Pauline Hanson’s politics is finding new resonance because it turns real pressures over housing, services, tax and insecurity into a familiar politics of exclusion, offering some migrant-background voters the dangerous comfort of a place near the gate.

Pauline Hanson once built a career warning that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”.

Now she has found a more useful sentence.

At the National Press Club, she declared that “this beautiful country belongs to all Australians born here and those who have joined us”.

There it was: the invitation, soft enough for some migrant voters to hear reassurance. She does not mean us, one may think. She means uncontrolled immigration. She means the people who came after us, who did not work hard enough, integrate properly, or pay their dues.

Multiculturalism, according to her, was an “utterly flawed policy”. Australia could be “multiracial”, she alleged, but had to be “monocultural”. Mandarin and Arabic spoken at home appeared in her list of problems for social cohesion.

Well, apparently, the old suspicion had borrowed the language of social cohesion. Her infamous line was blunt: Asians would swamp us. The new line works differently. It does not only say who should be feared. It also hints at who may be accepted, with terms and conditions.

On some Chinese-language social platforms, clips of Hanson’s speech produced a familiar split. Some users treated her words as common sense: migrants should learn English, multiculturalism has gone too far, Australia should not keep reshaping itself around newcomers. Others warned that Hanson’s politics would eventually turn on Chinese Australians........

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