Dr Williams said it was likely the Liberal National Party had five Senate seats sewn up and Labor would have four. Former Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett is running for the Greens in the Queensland Senate allocation. Credit:Harrison Saragossi Assuming they were elected in the order in which they appeared on the ballot paper, that would see the re-election of LNP senators George Brandis, Matthew Canavan, James McGrath, Ian McDonald and Barry O'Sullivan. Joanna Lindgren, the great-niece of the late indigenous trailblazer Neville Bonner who filled a casual Senate vacancy last year, would miss out under that scenario. Labor senators Clare Moore and Chris Ketter would be returned, along with former state MP Murray Watt, who headed the ALP ticket, and former state secretary Anthony Chisholm.

Add Greens Senator Larissa Waters to the mix and that was 10 of the 12 Queensland Senate seats allocated. Senator Glenn Lazarus faces a challenge from the Greens and Pauline Hanson to keep his seat. Credit:Robert Shakespeare Dr Williams said the fight for the remaining two would likely come from a three-way battle between Senator Lazarus, Mr Bartlett and Ms Hanson. And Ms Hanson, he said, had her best chance of election since her unsuccessful bid for the seat of Blair in 1998. "Hanson's chances are still very much alive because the taboo against preferencing Hanson above the major parties appears to be lifted and this has gone largely unnoticed during the campaign," Dr Williams said.

"The fact that Labor voters, for example, preferenced Hanson above (LNP state MP) Ian Rickuss in Lockyer at the last state election broke that taboo." Greens Senator Larissa Waters last week identified Ms Hanson as the biggest threat against Mr Bartlett's bid to become the party's second Queensland senator, along with Senator Lindgren. Despite maintaining a significant public profile for two decades Ms Hanson's electoral stocks have been less than stellar since her single term in Parliament, having failed in all her bids for public office. Her sole electoral victory, other than at the local council level, came in 1996 when she stood as a Liberal in the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley. The Liberal Party disendorsed Ms Hanson after she made inflammatory remarks about Aboriginal Australians, but nominations had already closed, so she still appeared as a Liberal candidate on the ballot papers.

Since she lost the seat of Oxley in 1998, Ms Hanson has stood for the Senate four times – three times in Queensland and once in New South Wales. Ms Hanson also stood twice for NSW's upper house, the Legislative Council, and contested Queensland state seats in 2009 and 2015. Dr Williams said there were a lot of variables when it came to who would make up Queensland's representation in the red chamber. "We don't know where the Palmer vote is going to go," he said. "We don't know how many are going to just vote one Lazarus or just vote one Hanson.

"All we can say is both Hanson's and Lazarus's chances are alive and one might get the 11th and the other the 12th. "What we can say is people like Bernard Gaynor won't get up – under a preference whispering system, who knows, he may have – and I don't think Xenophon is really in the race in Queensland." Dr Williams said Ms Hanson's return to the political sphere, should it happen, would change the tenor of Australian polity. "What it would do is fuel the fires of suspicion of difference and fuel the fires of xenophobia once again," he said. "It would fuel Islamophobia and draw middle Australia's attention to what, to some extent, Britain did just a few days ago."

Dr Williams said despite them being "very different polities" he saw some parallels between recent events in the United Kingdom and the United States that have seen the UK vote to leave the European Union and the rise of Donald Trump in American presidential politics. "It's very much about a disconnect with politicians and the political class generally, which is what I think is also happening in Britain and the United States," he said. "People are listening to Bernie Sanders and Trump because they feel the political centre has failed them, so if it wasn't Trump, it'd be someone else. If it wasn't Sanders, it'd be someone else." Whatever happens on Saturday, Dr Williams said it was likely Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's stated double dissolution aim of bringing more certainty to the Senate would ultimately be futile. "I think the Senate will be as multivaried as the last one," he said.