It’s 2016, and yet somehow ponderous Paul Kelly has still not been put out to pasture. Only in the Australian – a newspaper made by and for grumpy old men – could he allowed to sound off at such punishing length.

Last week he was demanding that Pauline Hanson be “managed” properly. He accused everyone in Australian politics of having failed to learn the lessons of her first brush with national political influence. Everyone, that is, except for Paul Kelly.

When we walked out on Pauline Hanson, we were reaching out to decent Australians| Richard Di Natale Read more

The Greens, who walked out on her maiden speech, were handling her in a way that is “self-interested and counter-productive”. “The shock of progressives” at an Essential poll showing almost half of Australians wanted an end to Muslim immigration showed that they had not recently “visited a pub outside the 6km politically correct safe zone from the capital city CBD”. (One wonders how many suburban pubs Kelly has visited lately.)

More perfidy and error comes from the direction of those Kelly refers to only as “conservative ideologues”. (We might wonder if he doesn’t offer names because he shares a Holt Street lunchroom with some of them.) These people are accused of “pumping her up as part of their fanatical campaign to destroy Malcolm Turnbull”.

With more contortions than usual, Kelly attempted to nominate a position between these two extremes. We must realise, he wrote, that the polling reflects a rejection of Islamic extremist ideology, and that “mutual respect is vital but it needs to rest on a firm foundation that rejects both Hanson’s prejudice and progressive denial of reality”.

It’s the same boring routine with the same stock characters – the out-of-touch left and the extremist right – acting as foils to Kelly’s own, allegedly pragmatic, centre-right position.

In this instance, though, Kelly whitewashes the real lesson of recent Australian history: that conservatives – including a number of Kelly’s colleagues – have mainstreamed ideas, resentments and prejudices that Hanson first introduced from the fringes of the far right.

One artefact illuminates this point quite well. In 1997 – somewhere between the formation of One Nation that April and Hanson’s “assassination” video – a book was published called Pauline Hanson: The Truth.

Issued under the authorship of one George J Merritt, its first half was a compilation of Hanson speeches and press releases through 1996. Its second half was a collection of essays by members of the Pauline Hanson Support Movement in defence of Hanson.

Both halves show us the degree to which conservatives with mainstream credentials and prominent platforms have come to resemble the Hansonists of the 1990s, and the extent to which mainstream conservatism as a whole has moved in a Hansonist direction over the past two decades.

One example is Hansonist anti-intellectualism which was fertilised during the Howard years, and has now ripened into an increasingly mainstream conservative appetite for conspiracy theory.

Pauline Hanson: The Truth reprints a speech Hanson made to the far-right, pro-gun Australian Reform party in 1996, where she nominates a range of people who exist to “denigrate Australian culture” – “some of these people are leaders of ethnic groups, some are what I call academic snobs, some are in parliament, and some come from the media”.

In the second half of the book, a more conspiratorial note is struck on intellectuals by one of her supporters writing on “The New Class”, described as a “ruling elite that controls, not only by armed force and money, but also by ideas”.

The New Class are “coercive utopians”, who constitute a “cognitive elite … primarily created by the university system”. They are the “radicals of the 1960s who have now become the liberal-left establishment”.

They promote a “new religion of internationalism – of anti-white racism, multiculturalism, feminism and Asianisation”.

An increasing hostility to intellectuals on the part of mainstream conservatives was borne out in Howard government attacks on universities, and eventually on any credentialled experts who spoke out against it.

Hanson’s conspiracy-tinged contempt for intellectuals is now regularly expressed on the pages of the national broadsheet

More strikingly, though, Hansonist attacks on intellectuals came to be voiced by mainstream conservative commentators in the vocabulary of the far right.

Kelly’s colleague at the Australian, Nick Cater, disparaged what he called a “new class” of “tertiary-educated, middle-class professionals” which “presumes to possess superior insights and manners to the broad mass of people” and “elevates its own status by devaluing that of others”.

Soon enough, Cater was putting this argument in the vocabulary of “cultural Marxism”, a conspiracy theory which itself originated and still flourishes on the far right. Cater said Bill Shorten’s expressed wish to help more women to become MPs was derived from ideas which were a “legacy of the thuggish, subversive world of West German political activism” in the 1960s.

This theme has since been taken up by others on the centre right including Chris Uhlmann, who explained criticism of Tony Abbott’s speaking engagements as an outcome of cultural Marxism.

Hanson’s conspiracy-tinged contempt for intellectuals is now regularly expressed on the pages of the national broadsheet by mainstream centre-right journalists.

A second example is offered by the Hansonist approach to Indigenous Australians. Pauline Hanson: The Truth reproduces a long press release detailing the myriad benefits she alleged that Indigenous Australians then received and that white Australians did not – what she called “inequalities between black and white Australians”.

This theme – resentment towards a dispossessed people – is not only repeated throughout the book. More recently, it has become an organising principle among mainstream conservatives.

When Andrew Bolt came a cropper after questioning the Aboriginality of some people with fair skin, it was in part because of articles that referred to awards, honours and funding that were accessible to what the court called “fair-skinned aborigines”.

He was drawing from the same well of white Australian grievance that Hanson was in the 1990s.

Chris Uhlmann should mind his language on 'cultural Marxism' | Jason Wilson Read more

Bolt became a cause celebre on the right, with the Institue of Public Affairs campaigning for him, and sparking an ongoing effort to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, under which he was successfully sued.

In the Senate, Liberal party figures including Cory Bernardi have reached across the aisle to the One Nation senators in an attempt to change the act.

Countless column inches in the Australian were devoted to supporting Bolt and decrying the Racial Discrimination Act.

And wouldn’t you know it – just last month Kelly belched up a tl;dr attack on identity politics, the internet and 18C because some people took Bill Leak to task over a cartoon that caricatured Aboriginal fathers.

We can leave refugee policy – which has been entirely remade on Hansonist lines – to one side for now. Suffice to say that the resentments Hanson dragged from the far right into mainstream debate have become integrated into Australian conservatism. In turn, conservatives have made Hansonist positions part of Australia’s political furniture.

Paul Kelly shouldn’t waste any more words, or time, trying to pin that on progressives.