At lunchtime on Thursday, my daughter left school, caught a bus and train into Melbourne’s CBD with her friends, and screamed her lungs out about Pauline Hanson.

I gave her permission. I could hardly say no, considering I did the same thing 28 years ago.

In 1998, I was in year 11 at Bunbury senior high school in Western Australia. Pauline Hanson was visiting our town, so I wagged school with my friends Steve, Kate and Andrea and joined a small protest outside the venue where she was speaking.

We had little first-hand experience of cultural diversity, but we were outraged by her mean-spiritedness. Hanson had recently made a statement about being “the mother of the nation” (or something like that) so we........

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