come across, not so much as polished gems as the unfiltered mediations of a person unworried by the shaping interpretations of the traditional media stable.  One Nation, observe media analysists in The Conversation, “was the first political party in Australia to launch a website, an early adopter........

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