Twenty years ago on Saturday Pauline Hanson delivered her maiden speech in the House of Representatives – the famously incoherent medley of complaints about Indigenous entitlements, Asians, multiculturalism, world banks and big business that launched two decades of controversy, several unsuccessful comebacks and a brief stint in jail.

Now she’s probably preparing for her first speech as a senator.

Her targets have changed – she’s just as worried about Muslims as Asians and Indigenous Australians these days. But her tenor is just the same, the dogged indignation of someone who is convinced they represent people who are under threat from something or other, against whom the system is somehow unfairly rigged and to whom no one will listen.

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“I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks,” she said last time. “My view on issues is based on common sense.”

The specifics are likely to be similarly hard to follow – back then she warned we only had “10 to 15 years left to turn things around”– it wasn’t quite clear what needed turning, that privatisation was bad; “I may be only ‘a fish and chip shop lady’, but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping” and that we were being “swamped by Asians”.

When journalist Tracey Curro pointed out the actual figures about Australia’s population of Asian-origin in an interview it prompted Hanson’s famous “please explain” answer to the follow-up question about whether she was xenophobic.

You can see she’s got the best interests of this country at heart Ron Caddies, Hanson voter

I remember the bewilderment I felt the first time I interviewed Hanson, not long after that speech. I figured it was so laden with obvious falsehoods and leaps of logic I’d just slice it up with fact-based questions. But when I pressed her on one thing she slid to another. Some answers had so little connection with the question it was difficult to know what to do with them. It was like trying to cut fairy floss with a knife.

When she appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program last month I was reminded of another thing about interviewing Hanson. She is at her strongest when she can turn a factual interrogation of her policies into a personal attack – another example of Pauline standing up to the elites who have it in for ordinary people, a validation of her core message to her constituency.

She was floundering on Q&a until asked about the divisiveness and hurt caused by her policies and rhetoric, but then her green eyes flashed and she parried. “Why do you reverse it on me and say you’re blaming me for the problems in Australia when we have seen what is happening?”.

And her supporters are often as attracted to that message of generalised grievance and disenfranchisement, that search for the “them” who can be blamed for the plight of “us”, as to her actual policies.

Rod Caddies was among the Hanson voters who participated in Jenny Brockie’s excellent SBS Insight program talking to an audience made up of the almost 25% of Australians who voted for minor parties in the July election.

He did not agree with Hanson’s policy of halting Muslim immigration. But he still backed her.

“You don’t have to agree with everything a politician says to still want to follow them, but you can want to follow them because of the passion they’ve got,” he said. “You can see she’s got the best interests of this country at heart, whereas I don’t feel, you know, some of the other politicians have. I feel they’ve got a game, an end result they want out of their party. It’s like the party’s more important than the country.”

The program also heard from Caileb Eder, an Indigenous Australian who was prepared to overlook her anti-Indigenous positions because “people change over time” and Irene Trewarne, who arrived in Australia as a refugee child, who said she also didn’t “necessarily like how Pauline expresses herself at times” but gave her a second preference vote because of her “forthrightness”.

Attacking her, or patronising her, is likely to be counter-productive and to make her stronger

Essential media research last month showed an astonishing 62% of voters agreed with the statement: “I might not personally agree with everything she says but she is speaking for a lot of ordinary Australians.”

Of course many of Hanson’s supporters also fully subscribe to her noxious cocktail of religious and race-based blame, her calls for royal commissions into Islam and bans on new mosques.

In the weeks after she secured four Senate seats an impassioned debate broke out among columnists about the best way to respond, with some, like Margo Kingston, urging tolerance and conversation and others like blogger Ketan Joshi pointing out that “racist sentiment inspired by economic anxiety and political disenfranchisement is still racist”.

But the lessons of two decades of Hansonism suggest there can be a point of intersection.

Yes, her policies need to be clearly called for what they are. Racist. Divisive. Deeply damaging. But called out in the knowledge that attacking her, or patronising her, is likely to be counter-productive and to make her stronger.

And as we prepare for her to exercise this new parliamentary influence, it’s worth remembering that she is pushing the boundaries of political debate in an atmosphere of heightened economic nervousness and in ways that create space and comfort for cannier and more powerful operators, like Cory Bernadi, at a time when the conservative right is challenging the legitimacy and authority of Malcolm Turnbull’s government and making it ever harder for the policy-making process to do anything other than spin its wheels.

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Even Tony “back with helpful advice about everything” Abbott has now staged a very public Facebook-published rapprochement with Hanson, after once leading the push to try to destroy her party.

Her policies are as ill-conceived as ever, but this time they are landing in a parliament that seems custom-built to compound the feelings of grievance and disillusionment with the political process that fuelled her rise in the first place.

Twenty years on it could be even harder to counter Hansonism’s bitter feelings with facts.