In 2017, when I had only been living in Australia for a few years, Pauline Hanson came to my neighbourhood. The event was billed as “Pots and Pizza with Pauline at the Paddo”. About 200 people turned up to listen to her speak, and a similar size crowd gathered outside holding protest signs and likening her to Trump. Twenty police officers showed up in 11 police cars. A few days later, my daughter ran over to one of our neighbour’s houses for a play. When I walked in there later to get her, there were One Nation pamphlets on the counter. “You went?” I asked. I was hoping (desperately) that her friend’s dad had gone as a protester. ‘Yeah,” he said, looking a bit embarrassed. “I thought it would be good to hear what she had to say.”

Amid all the political punditry about the One Nation win in Farrer, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that for those on the receiving end of One Nation’s grievance politics, this all feels really personal.

A few years later I was talking to a young woman who came to Australia when she was in primary school. If I remember correctly, she was from east Africa. One of her first assignments at school had been to choose a person in the public eye who she admired and do a presentation on them. It could have been a footy player, a community leader, the prime minister (at the time, Julia Gillard); anyone.

She chose Pauline Hanson. She didn’t know anything about her except that she was in parliament and had brightly coloured hair. In a sea of men in parliament, her budding feminist instincts told her this was someone worth celebrating. She was........

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