A little while after Pauline Hanson graduated from Ipswich City Council politics to take the Queensland seat of Oxley, I ran into her in a Canberra pub. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Journalists and politicians often drink together, or at least in close proximity to each other, and in the late 1990s Canberra had so few drinking holes that collisions were inevitable.

She was new to the national capital, and so was I.

Older, more experienced journos were giving her a pretty wide berth, but it was late and I was young, so I jammed myself in beside her at the bar and tried to change her mind.

We galloped through her views on race as I tried to hold her attention. But she was clearly there to have a good time and was getting a fair bit of attention from the half-cut crowd.

Over the years I kept trying.

At science and education dinners at Parliament House I was often seated next to her, I assume because I could be relied on to try to hold a........

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