Well, Pauline’s back. In her first major press conference since executing her political comeback this past weekend, it was all so familiar.



The righteous tremor in the voice. The expanse of feelings, untrammelled by facts or evidence. The defiant jut of the chin, the piercing eyes. The siege mentality upon which she and her supporters thrive.

As Pauline spoke to reporters in Brisbane on Monday in the wake of her win in the Senate, the derision rained down. Social media roiled in protest. Here was Australia’s Donald Trump, a cancer on the democracy.

Journalists leaned in for a rigorous interrogation, relentlessly parsing her program, pointing out the inconsistencies, the corrosive absurdities – a display of precision nit-picking from the Brisbane press pack, who worked cooperatively, backing up each other’s questions and consequently excelled in pulling Pauline’s manifesto apart.

A good day for political journalism, and entirely valid as an exercise. Except when you encounter that sinking feeling that interrogations like the one that unfolded in Brisbane on Monday only make her stronger with her own constituency.

Journalists in the US spent months trying to pull apart the manifest absurdities of Donald Trump, and perversely, it seemed to help him, amplifying his underdog status.

Hanson does share Donald Trump’s peculiar political magic, an utter contempt for facts. In the world of Trump and Hanson, feelings are always better than evidence. Political communication is all about the art of confirmation bias – one is expected to nod along in agreement.

Pauline Hanson does share Donald Trump’s peculiar political magic, an utter contempt for facts Katharine Murphy

This sort of demagoguery isn’t supposed to work; the checks and balances in our democratic system are supposed to expose political mythmaking for what it is, but anyone who inhabits politics in contemporary times knows we have entered some kind of post-truth twilight where establishment wisdom tends to get short shrift.

And why does it get short shrift? Establishment wisdom told Pauline Hanson’s supporters that globalisation would be a boon for everybody – a kind of nirvana that would deliver untrammelled prosperity, and even if it didn’t, winners and losers were a necessary price to pay for the lucky cohort winning on a scale unrivalled in human history.

Establishment wisdom also told Pauline Hanson’s supporters nationalism and parochialism was passe, a vestige of the old Australia: sleepy, backward, unsophisticated, fortressed by tariffs and distance. The new enlightenment was about seeing yourself as a citizen of the world. Markets were opened, people moved more freely across borders, and Australia was better for it.

But now a reckoning is starting to play out around the world.

In America, in the United Kingdom, in Europe, through different democratic processes, in different manifestations, the losers of globalisation are telling the political class they’ve had a gutful of establishment wisdom.

They are sick of being patted on the head and told that seismic shifts of the last 20 years has all been for the best, because from the vantage point of their practical lived experience, it has not been for the best.

If you are trapped in the old economy, if you are a victim of the forces of disruption that Malcolm Turnbull has spent much of his short prime ministership championing, the changes of the past three decades have only heightened your sense of contingency and alienation.

This is all fertile ground for insurgent political movements like One Nation, which is why she’s back.

So in dealing with Pauline Hanson over the next term, we need to confront not only the reality that she’s back in the Australian parliament, embarking on all necessary vigilance to call out dissembling. We also need to ask a deeper question: why is she back? Because without the why there is no what. This challenge applies equally to mainstream politics, which is desperately in need of a new, engaging and empathetic language to communicate with voters about structural reform – and to the media, which in the eyes of many disillusioned voters, does little more than amplify the conventional wisdom out of Canberra.

Much about this election remains uncertain. We don’t yet know who will form government. We don’t know whether, to borrow a Turnbullism, the immediate future is stability or chaos.

But the election has delivered us all one very clear verdict. A sizeable proportion of the Australian voting public is now disengaged from the shibboleths of major party politics, and increasingly disinclined to take their lumps.

They are inclined to listen to people who make a virtue of breaking the Canberra conventions – people intent on holding themselves out of saviours of forgotten people. The worst of it is demagogues who hold themselves out as the saviours of the forgotten people are often just peddling a different kind of political mythology, a mythology that, if enacted, would hurt working people and harm their prospects.

So what does all this mean? It’s pretty simple really. The dynamic is challenging, both for mainstream political parties, and for political journalism.

In a way we have the same imperative.

We can approach our task in a couple of ways. We can reflexively patronise Pauline, or muscle up in a way that only endears her to her rusted on constituency – or we can attempt to understand the underlying dynamics in play.

There will be some voters who went with Hanson in 2016 not to validate her, but as a means of raising a middle digit in the direction of the parliamentary triangle. For some, returning Pauline would be the equivalent of sending a postcard of disgust to Canberra.

We need to recognise the disaffection genie is well and truly out of the bottle in Australia, and the story we need to prosecute, the only story that ultimately matters because it shapes the future, is why.