"It starts with toilets and ends up costing us our Australian way of life."

Cancel the rest of the year, that's the winner: the political quote of 2016. It's the kind of thing you can imagine as a tag to a sketch in one of those comedy shows that used to rule prime time in the 1990s. Who knows. It possibly featured in a skit where they lampooned Pauline Hanson. And yet, there it is, at the hand of Pauline herself on her 2016 Facebook page – right beneath a video in which she shared her exasperation at the Australian Taxation Office installing squat toilets in its building. You know, one of those ones they use in Asia or somewhere. Hence: "If they don't know how to use our toilets …" That quote, by the way, might be the runner-up.

On some level, I get it. Hanson's big idea is that Australia is under relentless attack from minorities that swamp us without assimilating. That was her story in the '90s and it's her story now, with Muslims mostly substituted for Asians and terrorism adding some extra edge. And when you have a big idea like that, the small examples are the most powerful. Fixating on toilets might seem strange, but if you're on board Hanson's narrative, it's evidence of just how thoroughgoing the threat really is. Its seriousness derives precisely from its smallness. You can imagine how this might go: "It's not enough they take our jobs, they're even taking our toilets!" ... "We can't even shit our way in our own country anymore!" Etcetera.

These sorts of stories have long been a staple of reactionary nationalists. Often they're just made up – like that one about how a British bank had stopped using piggy banks in their advertising because they were deemed offensive to Muslims. But here's the thing about those conspiratorial panics: they're always discussed so breathlessly. The people invoking them are deadly serious because they're trying to portray some grave cultural threat. And that's what's striking about Hanson's video: she's not particularly serious. In fact, her delivery is marked by its conspicuous lack of gravity. She seems to find it all pretty funny, like she's in on the joke.