If Pauline Hanson seemed isolated in her open views about race and identity in Canberra 20 years ago, this time she may find herself struggling for the bright white spotlight. On her first day in parliament, Senator Cory Bernardi bounded around collecting signatures from almost the entire Liberal and National party backbench for the overthrow of laws designed to prevent racist hate speech, with no real need for Hanson and her three fellow senators.

Liberal MP George Christensen who, like Hanson, has hit the podium at Reclaim Australia rallies, beelined for her at the opening ceremony, happily sharing a bag of mixed nuts with Hanson and the wide-eyed Malcolm Roberts. This week’s shotgun wedding video starring Hanson and Tony Abbott aims to clear out the last vestiges of her decades-old dispute with the “traditional” conservative right.

Pauline Hanson’s back in Canberra, and many there are keen to show us that the sky hasn’t fallen in, although Malcolm Roberts may yet demand empirical evidence for such a galactic non-event.

In the late 90s I made two songs from editing Hanson’s voice, changed my name to Pauline Pantsdown and ran as a NSW Senate candidate in the 1998 election while my song “I Don’t Like It” was topping the charts (the first song “I’m a Back Door Man” having been temporarily halted after court action by Hanson).

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Contrary to popular discourse by and about Hanson as a “non-politician”, I felt that she was the most constructed celebrity politician I’d ever seen, with a rapidly-changing succession of handlers pushing an American-style log cabin story to present her as an “ordinary Australian”.

I could only see her “ordinariness” in her presentation and vocal style, as opposed to her beliefs or politics. Her voice somewhat nostalgically reminded me of my mother’s Queensland family, and when required to speak in character (as opposed to miming my edit of her voice), I’d call on childhood memories of Aunt Jeanette. There hadn’t been anyone who sounded like my aunt in parliament before, but Aunt Jeanette hadn’t blamed the world’s problems on Aboriginal and Asian people.

At the time, I hoped to have an effect by mimicking her constructed media image, presenting as an “alternate Pauline” to critique her politics. I met many Hanson supporters while on the campaign trail, and I’d never met political fans who knew so little of their hero’s policies. Some of them were racists, the rest were just looking for their Aunt Jeanette.

Since Hanson’s re-election two months ago, debate has swirled around how to “respond” to her. Margo Kingston called on people to listen to Hanson, prompting a variety of responses that Ketan Joshi summarised as being divided according to whether or not the authors were members of groups targeted by Hanson.

This paralleled my experience of people’s opinions in the 90s – while Caucasian people would talk of Hanson in terms of the embarrassment of her possible reflection on them, some Asian and Aboriginal friends said my songs gave them a conduit to “laugh back at her” as an element of fighting perceived powerlessness while under attack.

Already, Hanson’s reappearance has led to generalised public “concern” in relation to Muslims, with Sonia Kruger’s televised panic leading to peacemaking attempts by commentator Waleed Aly, for which he was criticised by other voices such as Mohamad Tabbaa and Claudia Maryam Sirdah for replacing criticism of the source of that fear.

Hanson’s success will be her undoing. As conservative politicians scramble to fete her, the B-grade underdog script lies in shreds. Those dragged into government under her name are emerging into the public eye like a succession of McDonald’s pantomime villains, and we’ll see the collapse of unity faster than the Palmer United party after a curry dinner, or One Nation themselves in the 1998 Queensland state parliament.

Cory Bernardi is more dangerous than One Nation – his party is in power | Jason Wilson Read more

In the 2016 election, she faced off a nationwide smorgasbord of rival anti-Islam groupings purely by virtue of her 21st century B-celeb status on a succession of soft breakfast and reality TV shows. A few years ago, the Sydney-based Drag Industry Variety Awards (Diva) invited her to present an award, and in the process of successfully getting that invitation reversed, my friend Verushka Darling and I discovered that some younger organisers had no real idea of the source of her fame – to them, she was just another TV celebrity.

As in 1998, Hanson will collapse under scrutiny. Let’s merely ask for the structure of that royal commission into Islam, and ask how that economic protectionism will actually serve the farmers who she’s promised the world.

And as her non-answers bring her down from her castle like a latter-day Wizard of Oz, let’s remember to keep an eye on George Christensen’s crude anti-Islam website, with its imagery of gun sights on people’s heads, and consider Celeste Liddle’s plea to look at institutionalised rather than individual racism. Apart from her weird men’s-rights-activist-influenced statements about women faking domestic violence, perhaps there’s nothing really special about Pauline anymore.